Standing Outside the Operating Theatre with a Clipboard
In my previous article, I described a company preparing for a major transformation whose executive team wanted its program director to “keep score” and “speak sternly” if progress was disappointing.
The remark was bizarre, but it was also revealing. The company was preparing for major surgery and looking for someone to stand outside the operating theatre with a clipboard, asking everyone to be a little more careful.
The deeper problem was not simply that the directors misunderstood the role. They had started looking for a program director before deciding what the person would actually be expected or authorised to direct.
That is much more common than it ought to be.
Choosing the person before defining the role
The discussion normally begins sensibly enough. The chief executive and senior management team recognise that the transformation is too large and complex to be managed through normal business routines. They accept that experienced program leadership will be needed.
Then the conversation shifts. Instead of defining what the transformation will require from its leader, the team starts discussing who might be available.
The role may be seen as an opportunity for a rising star, or a substantial assignment for a trusted executive who knows the company well but for whom the organisation has not quite found the right home.
The chief executive may have a close aide with access and influence. Another candidate may speak the language of transformation fluently, understand the theory and have worked on substantial change, without ever having led anything approaching the scale now in prospect.
If none of the internal candidates looks convincing, the company may turn to a major consultancy for structure, resources and credibility.
Each option can be made to sound entirely reasonable. The rising star brings energy and promise. The long-serving executive understands the company. The trusted aide has the ear of the chief executive. The transformation professional knows the methods and terminology. The consultancy brings resources and a recognised name.
The problem is not necessarily the individual. It is that the company is choosing between people before it has defined the job.
That is how a major transformation can become a development opportunity, a convenient organisational home, an extension of the chief executive’s office or a substantial consulting assignment.
None of those arrangements is automatically wrong, but none answers the central question: what must this person be able to direct that the existing organisation cannot direct for itself?
Until that question has been answered, the search is premature.
Knowing the company is valuable, but it is not the same as knowing how to lead its transformation. A functional executive may have delivered excellent results inside one part of the business, sponsored major projects and participated in numerous steering committees. They may have spent years around transformation activity.
None of that necessarily means they have led a company-wide undertaking in which the outcome depends on decisions, resources, systems, suppliers and priorities spread across the organisation.
There may also be a serious political difficulty. A rising executive can suddenly find themselves expected to challenge people far more senior than they are, redirect resources they do not control and overturn decisions made by executives who still have considerable influence over their future.
The title may say transformation director. The organisation may continue to regard them as a promising subordinate.
The same issue arises when the role is given to the chief executive’s trusted aide. Proximity to the CEO may provide access and influence, but it does not automatically provide the experience needed to build and control a complex delivery system. Carrying the chief executive’s message is not the same as leading the transformation.
The individual is not the transformation system
Another assumption reveals how lightly some organisations think about the appointment. They imagine that the program director will arrive alone.
There may be no established transformation office, no experienced planning capability, no integrated dependency management and no clear mechanism for turning functional plans into one coherent delivery system. The individual is expected to establish where the company really stands, determine what has already been committed, test the assumptions, trace the dependencies, create the plan and then somehow run the transformation.
In the case I described previously, this was exactly what appeared to be envisaged. I brought several experienced colleagues with me, and establishing the true starting position took more than a month. We had to understand the commitments already made, examine the plans, test the assumptions and identify the gaps between what the company intended to do and what it was actually equipped to deliver.
That was not administrative preparation. It was the work required to determine whether the transformation had a credible starting point at all.
The idea that one person could do all of that alone, then proceed to run a companywide transformation without any supporting infrastructure, revealed the same misunderstanding as the request to keep score.
They did not see the program director as the leader of an enterprise delivery system. They saw the program director as the system.
No individual, however capable or experienced, can compensate indefinitely for the absence of the organisation needed to support the role.
Where the role sits begins to shape the transformation
Once the candidate has been discussed, the next debate is usually about the reporting line.
The obvious answer is that an enterprise transformation should report to the chief executive, because the CEO is the one person with authority across the whole company. Sometimes that works.
But the chief executive may soon conclude that the transformation requires more time and attention than they can provide while also running the business and dealing with the board, investors, regulators, customers and everything else that comes with the job.
The role is then moved elsewhere, perhaps under strategy, finance, technology or operations.
That decision may look administrative, but it begins to define how the transformation is understood. Under strategy, the program can become preoccupied with organisational design, the future operating model and the story being presented to the board. Under finance, savings, headcount reductions and benefits targets can begin to determine the sequence of change. Under technology, the transformation may gradually become a large systems program, with operational, commercial and organisational changes treated as supporting activities. Under operations, immediate business pressures can repeatedly displace work that is disruptive now but essential for the future.
All these functions have an important part to play. The difficulty arises when the perspective of one function becomes the organising logic for the entire transformation.
The program may retain an enterprise-wide title, but in practice it is being run through one part of the company. The reporting line therefore matters, but it is not the decisive issue. The more important question is what authority the program director actually has.
This is usually where clarity is weakest.
A transformation director may report directly to the chief executive and still possess very little practical authority. They may attend every important meeting and carry a substantial title, yet remain unable to make many of the decisions that determine progress.
The board expects an integrated result, while the functional directors retain control of the people, money, systems, suppliers and priorities needed to produce it.
The program director is given responsibility for the result without control over many of the decisions on which success depends.
They can identify problems, report them and escalate them, but cannot necessarily resolve them. When two functions disagree, they appeal to the executive team. When resources are withheld, they negotiate. When priorities conflict, they ask for alignment. When a supplier falls out of step, they may raise the problem without controlling the commercial relationship.
The program director becomes responsible for consequences whose causes sit elsewhere.
The title suggests control. The operating model provides very little of it.
When the transformation begins to become real
The arrangement can appear workable while the transformation remains largely theoretical. The real test comes when it begins to change the organisation.
Roles disappear, reporting lines move, budgets are redirected and established priorities are challenged. Some executives gain influence while others lose it. Functions accustomed to controlling their own agendas are required to act in the interests of an outcome they do not fully own.
That is when concerns begin to reach the chief executive, the HR director and individual members of the board.
The transformation director is said to be too forceful. They do not understand the culture. They are not taking people with them. Morale is suffering. Good people may leave. The pace is too fast and the organisation is being destabilised.
Some of those concerns may be legitimate. Transformation directors are not beyond criticism, and poor judgement or unnecessary aggression can cause real damage. The ability to bring people through difficult change matters enormously.
But resistance to the consequences of transformation can easily be presented as concern about the person leading it.
As the complaints accumulate, the person appointed to challenge the organisation can gradually become portrayed as the source of the disruption. This is where the original lack of clarity becomes dangerous.
If the mandate was never explicit, the chief executive may struggle to distinguish between a transformation director exceeding their authority and one simply exercising the authority the transformation requires. Executives can resist the changes while continuing to insist that they support the transformation itself.
Eventually, the CEO may decide that the easiest way to restore confidence is to replace the transformation director. Another familiar response is to hand the program to the functional director making the strongest complaints, on the grounds that they understand the business and can settle the organisation down.
That rewards resistance and gives control of an enterprise transformation to one of the interests it was intended to change.
A new leader may be appointed with instructions to rebuild relationships, improve communication and take people with them. The organisation experiences a brief sense of relief, but the tensions that produced the complaints have not disappeared. The same decisions still have to be made, the same functions still have to surrender some control and the same interests still have to be challenged.
The company may believe it has solved a leadership problem.
In reality, it may simply have removed the person who was making the transformation real.
The role has to exist before it can be filled
The lesson is not simply that companies need to choose better program directors.
Before selecting the individual, debating the reporting line or commissioning a search firm, the executive team has to decide how the transformation will actually be led. It has to define what the program director will be expected to direct, what decisions they can make, what authority they will hold across functions and what delivery organisation will sit behind them.
It also has to decide what happens when the interests of the transformation conflict with the interests of an individual business unit. Most importantly, the executive team has to decide whether it is genuinely prepared to allow the transformation to change how the company itself is led.
If those questions cannot be answered clearly, the problem is not that the company has yet to find the right program director.
It has not yet created a role in which any program director could succeed.
The company may think it has appointed someone to run the operation.
In reality, it has placed them outside the operating theatre with a clipboard.
And when the operation begins to go wrong, that will probably be the first person it replaces.
About the author
David Hilliard is Founder of Mentor, execution specialists in strategic program execution.