The Lost Middle of Your Product Transformation
Often overlooked, your middle layer of leadership can make or break your transformation efforts.
“We have a clear vision of where we want to be, and our leadership team is closely aligned.”
It’s a great starting point for any change, especially one that tests the fortitude, patience, and sincerity of leadership teams. Often the next step is to build a roadmap and action plan to implement and adopt changes across teams and front-line employees. But there’s a missing step: an entire group of critical stakeholders’ support and understanding of the new operating model has been assumed. According to a 2020 leadership survey, 71% of managers are not fully aligned with the organization’s vision.
The group that’s frequently overlooked or underutilized is the middle layer of leadership. If they are included, they’re utilized as mouthpieces for the change, enforcers of the process, and scapegoats for resistance. In truth, these leaders are the linchpin to your transformation’s success. You need a different approach to engage them and evolve your organization.
Below are some tips to shift the model and engage the middle.
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Involve them in the vision creation
Employees who feel their voice is heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work. People are more likely to support an idea they helped create. By engaging your middle leadership in defining the path forward, it creates a sense of shared purpose that drives them to support the newly defined vision.
Empower them to lead the change
A key component of product and agile ways of working is pushing decisions and autonomy closest to the work. This needs to include the leaders that are closest to the teams and know their teams most intimately. These leaders know best how to enroll their people in the changes and mitigate the most likely challenges the team will present during their journey. Many organizations will create metrics for accountability at team and department levels but may not empower the leaders with the tools and knowledge to drive the behaviors the teams are expected to demonstrate.
Enable leaders to prioritize the change
According to two separate studies on sustainable digital transformation, commonly cited barriers to transformation were lack of funding and resources — key indicators that the effort is not prioritized adequately.
Organizations will often protect the ongoing delivery or “business as usual” from the transformation and then express frustration about the slow pace of change. You can either be fast and disruptive or methodical and patient.
Pilot with rockstar teams and leaders
Attitude and raw ability are more important than learned skills or processes when it comes to piloting. Your rockstars will demonstrate what success can look like for your organization, as well as highlight and overcome the barriers that other teams will face.
Transformation is complex work, and for medium complexity jobs, top employees outperform average employees by a median margin of 85–100%. Additionally, your stronger employees will have a multiplicative effect on the performance of others on the team, boosting performance by 5–15%. Couple your rockstar teams with your engaged managers to create the momentum needed for lasting change.
Provide safety for early adopters (and their leaders)
Psychological safety is critical for teams — especially for teams that will be required to adapt, learn, and grow in a new operating model. Transformation requires experimentation, and true experimentation requires failure. Early adopters need to understand that smart risks and experiments that drive progress and learning for the organization will be celebrated and not punished.
The people critical in creating psychological safety are again the middle management that can either reinforce the old behaviors or model and support the new desired behaviors. It is critical to educate and develop in these leaders the skills needed to operate in the new model.
The journey ahead
The shift to a product model is a significant undertaking and expands the scope beyond traditional agile transformation. This expanded scope increases complexity while also addressing many of the obstacles companies experience implementing agile as “an IT thing” (e.g., building the wrong things faster). While the change is more dramatic, including the leaders closest to the change — and preparing them for the road ahead — is critical to creating lasting change and achieving your vision.
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