the organization who are able to embody and instill these cultural values so they can successfully guide their employees, teams, and organizations through the transformation process. We've found that mastering these two macro levers ultimately determines the success of any transformation effort. The centerpiece of Chapter 2 is our Six-Step Model of Cultural Transformation, which provides a powerful road map for achieving sustained success with any transformation effort by focusing on the micro levers of vision, humility, communication, leadership at all levels, talent, and measurement. These micro levers, if pushed with passion, perseverance, and precision, are the keys to mastering the leadership and culture macro levers which, as we said earlier, are the critical foundation steps to ensuring sustained success with any transformation initiative.
Conversations with 14 Transformational Leaders
In our conversations with business people from around the world, one of the most common things we hear is that there isn't enough mentorship for aspiring leaders today. In fact, the “leadership gap” is one of the biggest challenges facing companies worldwide. This is a big reason we chose to write this book. We wanted to give you unprecedented access to some of today's most successful business minds and ask them the big questions about success, leadership, corporate culture, and the future of business. Through the following interviews, you'll get to hear from 14 CEOs who have each, in their own way, exemplified transformational leadership within their own companies.
There's the story of Kathy Mazzarella, who started working for Graybar without a college degree and rose through the ranks to become the first female CEO in the company's history. You'll hear from Kris Canekeratne, a Sri Lankan native who instilled a commitment to perpetual improvement into the core business culture of Virtusa from the beginning, allowing the company to survive several evolutions in the tech sector and remain one of the top companies in the world for two decades. There's a conversation with Hap Klopp, who started his company with a group of fellow outdoor enthusiasts and, thanks to an uncompromising commitment to creating products that they love, grew The North Face into the world's most respected outdoor equipment company. And you'll learn how Eddie Machaalani built Bigcommerce on a foundation of hard-working family values that he learned growing up in the Lebanese immigrant community in Sydney, Australia.
Each of these CEOs brings a unique perspective to bear on leadership and cultural transformation. But they all share an uncompromising belief that culture starts from the top and that the success or failure of any company depends on the integrity and vision of its leader. We feel honored to have spoken to such a talented and diverse group of leaders, and hope that by hearing their stories, you'll be better equipped to engage in and lead transformation efforts within your own company.
But before we dive into the interviews, we'd like to talk more in depth about both cultural transformation and leadership, which we'll do in Chapters 1 and 2.
Chapter 1
Understanding Your Culture and Understanding the Culture You Must Create
As we discovered in interviewing some of the top CEOs in the world, successful CEOs and senior leadership teams can and do nurture and reinforce new mind-sets. Individuals, teams, and entire organizations can adapt, mature, and increase preparedness to deal successfully with current and future challenges. They learn to transform successfully what they do and how they do it. As a result, they create and sustain a “think different, think big” culture that is matched only by a “do different, do big” culture. The magic is not in espousing a bold vision or executing an untargeted strategy, but in the match.
Take a client of mine, Claro Colombia, the America Movil subsidiary in Colombia. America Movil has operations in 18 countries throughout South and Central America, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States as well as in eight countries in Europe through its Austria Telekom operation. Partly as a result of a corporate-wide initiative to laser focus on enhancing customer experience but also to sustain its leadership position, Claro required a game-changing think-big vision and strategy to ignite its cultural change initiative. Led by Claro Colombia CEO Juan Carlos Archila (see his interview in Chapter 11), Claro started its transformation journey by leveraging its considerable corporate people strengths – an unwavering focus, discipline, and flawless execution in such areas as product development and work processes – into a laser focus on the customer, including building customer relationships based on rapport and trust, creating memorable customer experiences, and building and sustaining a culture based on customer advocacy. Claro's new value proposition emphasizes an almost maniacal focus on enhancing a customer's experience and providing instantaneous turnaround on most services and products, delivered with consistent quality by an entrepreneurial and engaged staff. In conjunction with these transformations, the company launched a new, far simpler business model geared to growth. While still early in its transformation journey, these measures have brought new energy to the organization and inspired a stronger and more vibrant culture of leader and individual contributor capability, commitment, and alignment that is driving impressive operating results. Again, Claro Colombia's shift was big, but the shift required a laser focus on fewer levers – not more – enabling leaders and all employees to focus on what really matters.
Organizations that want to adapt during turbulent times cannot force these transformations purely through programmatic approaches such as restructuring and reengineering. They need a new kind of leadership capability – one that can reframe dilemmas; reinterpret options; and reform, revitalize, and renew operations. They must achieve all of these capabilities at once.
Transforming organizational culture is not for the weak or the quick-change artist. Real, serious, sustained transformation requires real, serious, sustained leadership.
What Is Culture? Let's Start Here
Your organization's culture represents the collective character, values, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and behaviors of your leaders and individual contributors. Your organization's culture is a product of such factors as its history and how your leaders and individual contributors ascribe meaning and value to it as well as leadership style (legacy and current), which is then reflected in the creation and implementation of your organization's values, vision, mission, purpose, strategy, structure, and roles. Ultimately, your overall culture and the relative health and vibrancy of your culture comprises five cultures as shown in Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 The Five Cultures of Culture
To what extent does your organization develop the inner core (that is, values, character, thoughts, beliefs, emotional makeup) and outer core competencies and skills of employees and leaders at all levels? Is there a passion and diligence displayed on the part of the senior leadership team to equip leaders and individual contributors with the skills required for individual and organizational effectiveness now and into the future, skills that increase people's learning agility, change/transformation agility, and people agility? To what extent is your organization creating a culture of can do, in which people truly believe they have the skills and capabilities required to be successful and help the organization be successful?
To what extent do your organization's vision, mission, and purpose excite and motivate leaders and employees? To what extent is authority and responsibility delegated to those who have the best and most up-to-date information to make the best decisions? To what extent do people truly believe that they can impact the business in a positive way and add value for customers and society? Are people motivated, passionate, and inspired to do great things for the organization? To what extent is there a reasonable risk-taking culture in place in which people believe they
