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Grasp big change management opportunities

Inflection number five: Co-leading a major business turnaround

About ten months into my time at MBS I had a number of interesting phone calls with Gartner.

The previous CEO had left about midyear and the incoming CEO had spent some time investigating why a big chunk of the business was stagnating (which was also contributing to a low and sluggish share price).

Clearly a turnaround was required. Feelers had been put out to a small number of people and I was one of them.

I had maintained quite close links with Gartner while at MBS. Gartner is an iconic company and, like MBS, an organisation that once you have worked there, you will always have continuing ties.

During my last six months at MBS, the book I had co-authored at Gartner, The New CIO Leader, was on its way to the printer, and due to be launched at the next three major Gartner Symposia in Orlando, Cannes and Sydney.

I was invited to meet with the newish Gartner CEO, Gene Hall, at the Cannes symposium. His first words were that he wanted me back in the company. I replied that that might be possible, provided I could continue living in Melbourne.

This time the challenge was of a different type. The business that I had been part of previously represented about one fifth of Gartner’s total revenue, while the stagnating Research part of the business represented more than three quarters of total revenue.

My friend and former boss Robin Kranich had been asked to lead the business turnaround of the Research business, and my new role was to lead new product development as part of that turnaround. We all knew that most of the new Research business products that had been launched in the previous four or five years had faltered, and that the product portfolio needed an overhaul.

That challenge and opportunity was too good to refuse, though it again came with quite a few trade-offs.

Taking risks leads to learnings

If you have the chance to work on a major turnaround, start a new business, or lead a risky project, take it! These opportunities don’t come up very often. No matter how it turns out, you will learn a huge amount along the way.

I had made it clear at the outset that if I did return to Gartner I would stay until we did the turnaround, which would probably be about three or four years at most.

I sort of squared things away with my husband Robert when I returned to Australia from Cannes. He had come to enjoy seeing more of me than he had for some years, but he also knew this was a great opportunity and that it was the sort of role I would probably relish.

Now I just had to explain to the new MBS Dean, who had started in November, that I would be leaving. He was gracious and agreed that I could leave in the new year after we put a few other developments in place—inducting a new group of students in October and planning for the revised international module, which included time in China.

My advice to him, though, was that the workload really needed additional staffing. I knew that none of the current academic staff would take on both the academic and marketing leadership as I had done, and that turned out to be the case.

Additional staffing was put in place for the next program leaders and my role became two roles after my departure.

A different kind of return

The return to Gartner as Senior Vice President for New Product Development was both gratifying and a bit scary.

A group of the often-tetchy senior analysts told me the fact that I had seen fit to return meant that I must have thought we could turn the business around. That in turn, had a considerable, if concerning, impact on me. If they thought we could do this, then I really did have to believe we could, and that we would. It was a kind of positive re-enforcement and challenge rolled into one.

I did have to rethink how I did things quite early on. I was much more accustomed to working with a group who would think conceptually through a problem and work through to a solution. I quickly learned in this new role, that I always had to start with the numbers that could possibly be achieved through a particular course of action, no matter how fuzzy those numbers might be.

It was a crash course in remembering to shape and present the case in the style of the recipients—not the way that seemed most logical and obvious to me. This was something that I did know, but had to remember to do all the time. And, after one not-so-good 5am conference call, I learned to make sure the rhythm of the work meant that I was in Gartner’s US Headquarters for all the critical meetings.

After about eighteen months, we started to see a real turnaround in our numbers and I knew it was probably time to think about the next chapter in my career. Other people had ‘got it’ and were now running with the new products and services. I was under pressure to move to the US, but did not want to. And I missed spending a lot of time with clients, which is where and how I gain a lot of energy.

Sometime prior, I had been approached by, but declined joining, executive search firms. Their business models meant that, as a partner, you were effectively in competition with your colleagues. For better or worse, I have the collaborative ‘gene’, which better suited academia and Gartner-type roles.

Through this time period, I kept in touch with Mark Lelliott, Managing Partner at a leading search firm and then through his leadership of other businesses. We worked together on a major global Gartner report on what makes executives successful: he led from the executive search firm, and a colleague and I co-led this for Gartner. After that, I provided some feedback about capability and assessment tools he and his colleagues had developed.

When he approached me about being a candidate for a role in a large merger and acquisition he was working on, I asked, ‘Why me?’ For someone who I thought didn’t know me all that well, I found the answer fascinating.

He described some attributes I had not really thought about, such as my ability to diagnose what was happening in organisations, the value of experience in working with diverse executive teams, and my ability to provide a level of clarity through understanding the essence of a situation, making complex things simpler to understand. I just hadn’t thought of these as particular attributes, nor had I realised how generically useful they might be!

Regular self-assessment is a good habit to develop. Why regular? The biggest disadvantage of assessing yourself is that it is difficult to be objective about both your strengths and weaknesses. By making a habit of self-assessment you are more attuned to picking up on the feedback from others, which can realign your perceptions.

Inflection number six: Embarking on yet another new career

At one of my occasional lunches with Mark during 2006, he made some comments about how perhaps working with him and the team at what became EWK International (and later NGS Global) would be a good move. I thought he was just being polite and didn’t take too much notice.

Later that afternoon, though, I started to think things through. Perhaps it was time for my next career change.

I had indicated to my Gartner colleagues that I would only stay until we turned the business around and clearly that was happening. I rang Mark back later that afternoon and asked him if he was actually offering me a job? The response was of course he was, and how could I not realise that immediately.

Over the next few months, during discussions with the executive search partners, I learned why they might want me to join them, and why and how I could succeed in leadership advisory and executive search work.

My experience as an executive educator and advisor, executive professional services roles, and leading product development seemed to be a very good combination from their viewpoint.

Their business model was quite different from most competitors. It was (and is) a very collegial and collaborative model. They were all mature and experienced. It was the partners that played the predominant role in both bringing in business and in doing the execution of that business. There was not a layer of associates to whom they passed on the bulk of the work with clients. Sure, they had researchers, but partners doing the work was a key part of value proposition.

I took my usual approach and thought through where I would learn most, where I figured I would make the best contribution, and then, being in the second half of my 50s, asked myself what was likely to provide the best platform for the next ten or so years of my career?

We agreed that for the first six weeks my focus was to review all the intellectual property the group had developed and to put that into a more ‘industrial’ or ‘reusable’ form. The expectation was that it would take six months or more for me to be fully ‘inducted’ into this new business and I was grateful for that.

However, things usually don’t work out quite as planned and this was the case here too. I did focus heavily on the IP work, but also spent some time with clients alongside my colleagues and then brought in some early work.

On my second day I went with a colleague to have a discussion with a potential client. We left with two searches confirmed, and I thought, ‘How easy was that?’

The answer was that it was the result of a relationship built over time, and not to assume that most or many meetings would result like that. Over the next ten years I had many lessons.