How To Build Cohesive Teams and Drive Transformational Change

Every business leader understands the tremendous need to transform given the incredible opportunities and challenges nearly all organizations face today. Paul Leinwand and Mahadeva Matt Mani from PwC look at how successful business transformation requires strong leadership. While it’s sometimes easy to recognize the need for change, working with others to establish a shared agenda and collaborate is a big task. 

With transformation and technology permeating every aspect of business today, CIOs play a more crucial role. They are transformational leaders accountable for building winning teams within a company. The CIO often raises the bar for the rest of the leadership team about the need to make some of the critical choices about the organization’s future.

The CIOs that tend to succeed, and more importantly, help their company succeed, understand that the nature of competitive advantage today has shifted—and that digitizing is not enough. CIOs must understand the essence of what it takes to transform beyond implementing technology successfully. They must be able to educate others and bring them along the journey as willing participants. 

Behind every great CIO leading this charge at the executive level, there also has to be a strong team that collaborates within the IT department that executes on the company’s visions and collaborates with other departments to bring them along. Drawing from our recent book Beyond DigitalOpens a new window about how great leaders have succeeded in transforming their organizations, here’s what it takes for CIOs to lead cohesive teams that set their organizations up for success. 

Beyond Present Demands

It’s easy for CIOs and their teams to get wrapped up in the day-to-day needs of the business. More often than not, things can overwhelm a CIO’s agenda, like major projects that are late and over budget, endless demands of users, functions and business units, not to mention a global pandemic or supply chain disruption, among others. Case in point, over half of CIOs are trying to overcome a lack of integration with existing systems and data, according to a recent PwC reportOpens a new window . 

But effective CIOs will see this for what it is: a part of what they should expect in a day’s job. They will also still secure time to focus on the efforts needed for transformation—especially when disruptive events force their hand to speed up the transformation process. Yes, they will assemble task teams to manage the urgent, but at the same time, they will also empower their team with the resources they need to keep moving the transformation forward to upskill and advance their careers. 

In the words of Philip’s CEO, Frans van Houten, this is a matter of performing and transforming. Both are equally important and complementary. Without performance, you don’t have a present, but you don’t have a future without transformation. Both must coexist, and effective CIOs must balance this effort for themselves and their teams. 

Taking Ownership of Collaboration

Given the complexity of business challenges and the need to integrate insights from across all company areas, successful teams need to collaborate. Every team member needs to be committed to working together to help the team achieve a shared mission. CIOs, therefore, must inculcate a strong culture of purpose and collaboration in their teams – a culture in which the team is purpose-driven to work together across internal silos to help the IT function succeed and collaborate across the organization to deliver shared business outcomes. 

That’s why it’s important for CIOs to spend time with their team to craft a meaningful mission connected to the company’s purpose – one that is meaningful for the individuals in the team and in which they can see their individual purposes. Is the team there only to deliver technology go-lives and meet an IT budget, or are they also driven to create a meaningful impact for customers, employees, and society that aligns with the company’s purpose?

CIOs can also facilitate this culture by embracing their role as change agents and behavior influencers of the organization. By making their own teams accountable for behaving in collaborative ways and modeling the right behaviors, CIOs can have a meaningful impact in pivoting the broader organization to work collaboratively with IT. This can start with simple behaviors like Microsoft’s leadership team implemented – ending each meeting with asking, “Was that a growth mindset or fixed-mindset meeting? Why?” These targeted behavior changes add up over time to shift the type of conversations your teams have and thereby evolve the culture to purpose-driven, focused, and collaborative.

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The Right Mix of Skills

Real business transformation requires incredible capabilities—like innovation, revenue management, customer success, risk management—which a company needs to build to support its value proposition uniquely. These capabilities are increasingly cross-functional and require technology to be an important component. Therefore, to transform successfully, CIOs need to create diverse, forward-thinking, and flexible teams that can contribute to the company’s differentiating capabilities. 

The first step in creating the right team and enabling transformation is identifying the key skills you need to build the company’s differentiating capabilities and then incorporate people into your team with those skills. 

Take Hitachi, for instance. As the company set out on its transformation journey, it deliberately sought out more diversity by choosing leaders from different cultures and had experience in different industries and markets. This deliberate diversity in the management team played an important role in enabling the company to challenge assumptions, inject new capabilities (including technology) and effectively respond to constantly changing customer, business and market needs. Hitachi transformed from its prior focus across many businesses to a coherent enterprise focused on bringing its capabilities in social innovation technologies to business areas such as mobility and sustainable energy.

In the Change-driver’s Seat

Each team a CIO builds will be unique to an organization’s goals, but the main takeaway is the same: build a diverse team in its experience and skills—and make sure that team is embedded in the right places in the organization. Where the CIO owns end-to-end processes, those skills will go way beyond technology, since the most well-developed capabilities are highly cross-functional. At times, this may mean letting go of the functional history and embedding great resources together with other functions to create the outcomes the company needs. Our research in Beyond Digital highlighted this type of organization model in what we call “outcome-oriented teams,” where the right resources come together to drive the company’s most important capabilities.

CIOs play a crucial role in today’s organizations—to help their companies recognize the need to transform and how to go about it. Yet to succeed, CIOs must build a team that focuses on driving transformation, embraces collaboration, and has team members that bring a diversity of skills, experiences and perspectives. This opportunity is not only uniquely available for the CIO, given the role they play. We need to enable these leaders to step up and help their organizations take on the difficult but essential transformation work ahead.

How are you enabling transformational change within your organization? Share with us on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to learn from you!