la How to Transform Your Company from the Middle
One of my clients is a product manager at an Adtech company. They provide a platform to their enterprise and business accounts in retargeting (aka-Remarketing), which is a strategy of cyber-stalking a first-time visitor to your site, who leaves without making a purchase and haunting them with your companys product ads on every screen they land on while surfing. Done right, this can change the conversion rate from a typical 2% to as high as 90%!
As a product manager he was frustrated with the performance of their AI-based platform in delivering the ROI that the companys clients expected. Soon, the company tanked and its stock plummeted because the engineering team responsible for the platform performance did not understand what the clientsand the product managerswere saying. My client led the product management team. This company was founded on the premise that bright engineers always have all the answers, regardless of what the questions were!
His frustrations culminated first in his deciding to leave the company and to go somewhere else, away from this insanity. Since the situation at his company was hopeless and was getting worse every day, we decided to embark on a more off-the-beaten-path plan, but a heroic one.
My client started as a hands-on engineer before he decided to become a product manager, well before he joined this company. So, he knew what engineering needed to do, not just from making the product more appealing, robust, and impactful in Adtech, but also HOW to do it.
Our plan was to see what it took to make a complete turnaround from the middle! After he came to me and got over his desire to quit, listening to some interesting possibilities, the two of us brainstormed to figure out how to get the team of engineers to make the changes that he wanted without facing interference from the engineering majordomos, who had rejected his ideas from the get-go. The tanking stock, customers defecting in droves, and the companys plight did not faze the Chief Engineer to make the required changes to the product; he was too busy overseeing the everyday tweaking of what was already not working. The CEO, a salesman, had hired the Chief Engineer, so he was not about to interfere with the engineering plans. My clients frustration was that he could not even get engineering to pilot the idea to show its merit; he was quite confident, however, that it would turn the tide.
Putting our heads together we came up with a risky plan to recruit some thought leaders from engineering to bootleg my clients idea and to work on it to develop a pilot product that incorporated the changes he desperately wanted. Luckily for my client he was already synched up with many rank-and-file engineers because of his previous work in product development and engineering, and his engineering mindset. His targeted recruits knew the deficiencies of the product and had agreed with my client, but were powerless to cross their engineering boss to do anything about it.
So, the clandestine plan of subterfuge involved getting one or two thought leaders from engineering who saw the merit of my clients idea and who were concerned about the value of their tanking stock, which was crashing and also about their rsum and how it would look if their company went belly up. Working with these two thought leaders he told them to recruit others under them who, in turn, would follow their lead and carry out the mission.
Soon, my clients commando team in engineering had 8-10 fired up and smoking engineers who were on a mission to save the company. While the army of engineers under the Chief Engineer continued working on tweaking the status quo and making it better, this commando team was bootlegging the change on their own time, hidden from all the prying eyes.
Within about two months the pilot was ready and was first quietly demonstrated to the product team, sales managers, and customer support group, which resulted in all thumbs up. Next, they took the roadshow to some frustrated clients and showed them what the revised product would do to their marketing ROI and customer acquisition through retargeting. When the test clients put that revised platform to work, the results were resoundingly positive, delighting the frustrated clients.
This was all the proof my client needed to make the change in the engineering product roadmap. He was also smart to give all the credit for this mission to the crack engineering commando team that saved the day for this company. By the time customers uncovered the performance of the revised product the CEO had come to know about its successmostly through excited customers, forcing him to fire the Chief Engineer and to hire his replacement. The new Chief was excited about carrying out the needed change and to provide the leadership for the new product roadmap.
Within the next few months the change had been productized under the new leadership, the product in the hands of eager clients took off, and the revenues were now growing once again. By the end of the six months following this guerilla attack on the original product roadmap the companys stock had tripled!
Word soon got out of this remarkable turnaround about this company that the Wall Street had written off and the personmy clientresponsible for it. My client started getting a torrent of calls and inquiries from AI companies who wanted him badly following this remarkable recovery. As of this writing he is now considering several C-level opportunities that are chasing him!
So, what are some of the leadership lessons from this episode? Here is my take:
- If you are fed up with the leadership of certain functional groups within your company and are at too low a level to affect any change dont merely throw your hands up and surrender. Do not merely walk away from this opportunity. Seriously consider other out-of-the-box options.
- If you are tempted to quit re-consider and decide if you can mobilize a turnaround leveraging what you know and what you can do if you can create the right environment for that turnaroundall of this managing it from the middle. At this time do not worry about the status and the power of those you want to overthrow. You are not going to do that yourself, but you are going to create circumstances that force their overthrow.
- Formalize your idea and confirm its validity to yourself first using some bootstrapped techniques. Find some champions you can trust to show the results and seek some inputs to further solidify your approach.
- Vector into the troubled functional area that must mobilize this change to overcome the problem your company or BU is facing, identifying some crack rebels who can see your point of view. Take them into your confidence and share your secret with them. These are just one or two leaders who are also frustrated with the status quo and the value of their tanking stock or how this stint is going to impact their rsum if they just sat and waited, instead.
- Ask these one or two recruits to on board their trusted teammates to build a deeper bench to support the mission based on your own assessment of what it would take to succeed. Once they understand their mission the recruits will do the rest on their own and manage their team. This is how you multiply your leadership force from the outside.
- Once you have something to show as a proof point showcase your success to internal champions who can get behind you and who can build a rebellion throughout the company, still discreetly.
- Figure out how to take this bootstrapped demo on a roadshow to customers who have not yet given up on your company despite their frustrations and their threats of defection.
- Once the customers see the power of your turnaround empower them to call the CEO and others to let them know their take on what they just saw and demand the right next step from the CEO.
- Watch the power structure that steadfastly held on to the alternate truths crumble and a new power structure emerge from this move you just staged.
- Translate the results of this turnaround into your revised rsum and then decide if you want to stay or enjoy the new reception the job market is now willing to accord you.
The episode above is not something that happens normally at this level of impact and influence. But, it does happen in lesser ways and with varying impact. So, make your own assessment of what is throttling your company, BU, or division and your power and will to change it and then go ahead and surprise yourself!
Good luck!
| About Author | |
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Dilip has distinguished himself as LinkedIn’s #1 career coach from among a global pool of over 1,000 peers ever since LinkedIn started ranking them professionally (LinkedIn selected 23 categories of professionals for this ranking and published this ranking from 2006 until 2012). Having worked with over 6,000 clients from all walks of professions and having worked with nearly the entire spectrum of age groups—from high-school graduates about to enter college to those in their 70s, not knowing what to do with their retirement—Dilip has developed a unique approach to bringing meaning to their professional and personal lives. Dilip’s professional success lies in his ability to codify what he has learned in his own varied life (he has changed careers four times and is currently in his fifth) and from those of his clients, and to apply the essence of that learning to each coaching situation. After getting his B.Tech. (Honors) from IIT-Bombay and Master’s in electrical engineering(MSEE) from Stanford University, Dilip worked at various organizations, starting as an individual contributor and then progressing to head an engineering organization of a division of a high-tech company, with $2B in sales, in California’s Silicon Valley. His current interest in coaching resulted from his career experiences spanning nearly four decades, at four very diverse organizations–and industries, including a major conglomerate in India, and from what it takes to re-invent oneself time and again, especially after a lay-off and with constraints that are beyond your control. During the 45-plus years since his graduation, Dilip has reinvented himself time and again to explore new career horizons. When he left the corporate world, as head of engineering of a technology company, he started his own technology consulting business, helping high-tech and biotech companies streamline their product development processes. Dilip’s third career was working as a marketing consultant helping Fortune-500 companies dramatically improve their sales, based on a novel concept. It is during this work that Dilip realized that the greatest challenge most corporations face is available leadership resources and effectiveness; too many followers looking up to rudderless leadership. Dilip then decided to work with corporations helping them understand the leadership process and how to increase leadership effectiveness at every level. Soon afterwards, when the job-market tanked in Silicon Valley in 2001, Dilip changed his career track yet again and decided to work initially with many high-tech refugees, who wanted expert guidance in their reinvention and reemployment. Quickly, Dilip expanded his practice to help professionals from all walks of life. Now in his fifth career, Dilip works with professionals in the Silicon Valley and around the world helping with reinvention to get their dream jobs or vocations. As a career counselor and life coach, Dilip’s focus has been career transitions for professionals at all levels and engaging them in a purposeful pursuit. Working with them, he has developed many groundbreaking approaches to career transition that are now published in five books, his weekly blogs, and hundreds of articles. He has worked with those looking for a change in their careers–re-invention–and jobs at levels ranging from CEOs to hospital orderlies. He has developed numerous seminars and workshops to complement his individual coaching for helping others with making career and life transitions. Dilip’s central theme in his practice is to help clients discover their latent genius and then build a value proposition around it to articulate a strong verbal brand. Throughout this journey, Dilip has come up with many groundbreaking practices such as an Inductive Résumé and the Genius Extraction Tool. Dilip owns two patents, has two publications in the Harvard Business Review and has led a CEO roundtable for Chief Executive on Customer Loyalty. Both Amazon and B&N list numerous reviews on his five books. Dilip is also listed in Who’s Who, has appeared several times on CNN Headline News/Comcast Local Edition, as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle in its career columns. Dilip is a contributing writer to several publications. Dilip is a sought-after speaker at public and private forums on jobs, careers, leadership challenges, and how to be an effective leader. |
Website: https://dilipsaraf.com/?p=2906
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