Shifting IT culture

Pt. 2: Top Team Alignment Session

After gathering this data, BTS and the top leadership team met to discuss the findings. Leadership was delighted – this was the first time they had a clear articulation of the behaviors that they, their officers and their directors would need to be successful. Their prior competency framework had been comparably vague and long, and it was not as rooted in real behaviors within the business cadence.

With the passion to change along with a much clearer articulation of what, how and when to change, the next step was to build a developmental experience to bring the culture alive for all IT officers and directors.

Pt. 3: Creating a Powerful Experience

To accelerate the culture transformation and get leaders to “great” behaviors faster, BTS constructed separate “Leadership Experience Labs” for both the officers and the directors. These workshops leveraged scenarios designed to bring to life the critical moments identified in the interviews and endorsed by the leaders.

When called for, stress was introduced into the scenario – via role plays, moments of tension or discussion – so that leaders’ behaviors could be observed, analyzed and rated. An element of competition was introduced at the team level to make the whole experience fun. The content at both experiences was similar, with the key difference being that officers acted as coaches in the director experience to both show their commitment and solidify their own learning.

The attention to why the “great” behaviors marked the path forward – and why old behaviors needed to be abandoned – crystalized the transformation in leaders’ minds. Presenting pivotal moments in the four primary roles played by IT leaders resonated with them and allowed focused practice of the “great” behaviors.

To make the development experience personal for leaders, impartial Industrial/Organizational psychologists were trained on the desired behaviors and acted as role play partners to the leaders, observed them in the team sessions, and completed individual scoring.

The learning extended after the workshop through two meetings between the I/O psychologist and the leader: one meeting to share the personal feedback on their performance at the workshop, and another meeting to share feedback on a 360-degree assessment instrument that was tied to the “great” behaviors. In both cases, the coach focused on identifying the actions the leader would take to change their behavior and impact.

All the individual performance feedback was consolidated into “heat maps” showing areas of relative strength and weakness demonstrated by the leaders and reviewed with the top team. While some of the workshop performance data was predicted by the officers, both positive and negative surprises were revealed when the top team compared the data to traditional performance management data and their personal experiences with individual leaders.

The conclusions from the workshop data formed the basis of further development. New challenges were raised around a culture of cyber-security, requirements to understand the business better, and even the need to develop high potential talent differently within this critical business function.

The success of the officer and director workshops generated enough excitement that the CIO and his directs decided that all people managers would also attend a version of the director program, with the directors playing the role of coach this time to help drive culture alignment. Further, the creation of profiles and playbooks for the people manager audience was deemed necessary to round out this talent approach.

Pt. 4: Sustaining Learning and Culture Change

Leveraging the language of the IT organization, BTS recommended a series of “behavioral sprints.” For each fiscal quarter, all the officers and directors would focus on developing the same few behaviors tied to one of their roles. For example, all leaders would focus on the “Change Agent” role behaviors for the first quarter. Rather than introduce new meetings and complexity, BTS leveraged the existing business cadence of quarterly CIO meetings for the launch of each “sprint.”

As further reinforcement, directors were organized into peer teams with an officer as their coach. Each month during that quarter, officers led calls of the peer teams to monitor progress made during the prior 30 days. Importantly, the cohort expectation was to be support-group-like in nature: a safe place to review experiments that worked and those that failed to varying degrees. There were no direct reports on any of the teams. Each participant brought questions to the peer group for each call to assure relevancy of the conversations. The coaching for each leader on the call came from the VP as well as their peers.

Not only did these meetings directly benefit leaders, but they also gave the CIO’s direct reports an improved perspective of the talent outside their own groups.

Summary

While culture change is hard in any organization, certain steps can make that transformation easier. Defining desired behaviors is a powerful starting line. But leaders will not really enter the race if they don’t truly believe in the necessity for change – they need a rallying point.

Powerful leader-led experiences can challenge legacy behaviors, help mold belief systems and encourage first steps. Executive leaders need to cultivate, encourage and invest in the journey themselves – creating a supportive, ongoing environment in which everyone is making the journey together. This is just the ticket to help organizations over the finish line.