Last year Bain & Company surveyed more than 400 executives and senior leaders about transformation. Their most cited factor for a transformation’s success: retaining, developing, and acquiring the right talent and capabilities.

Getting the right people into the key roles and ensuring they have the right skills are critical, but just the start. To better understand how to find, enable, and deploy talent who will deliver and sustain a transformation, we asked four transformation leaders how they tackle this challenge.

Cathy Arledge, senior vice president of Business Transformation at Dell Technologies; Mathieu Staniulis, vice president of Products, Solutions, and Digital Platforms and chief transformation officer at Desjardins; Kyle Brown, Transformation Office leader, North American Container at International Paper; and Wilf Blackburn, who’s run transformations at multiple leading insurance companies in Asia and Europe, represent a cross section of industries and experiences. Arledge has been in her role for 15 years, and Blackburn has decades of transformation experience. Staniulis launched Desjardins’ transformation program four years ago, and Brown has been in his job since 2022. Each had a lot to share about the role of talent in a successful transformation.

Cultivating transformation talent

Q: How have you staffed your transformation team?

Brown: Originally, the transformation team all had day jobs, but we quickly realized this work needed a dedicated team. We looked for people who were action-oriented doers with functional expertise and deep business knowledge. As we move forward it’s become more about who can connect with different groups well and drive the initiative forward. If you can’t make it relatable to the people that are going to have to onboard the initiative, then transformation is dead in the water.

The project managers that are the most successful have shown the ability to navigate around the organization. They have a very high capacity for getting things done. They are change agents and drive change forward. They’re already embedded in the business. They have a lot of credibility. We take them out of their day-to-day job, but they don’t completely abandon it as they help drive this initiative through.

Arledge: When I led the very first effort across the company in 2009, Jeff Clarke [Dell’s COO] asked me, “Who do you want? You can draft anyone in the company, 200, 300 people, whatever you need.” And I said, “I want a data science team, and I want this vice president and a team of 10 to 12 process engineers. Everybody else I want in the business. I want great people assigned, that we will work with. We’ll put resources around them to help them get it right. That’s how we’ll best succeed for the company.”

Q: How do you identify leaders for the transformation?

Staniulis: We carefully select our project sponsors to speed up our transformation. They need to have a solid reputation within the organization and be recognized as strong team players. They’ll have to manage a lot of change and bring the organization together to work towards common goals, so I spend considerable time selecting the right people. It’s not always easy. It might involve removing key managers from major business lines to ensure our transformation projects get the attention they deserve. These individuals are hugely in demand and are often promoted to executive positions. I’ve lost a lot of these leaders over the past four years because they’ve been promoted to other positions. 

Arledge: An important job of the CTO is to be able to have frank, candid discussions with senior leadership about talent across the business to ensure the right teams and leaders are in place to drive (and deliver) change. We recruit top talent from our talent bench. We’re looking for thought leadership. These roles are super visible. That’s good and bad, right? But it’s a huge opportunity. You get celebrated, and you get promoted, and you make a career out of it.

The people who run the business need to be able to change the business also, and that’s an expectation of our senior leaders. These aren’t fringe efforts. It’s about what we need to do to enable our strategy.

Q: How do you involve the broader organization in the transformation?

Blackburn: The starting point is really to engage the team. Listening. That’s the first thing. Because if things aren’t working to the point where a revolution is required, then the folks in the business usually have a good sense of it themselves. By getting as close as possible to those who are doing the work, we’re likely to find the better solutions. They expect some change is going to happen, and they like to be part of it.

Ultimately, they are the ones who are controlling what happens.

And we get a view of who’s up for the change and who’s not. Who believes in the change and who are going to be the resisters. But don’t wait until you’ve got the complete team. Like with any journey, get moving. Then other people are attracted to join.

Q: When did you realize how critical it was to get your people to change?

Staniulis: Being a CTO, I’m responsible for orchestrating several technological initiatives simultaneously. However, I’m ultimately managing a human transformation; above all, I’m a change management leader.  

For example, in the first few years, we weren’t always hitting our productivity KPIs. Our board was getting nervous, considering the massive investments being made to accelerate the transformation and boost productivity. We were doing everything we needed to, project-wise. We realized on a certain level that the organization was resisting changing the ways we serve our customers. It was a pivotal moment when the board, the executive committee, everybody really, realized that things weren’t working. So, we had to work harder to get our people on board with the changes being made. 

Key takeaways on talent in transformations:

1. Focus on your critical roles. 

Companies often neglect to tie their strategic priorities to the specific outcomes required, making it difficult to pinpoint which roles are essential to delivering those outcomes and who is best fit to fill them. In Bain’s survey, 76% of respondents from companies with a successful transformation record said they understood which mission-critical roles were essential, while only 58% of those from poor performers had the same understanding.

2. Enlist your best up-and-coming talent and look for change management skills.

Transforming a business demands a blend of IQ and EQ attributes that only the very best managers possess. It’s the cream of the crop who can bring the acumen and experience needed to spearhead transformative change.

3. Empower the middle to sponsor transformative changes.

Midlevel managers are often portrayed as lacking the inspiration and motivation to contribute to a company’s progress. However, in our experience, very few middle managers truly fit this description. More commonly, the issue is a lack of engagement and empowerment. It’s imperative for senior leaders to actively encourage middle managers to bring forth innovative ideas, provide support when they propose significant changes, and listen when they surface likely sources of resistance. Work not only top down or bottom up but also, and most importantly, “middle out.”

For more about how companies cultivate and support transformation talent, read “The Three Common Transformation Talent Mistakes and How to Avoid Them,” “Middle Managers Should Drive Your Business Transformation,” and “Transformations That Work.”

The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Amber Erskine and Michele Flom to this article.

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