Abstract:Have you heard about When life gives you lemons, make some lemonade? Call it transformational challenges, difficulties, or even adversities; we encountered many types of lemons as part of our organizational transformation from when we were a small company to when we were part of one of the largest enterprises in the World! Trust me, each time, we sliced those tough lemons and made them the sweetest, and of course, the most memorable lemonade or rather, the most exciting professional journey of my life.
Interested to hear more?
As a person who went through at least a handful of mergers and acquisitions and organizational transformation in our company, I gained firsthand experience and insight into some of the difficulties that companies face as part of their transformation.
As part of this talk, I would like to humbly share our unpublished detailed experience representing our novel leadership stance with examples of our challenges, observations, and reflections. Our goal is to share, exchange and inspire you by inviting you to take on this exciting roller-coaster journey of enabling operational excellence and improving employee development, satisfaction and retention over the last seven years.
We would like to present the six chapters of our organizational transformation to share with you our firsthand experience of the collaboration with our leadership team, Finance, and HR to crawl, walk and finally run.
Here are the chapters:
1. Growing Pains! Sorting our ducks in the row!
This chapter is about when we were a small company and required some clarity into what we were doing and defined some processes as well as roles and responsibilities. How did we support our leadership and management in one of the most important pain points of our integration?
2. Welcome to the jungle!
How did we bridge the gap with cross-functional organizations such as Finance and HR using our Agile mindset? This chapter is about being acquired and facing the challenges of the integration of culture, process, and people. This chapter is about putting tiles for our people to navigate in the new mothership jungle.
3. Back to the core!
This chapter is about how we got rid of some cookie-cutting processes that we implemented ourselves(!) and established our very own customized process while accomplishing it collaboratively.
4. Mastery!
Chapter 2 was about creating a navigation path in the mothership process. Chapter 4 is about transforming to the next level. How did our transparency and Agile mindset not only to influence finance and leadership but also influence how we were able to enable our business leaders?
5. Enabler!
This chapter is about how we transformed into a SWAT team as part of our ongoing organizational transformation. Bridging not only teams and departments but also organizations to create a novel innovation stance.
6. Wild Card!
What are we baking for the next chapter as we present?
Learning Outcomes:- If you are a leader, manager, finance/HR expert, agile coach, or anyone interested in supporting operational excellence, you will learn a lot from our firsthand experience. We present our topic in a way that you will leave the sessions with the following inspirational takeaways:
- What was the most critical learning of these seven years? How did we leverage our Agile mindset and toolbox to help us navigate, embrace and succeed in our transformational challenges?
- How did we deliver value incrementally and experimentally throughout the organizational transformation?
- What was the role of diversity and inclusivity in our team? How did our DNA enable each person to bring a different and valuable perspective to the table? How did we embrace different working cultures and locations? How did we innovate?
- How did we stay focused and prevented endless philosophical discussions?
- How did we intentionally and carefully create and define our own culture in our team? How did we remain open, transparent with a high level of energy? What was the value and impact of such culture as part of this transformation? How did we embrace our differences and conflicts?
- How did we establish an objective, trusted position in our organization, not only from the perspective of our leadership but also from the standpoint of our agile development teams?
- How did we stay as a servant-leader and remain selfless in our organization?
- What was the value of having a big picture throughout this journey?