Connected Leadership Is The Key To Change

A professional services company was on a mission to work as ONE. The first step was to connect the leadership team before involving the rest of the organization on this journey. If the leadership team were not to walk the talk, the transformation would already be set to fail. Innovisor was asked to give the leadership team the insights to set them up for success.

Set up for success with predictive intelligence

One of the critical building blocks to succeed with change is the Innovisor Predictive Intelligence Tool©. This proprietary tool looks at six different variables to find the right actions to succeed. One of these variables is the leadership team coherence. This variable investigates how well the leadership team is connected to each other.

The leadership team was not set up for success

Figure 1: This visualization shows how the leadership team members were connected. The dot represents each leadership team member. The color indicates markets in which black is the support function. The lines between the dots show their connectivity. Siloed connectivity with a high risk of it falling apart.

One of the key insights was that the leadership team connected to each other based on the four markets it was operating in. There was no collaboration across the different markets.

The leadership team was highly fragmented. The organizational design had severe consequences on how people connected with each other. This only confirmed that the company needed to work as ONE – beginning with the leadership team! A new organizational design was needed based on the network insights.

The first step in company-wide change initiative: build a coherent leadership team

The leadership team was presented with a simulation. This simulation showed that with limited resources and time, they could realize a new organizational design focused on coherence. The coherence that was needed before putting the second step on the company-wide change initiative: the rest of the organization.

28% improvement in leadership connectivity

The simulations showed that by only connecting four leadership members, the cohesion of the leadership team improved by 28%. This efficient and effective improvement resulted in:

Mitigation of the risk the leadership team would fall apart
The flow of information around their company-wide change improved – crucial to have everyone aligned

This visualization on the left shows how the four leadership team members were connected with the rest of the leadership team. They were far away from each other because they mostly connected inside their own market. However, they had a hidden potential revealed by the network insights. The potential that their connectivity positively impacted the connectivity of the rest.

The simulation resulted in practical interventions.

First, senior leadership made sure the four leadership members were brought together on cross-collaborative projects. This way they were able to build, nurture and sustain these new collaborative relationships.

Second, the four leadership team members were also kept in the know on the company-wide change initiative. This awareness affected the rest of the leadership team.

The leadership team was now set up for change success. The next step was to understand the alignment and feelings of other critical stakeholder groups inside the rest of the organization.

Read more about ‘How To Make Smart Collaboration a Reality‘.