Leaders in today’s world—in businesses, government organizations, nonprofits, etc.—all face a common challenge: how to successfully navigate fast-moving, constant, complex change. In the midst of this challenge, it is critical to equip employees and develop leaders at all levels of the organization to help drive change. It is no longer realistic, or sufficient, to defer solely to the vision and actions of those in positional leadership roles. This need to develop, and engage, employees across the organization poses an additional challenge, particularly for HR and Training professionals. Along with the fast pace of our world today comes a pressure to build capability, skills, and competencies quickly.
The Approach
Traditionally, organizations have outsourced their approach to change. In other words, they have turned to outside experts to develop and implement a strategy for solving pressing challenges. While this approach can be successful for challenges that are time limited and narrow in scope, Dr. John Kotter’s research has shown that this is not a sustainable solution. For transformation to truly be successful and long lasting—to navigate challenges that are continuous and broad in scope—organizations must insource their approach to change. Leveraging the knowledge, expertise, and energy of employees within the organization is critical for long-term growth.
A global pharmaceutical company has embraced insourcing, taking a multi-tier approach to change and development. With an initial focus on the Sales function, this organization has continued to build its capabilities through wide-spread initiatives to drive toward the company’s vision, pointed 90-day efforts with specific results targets, customized working sessions for senior leaders and managers, and traditional classroom programming to build skills more broadly throughout the organization. These efforts—utilizing the company’s own workforce—have lead to significant changes for the business and its employees.
Suggestions for Getting Started
1. Identify priorities and opportunities. Rather than calling out all of the challenges facing the organization, seek to identify the specific opportunities that lie within those challenges. If these challenges are overcome, what will be different? What does success look like? Use the answers to these questions to identify your organization’s opportunities and strategic priorities. Then:
- Communicate this broadly. People are motivated to help move toward a positive vision for the future, particularly when this vision is clearly articulated.
- Use this lens to shape your focus areas. This will allow you to create various learning and development experiences that help drive the organization, and your employees, forward in an impactful way.
- With an emphasis on its Sales function, the global pharmaceutical company crafted an opportunity statement focused on two distinct areas: successfully navigating the changing landscape of health care to become the most respected in the industry, and to more than double its revenue.
2. Take a multi-dimensional approach to change and to employee development. The most effective approaches to change, as seen in the case study of the global pharmaceutical company, are those that are multi-faceted in nature. In addition, the power of insourcing stems from leveraging the knowledge and expertise of employees from all across the organization. Consider how to:
- Incorporate traditional educational opportunities and mentoring or coaching relationships with on-the-job experiences.
- Engineer opportunities for employees from various functions and levels to collaborate on initiatives that have both personal and business impact.
- The global pharmaceutical company launched a few targeted 90-day initiatives that resulted in millions of dollars of additional revenue (6,100 percent ROI), 80 percent decrease in decision-making time, 20 percent decrease in the number of incentive compensation plans and increased trust and transparency amongst the sales force.
- Connect various learning experiences, so they are iterative rather than disparate.
3. Engage the many. Too often, a select group of employees is tasked with identifying and implementing solutions to current challenges. Insourcing rests on the notion of engaging diverse groups of employees throughout the organization. For this approach to work, you need to:
- Ask for volunteers. We see, time and again, that people are passionate about the work they do, they have innovative ideas for pushing the organization forward, and they want to help!
- At the global pharmaceutical company, more than 700 employees raised their hands to demonstrate their urgency around the named opportunity statement and more than 400 have been actively involved in initiatives directly targeted at moving the needle on those identified opportunities over the last four years.
- Give explicit permission. Often, because of long-standing cultural norms, employees won’t raise their hands to help unless they are given the permission to do so.
4. Build the necessary skills and environment to allow your employees to take action. To unlock the full power of your organization, it is critical to provide development opportunities to build your employees’ skills and capabilities. Create intentional learning experiences, with the following in mind:
- Understand the benefits and limitations of various leadership development approaches. On-the-job learning, coaching and mentoring, and traditional classroom programs all have distinct benefits, and limitations. Clearly map your desired objectives to your specific development approach to maximize its impact.
- As part of its approach to develop a common language, go broader and deeper within the organization beyond the Sales function, and build leadership skills at all levels, the global pharmaceutical company added classroom programming to its curriculum.
- Leverage peer interaction. The most fruitful learning often occurs through discussion and interaction with diverse groups of colleagues. Create space for pairs, small groups, and large groups to provide advice, brainstorm challenges and solutions, and develop action plans for moving forward.
- Incorporate on-the-job components. Particularly when designing traditional educational experiences, ensure that learnings from the classroom address and connect back to employees’ real work.
Insourcing helps leaders leverage the power of their organization as a means to successfully navigate the constantly changing environment. Organizations are better equipped to not only remain stable, but to thrive, in the marketplace by unleashing the expertise, knowledge, and passion of their workforce—while continuing to develop employees’ skills and capabilities as leaders.
Vanessa LoVerme Akhtar, Ed.D., is a principal at Kotter International, a consulting firm that works to unlock the full power of an organization to achieve strategic, sustainable results faster than leaders believe possible. Kotter International’s Consulting Services help organizations accelerate the implementation of their most critical business strategies. The Kotter Center for Leaders helps individuals and teams build capabilities and skills around the topics of leadership and change. With a background in sport and performance psychology, Akhtar brings a unique perspective to her role, with a particular emphasis on the design, development, and implementation of both traditional and customized learning opportunities.
