Chapter 19
Mobilizing the Organization
At the core of the Conscious Capitalism journey is a shift in how we think about business—changing the narrative, or story, of business. The change-management agenda thus needs to include both what we will do (chapter 18) and how and why we do it, which will be addressed in this chapter.
Change-management expert John Kotter has noted that successful transformations have both a rational reason for change and an emotional appeal for why it matters. We will guide you in creating a dialogue in the organization about Conscious Capitalism and what your organization is aspiring to. The transformation will entail both a top-down and a bottom-up approach. There are two core elements to these approaches:
- Engaging and aligning the top team
- Engaging and enrolling the whole organization by developing a campaign of influence and creating an ongoing dialogue within the organization
These two elements, over time, will change how people think about your organization. We will discuss each of these in more detail in the following pages.
Aligning the Top Team
A critical step on the journey to Conscious Capitalism is to bring the top team along. If the top team is not aligned and engaged, it is very difficult to build trust and credibility with the rest of the organization. The organization watches what the top team says and does. If the leaders’ actions don’t reflect what they’re saying, the organization recognizes these conflicts and becomes more skeptical about the change effort. For this reason, the top team must understand why you are going on the journey and what the immediate steps to implement this are. Not everybody on the top team will become a true believer, but the leaders must at least understand the basics of what is being proposed and why.
The top team can be defined as needed in your organization. In some organizations, this team is just the executive committee, typically three to five top leaders. Other organizations may expand this team to ten to twelve people. The goal is to involve the people who are viewed as key influencers in leading and managing the day-to-day business. The size of the top team will also be based on how new and different the concept of Conscious Capitalism is to the way the team or organization has been operating to date. If it represents a significant change in cultural direction, you should begin with a smaller team. If the concept is building on a philosophy and business approach that has been in place for several years, you can consider a broader team. The goal is to have the right team that will build credibility and trust in the organization.
Figure 19-1 depicts a typical progression of organizational commitment to a major change initiative. You can expect a similar trajectory for the journey to Conscious Capitalism, if it is successfully executed.
Figure 19-1: Stages of organizational commitment over time
It is our experience that most people find Conscious Capitalism deeply inspiring. The philosophy helps people see business as a means to create greater meaning and personal fulfillment. Realistically, not everyone on your team will get there immediately. Some “reverent skeptics” will want to wait and see what changes you are proposing and what gets accomplished. Be patient. The key is to have on the top team at least two or three members who are onboard and excited about pursing Conscious Capitalism. Then, your initial successes will speak for themselves. If after twelve months, there still are one or two top-team members who remain unconvinced about the importance of a conscious culture, then you may have a problem of values alignment. You may need to consider if these team members are a good fit for the type of organization you want to create.
We recommend that you take a two-step process to onboarding the top team. First, you help the top team understand Conscious Capitalism and what it means for the aspirations of the company. We will outline this step in the next section, “Top-Team Onboarding Workshop.” You need to onboard the top-team members before you can work with them on the exercises in this book. The members need to understand the why of the journey before they can dig deeply into how it will get done.
The second step is to work through the exercises in this book and to move from aspiration to action. This means taking the team through the tenets step by step and then pulling this all together, as you did in chapter 18. The details of this step are expanded on later in this chapter.
Top-Team Onboarding Workshop
The goal of the workshop is to make the journey to Conscious Capitalism practical and meaningful, to help the team understand the what and the why of this philosophy. There is a saying from the Tao Te Ching that the longest journey begins with the first step. This workshop is your first step! Your team needs to understand and support what you are trying to accomplish. Begin with the end in mind: What does success look like over the next thirty-six months or beyond? Explore the needed shifts in behavior and beliefs you have about the business. Then, make this personal: “What does this mean for me, and what changes do I need to make in how I think and show up as a leader?” Finally, make sure the team agrees on how you are going to tell the story of the journey you are committed to going on to the rest of the organization.
The top-team workshop is divided into five blocks:
- Ground the team on understanding what Conscious Capitalism is and why you as a leader are personally committed to this journey.
- Create an aspiration—a vision of what the organization can become over time.
- Explore what shifts are required in thinking and in behaviors. Create a “from-to” map that captures the essence of this shift from one type of mindset and behavior to another (see figure 19-2 later in this chapter).
- Create the story of change that you will bring forward to the rest of the organization—why we as individual leaders, and as a team, believe this is an important journey, an existential imperative.
- Bring in the action plan that was developed in chapter 18. If your team hasn’t already created such a plan, now is a good time to do this exercise with your team. If the team has already created a version of the action plan and phased approach, have them review it.
Table 19-1 presents a sample agenda for this workshop and the five blocks. It assumes that you have worked with the team and done the exercises and other work in chapter 18: the work on each of the pillars, the three-phase implementation plan, and the “one big thing” for the next six to twelve months.
TABLE 19-1
If you have not worked with the team on completing the implementation plan in chapter 18, then you should build this step into the workshop. You should allot three to four hours to work through the exercises in chapter 18 together as a team. Do the implementation-plan exercises right after completing block 1—the grounding of why Conscious Capitalism matters. Doing implementation planning here will quickly ground the team on the practical implementation for the next thirty-six months. Then, go further with the team on building the vision and the necessary changes to make this plan stick. Pragmatically, this order helps the team build the case for the deeper changes that come with this journey.
Block 1: Why Conscious Capitalism Matters to Me or Us
Review with your team why, for you as a senior leader in the organization, this journey to Conscious Capitalism matters. This is your opportunity to express what you consider important and why you are excited about the opportunities. It’s also a chance to review, briefly, the four pillars of Conscious Capitalism. After you have spoken and introduced the concept, capture the questions that the team would like to address during the day. This is your opportunity to better understand which parts are resonating and are clearly understood by the team and which parts are not.
The five-why exercise below helps you better understand why Conscious Capitalism matters to you.
Why are you here? (Respond five times why until you drill down to the core of why you are really here.)
- Why? __________________________________________________________________
- Why? __________________________________________________________________
- Why? __________________________________________________________________
- Why? __________________________________________________________________
- Why? __________________________________________________________________
Block 2: Visualizing a Future Conscious Capitalism Organization
The goal of this exercise is to develop alignment in the team around an aspirational future. You want to move beyond the constraints of today’s situation and have the team let loose and dream a bit. Have them play the what-if game in a guided-imagery exercise.
As the leader, you should run this exercise, unless you have a facilitator for the workshop. Have the team members sit quietly in a circle of chairs, and have them close their eyes, get comfortable in their seats, and check their posture. Ask them to imagine what the organization would look like as a Conscious Capitalism company five years from now. Ask them to have fun with this exercise. There are no right or wrong answers. Loosen up and dream a bit. You are trying to access people’s imaginations to see what pops up for them when you ask the question. Guide them to imagine this picture fully. Tell them to walk around their image—notice the colors, the texture of its material, its size. These details help make the image more concrete for them.
- Ask them to open their eyes and write down three to five words that best capture their image. Instruct them not to think about this too much. Ask them not to judge what they wrote down. The key here is not to be too practical; the goal is to be aspirational. If we could, what would we want that future to look like? Do this exercise quickly, so the participants don’t spend too much time trying to get the words perfect. Capturing first impressions is the goal here.
Block 3: Shifting How We Think and Behave: Create a From-To Model
In this set of exercises, we’re trying to identify potential barriers to our journey. Given our aspirational vision, which assumptions might prevent us from achieving this vision? We will then describe what the opposite assumption or belief might look like, and armed with these observations, we will create a list of from-to beliefs and behaviors—changes we’ll have to make if our journey is to be successful.
- Have the team members list three to five things that they think could get in the way of achieving their aspirational vision.
- Which assumptions or beliefs might stop your organization from realizing this dream?
- Which practical elements of your business’s operation might prevent this dream from being realized?
Capture these obstacles on a flip chart, and discuss with the team which are the top three or four factors that might get in the way.
Take your list of the top three or four obstacles, and discuss with the group what the opposite assumptions or beliefs would be. For example, if we believe that people are cynical and don’t trust us, the opposite belief or assumption would be that we build a credible and trusting environment. Go through this exercise with the team, and then fill in the from-to box below. Figure 19-2 presents an example from another company that we have worked with.
Figure 19-2: Example of “from-to” mindset shifts
| From … | To … |
Block 4: Making It Personal, Taking a Stand
This next set of exercises focuses on trying to take the aspirational vision from the organizational level and making it relevant to each team member. The exercise asks a series of questions for them to reflect on in small groups. At the end, they should write a personal statement about why this vision matters to them.
Have each team member spend ten to fifteen minutes answering the following questions:
- What is it about this future vision that I find most important or inspiring? Why?
- When I look at the from-to model above, what are my personal challenges in shifting from one mindset and behavior to other ones? Why are these my challenges?
- Describe why this change matters to me and what my commitment to change will be.
- Have each person take out a blank sheet of paper. At the top of the paper, have the participants write the phrase “Conscious Capitalism Business Times.” Instruct them to write a paragraph or two as if they were business journalists writing five years from now about what the company looks like and how it has accomplished this transformation. You could also frame this assignment as if your organization had a Harvard Business Review cover story about its successful five-year journey to Conscious Capitalism. Have them write this story from the point of view of a business writer describing the journey: what, why, and how.
Come back together as a team, and have each team member spend two or three minutes describing their personal challenge and their commitment to meet that challenge to move forward on Conscious Capitalism.
Block 5: Pulling It Together
You have now created the following:
- An aspirational vision captured in three or four phrases or sentences
- A from-to model of the shift in thinking and behavior to enable this future
- A list of each leader’s potential personal challenges and opportunities associated with the vision
Have two members of the team pull this material together into a change story for the team after the meeting is finished. This story should be no more than five or six PowerPoint slides or two or three pages of written notes in a memo format. Ask them to create a first draft within ten days of the workshop, and have them circulate it to all the team members who participated in the workshop for review and edits. You now have your first draft of the journey to Conscious Capitalism change story!
Top-Team Alignment and Relevance: Aspiration to Action Workshop
The next step in getting the top team’s support is to move from aspiration to action. You want to make Conscious Capitalism relevant to the top team and to the core of the business and its operations. Relevance increases as you and your team work through the exercises in this book. For each of the pillars, you need to assess where you are, look at the possible ways you can move forward in this area, and discuss and decide on what the highest-impact initiatives might be for your organization. Then, working through chapter 18, you can pull all these possible initiatives together, prioritize them, and commit to action plans for the next twelve to eighteen months.
In our experience, there are two ways for a top team to approach this more detailed work. As highlighted in the preface, they are:
- Plan for a two- or three-day retreat in which the entire team is taken off-site. We recommend working through each of the five parts of the book in sequence, spending three or five hours on each of them. For each of the four tenets of Conscious Capitalism (represented by parts 1 through 4), focus on the areas most pertinent to your situation. For example, your team should focus on part 1, “Higher Purpose,” if your organization has not yet developed a clear statement of purpose or if the team thinks that the current purpose doesn’t fit your current needs and should be updated. If, on the other hand, the team believes that the organization has a well-defined sense of purpose, the next step is to make sure everyone understands the purpose and is living it. A possible two-day top-team agenda is outlined below.
Day 1
8:30–9:35 Introduction and journey review 9:35–9:45 Break 9:45–11:15 Purpose review 11:15–11:25 Break 11:25–12:30 Purpose: bring it to life 12:30–1:15 Lunch 1:15–3:00 Stakeholder mapping 3:00–3:15 Break 3:15–5:15 Stakeholder deep dives 5:15–5:30 Wrap-up and review Day 2
8:00–8:15 Reflections on day 1 8:15–10:30 Culture and values 10:30–10:45 Break 10:45–12:45 Conscious leadership 12:45–1:15 Lunch 1:15–2:30 Team working sessions 2:30–2:40 Break 2:40–3:15 Action plans and next steps 3:15–4:15 Team presentations 4:15–4:30 Wrap-up and close - An alternative approach is to schedule a series of five sessions, one for each part of the book, for three or four hours each, over not more than five or six weeks. The goal here is to ensure that you have enough time both to do the relevant exercises for your team and to discuss the potential impacts on your business and the concrete next steps to move this tenet into action.
Enroll and Empower the Organization
To create lasting change in the organization, you must bring the organization along on the journey. This means introducing your people to Conscious Capitalism, why it matters to you and the top team, what you aspire to, and how you will get there. As people in the organization begin to embrace Conscious Capitalism, they will start to make decisions and take actions that will slowly turn the organization in this direction. Like a giant cruise ship, organizations don’t turn on a dime. But like a flywheel, once the company does begin to turn, the change gains momentum and is difficult to stop. This organizational engagement process can take from two to six months to work through. The timing depends on the size of your organization and the intensity with which you engage in the process.
Every day, people in your organization make thousands of decisions and take actions to run, support, and execute on the direction your business is headed. What influences these decisions and their actions? Hopefully, their decisions and actions are based on their role and work experience and their understanding of what is in the best interest of the business. Therefore, the more they understand the importance and power of Conscious Capitalism, the more this philosophy will influence their decisions and actions.
Building this understanding and mobilizing the organization to think and act differently is the place where, frankly, most transformation programs break down. Too often, only the top echelon of the organization understands and has bought into the vision and execution plan. But the further you share your vision in the organization, the more likely you are to get sustainable change and results. We will outline two overlapping streams of activity to ensure that you begin a dialogue to engage with the organization at all levels.
- Create a core SWAT team of change champions from various levels of the organization. These people will act as emissaries and change agents in the organization.
- Launch a campaign of influence and engagement to create a dialogue with the organization about the what and why of Conscious Capitalism. In this way, the journey to Conscious Capitalism becomes relevant to people in their day-to-day roles in the organization.
Create Your Team of Change Champions
At the initial stage of the campaign of change and influence, you should bring together a core group of ten to twenty change champions who will serve as the eyes and ears of the organization and will be the main supporters of Conscious Capitalism. The size of this group depends on how large your organization is. Typically, these champions have the following characteristics:
- They come from multiple levels in the organization.
- They reflect a diversity of experience, ages, and functional and business experience.
- They are generally seen by their colleagues as key influencers or connectors.
- They are excited about Conscious Capitalism and the organization’s commitment to it.
- They are good leaders and managers—they can get things done.
Not everyone on the team will have all these characteristics, but most should have a majority of them. Take the following steps to enlist your champions:
- Make your first draft list of potential change champions.
- Circulate the list to members of the top team for feedback. Add and subtract names as appropriate.
- Finalize your list and discuss with the candidates’ managers the time commitment that will be required for this program.
- Personally invite the champions to participate in the program.
- Set the expectation that this will require 10 to 20 percent of their time for the next twelve to eighteen months.
Onboarding the Change Champions
The next step is to gather the change champions so that you can begin incorporating the idea of Conscious Capitalism deeper into the organization. You must first bring the change champions onboard, make sure they understand what Conscious Capitalism is all about, and set your expectations for them. A typical onboarding meeting will include the following elements:
- An introduction to Conscious Capitalism
–Use the same references and materials you used with the top team (chapter 18).
–Have the CEO or other senior leaders talk about why Conscious Capitalism is important to the organization, and why it’s important to them personally.
–Have members of the senior team share their perspectives and commitments to this conscious approach.
Review and get feedback on the change story. Have members of the top team present the change story to the change champions. Then, have the top team leave the room.
- Review the aspiration statement, and ask the change champions the following questions:
–What resonates with you?
–What does not resonate? Why not?
–What feedback do you have for the top team on this aspiration?
- Review the from-to model, and ask the champions these questions:
–What additional behaviors and issues need to be addressed because they might get in the way?
–What changes or other feedback do you have for the top team?
- Review the action plan, and ask the following questions:
–What do you see as the key success factors to make sure this plan gets executed?
–What might prevent execution? How can these barriers be addressed in advance?
–What is missing from this action plan?
–What could help accelerate the execution of the action plan?
- Collect all this feedback.
Invite the top team to come back into the room. Arrange the seating of the change champions in a U shape in the room. Have the senior team come in and sit in the center of that U shape. Have the champions present their feedback section by section. Let them give their feedback before the leadership team is asked to comment and build on what they have heard.
Typically, this onboarding process will take four to eight hours to do, depending on the size of the team and the time allocated for discussion and breakouts around the different sections that they review. Table 19-2 shows a suggested agenda for this onboarding session.
TABLE 19-2
The Campaign of Influence and Engagement
To engage and enroll the organization, the change champions need to quickly gather feedback on how to make the change story relevant to the organization. This is followed by developing and launching a campaign of influence and engagement to be executed over the next twelve to eighteen months. This campaign will touch and engage everyone in the organization, as well as external stakeholders.
Make the Change Story Relevant
The first task of the change champions will be to take the change story deeper into the organization and gather feedback and present that to the executive team. Typically, this is done through focus groups, in which one to two change champions meet with groups of six to eight people in the organization. Plan on ten to twenty focus groups with an average of 7 people in each, for a total of between 70 and 140 people.
In the focus groups, the change champions should review each section of the change story (aspirational vision, from-to model, and execution plan) and gather feedback. They will focus on what resonates or does not resonate and what might accelerate the shift and what might block it. The champions take notes during each focus group and write up a summary afterward.
After completing all the focus groups, the change champions typically gather for a half day or full day to debrief one another. They summarize and synthesize the feedback, make suggestions on how to improve the change story and the execution plan, and prepare to present their observations to the senior team. The senior team should then meet with the change champions for two to four hours to listen to the feedback from the organization. Working together, the senior team and the champions will create a new version of the change story and action plan to make the journey to Conscious Capitalism more effective in its execution.
Developing a Campaign of Influence and Engagement
The next stage of the process is to engage the entire organization in understanding what the journey to Conscious Capitalism is about and why you are doing this. To this end, you should begin a dialogue within the organization both to help address issues and questions and to continue to make a conscious culture relevant to people.
The metaphor of a campaign is used because this is not a one-and-done communication event. It requires staying on message, letting people the organization know that their input has been heard, and using multiple platforms and media to communicate the messages about the meaning and progress of the journey.
The goals of the communication campaign are typically as follows:
- Get the word out. Ensure that every employee understands where the journey to Conscious Capitalism is going and can articulate major issues that employees can have an impact on. Move from giving information to engaging and empowering people.
- Involve each employee in some significant way. Quickly move employees from spectators to active participants, from the stands to the playing field.
- Make it actionable. Develop ways to involve employees in translating strategic direction into changes in the way they work.
- Make it fun. Use creative and high-touch events (i.e., events that are more personal and interactive) and methods to invite participation and acceptance among employees.
- Learn by listening. Develop effective ways to hear, understand, and acknowledge employee feedback about the Conscious Capitalism story and implementation, as well as about the communication effort.
- Measure progress. Develop metrics to monitor progress, and share these regularly within the organization.
A typical communication campaign will include both high- and low-touch elements:
Low touch: less personal, less interactive
- Conference calls
- Voicemails from CEO
- Posters
- Intranet (news magazine, informational web pages)
- Videos of CEO
High touch: more personal, more interactive
- One-on-one meetings
- Town hall meetings
- Group informational meetings
- Focus groups oriented to gathering input
- Site events with lots of interaction
- Live webcasts with Q&A
Creating an Ongoing Dialogue
After building a deeper understanding of the journey, work with the change champions to create feedback and dialogue forums on a regular, local basis. Examples of how you can do this are:
- Local “Journey to Conscious Capitalism” councils. They meet regularly and discuss what is working and not working to help the organization become a conscious company. With the aid of a change champion, the councils provide suggestions and other feedback to the change champion team and ultimately back to the leadership team.
- Monthly discussion or reading groups. These are set up with a facilitator who may pick a relevant topic or reading and help the group reflect on the topic’s relevance to Conscious Capitalism in the group’s part of the organization.
- Monthly lunch-and-learn sessions hosted by a senior leader and a small group to discuss the progress of the journey to Conscious Capitalism and to gather feedback on what is working and what is not working.
The key here is to be creative and create local events and forums where Conscious Capitalism and the action plans become more and more relevant to the organization.
One of the powerful benefits of this kind of campaign and dialogue is that people start looking for ways they can contribute in their day-to-day jobs and responsibilities. Thousands of small decisions get made in any organization every day. When there is an organizational vision and framework for understanding what the desired behaviors are and what the action plans are, people come up with hundreds of creative ways of engaging and helping. This increased level of engagement and inspiration around a meaningful goal allows the organization to be innovative and creative and brings Conscious Capitalism to life in many unexpected ways.
Final Thoughts
This chapter set out to help you develop a successful journey to Conscious Capitalism.
If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes an entire organization to execute a successful transformation. The sustainability of the change you are implementing is strongly correlated with the depth of engagement within the organization. It will also be influenced by the quality of the ongoing dialogue you create to keep your efforts relevant to people’s day-to-day work.
As we have explained throughout the book, the journey begins with getting your leadership team engaged and aligned with what you’re doing and why you are doing it. An engaged leadership is an absolutely necessary but not sufficient step on the journey.
As we’ve also explained, the critical next step is to bring the entire organization on the journey. With the help of a team of change champions, you can get rapid feedback on the relevance of the change story that the leadership team has created. You can then develop a campaign to bring the entire organization on the journey.
We cannot overstate the important role that you, the leader of the organization, play in making this transformation happen and stick. This process of bringing your team along begins with clarity on why this matters to you, and your consistency with both the top team and the organization in staying on message on why it matters and how we will do it. As stated earlier, leadership matters, perhaps more than all the other pillars, in ensuring that Conscious Capitalism moves from inspiration to impact. You will have ample opportunity to develop your conscious leadership as you lead the transformation to Conscious Capitalism.