In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, effective leadership and collaboration are paramount for successful and lasting change. In this insightful interview, Lenka Pincot, Chief of Staff to the CEO at PMI, shares her extensive experience and expertise in organizational transformation. She offers a deep dive into the strategies and challenges of steering organizations through transformations in the modern era.

Throughout the conversation, Lenka emphasizes the importance of a clear vision, effective communication, and the empowerment of middle managers as key drivers of successful change initiatives. She explores the evolving nature of work, particularly in the context of digital transformation and disruption, and highlights the necessity for leaders to be adaptable and fluent in diverse ways of working.

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Interviewer: Let's talk about organizational transformation and the role of leadership in it. In recent years, nearly every major corporation has embarked on some sort of transformation, yet only 12% of major change programs produce lasting results, often due to factors like a lack of urgency, limited vision, poor communication, or insufficient leadership. For more than 20 years, you have been helping organizations implement their growth strategies and facilitating key agile transformation initiatives. What leadership lessons have those 20 years taught you, and what qualities in a leader can drive lasting change?

Lenka: That’s a complex question as it touches on various aspects. Let me first address why only a few transformations report lasting impact. There could be several reasons for this. One reason might be that the transformation didn't go as expected. Another reason could be the difficulty in assessing the impact of the transformation.

What we're currently observing is that organizations are often in a state of perpetual transformation, meaning there's no definitive end. They need to keep evolving, focusing on resilience and continuous progress, rather than achieving a static goal and then evaluating the success.

Evaluating transformations can be challenging. In my 20+ years of experience, I've learned that understanding the value and impact you want to create with your transformation is crucial. Businesses typically react to disruptions, such as market changes or shifts in consumer behavior, by deciding to transform. However, the key questions are: Do we have a clear vision? Do we understand the value we want to create for our customers, consumers and employees?

To make a transformation successful, it's vital to spend enough time understanding what you want to achieve. Define where you want to be some time after recognizing the need for transformation. The next step is to get everyone on the same page, sharing the same vision. This is especially challenging in large organizations with multiple leadership and management levels. It requires significant effort to articulate and communicate the vision across the organization and ensure everyone understands it.

Why is this understanding so important? In enterprise-wide transformations, you need changes across multiple teams. Centralizing the decision-making would create a bottleneck, so you must decentralize your transformation efforts. However, without a shared vision, employees might not understand why the transformation is necessary or its importance, leading to poor decisions or underestimating the urgency.

It is not a one-off process; it's continuous and constant. Consider that employees and team structures are also constantly changing, which is why transformation is as much about resilience as it is about agility.

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Interviewer: As organizational transformation often occurs alongside daily operations and must also adapt to continual external changes, it’s not uncommon for senior leaders to settle for modest improvements instead of exceptional performance under these conditions. How can leaders sustain change momentum through these transformations to ensure they enhance, rather than compromise, the success of future efforts?

Lenka: It’s important to understand change and the way we think about it. Everyone agrees that change is hard, so if you want to continue changing and transforming, it may sound contradictory, but you must stop perceiving it as change and transformation. What I mean is that you need to integrate it into your thinking and daily work so that it doesn’t feel like you are undergoing change and transformation.

For example, in my current job, we are also running a transformation. With the launch of a new strategy, we need to transform to deliver on it. If you see it as an extra task on top of your job, it creates an extra burden. People start distinguishing between their current job and the new way of doing things, which can be overwhelming. We need to support our teams and make them feel confident about the change without exhausting them. That's why the change must become a part of their daily work, integrated into their job.

During our transformation, we focus a lot on change management, people's engagement, and the engagement of our middle managers. We spend a lot of time talking, explaining, and communicating so that people understand the vision. This allows them to make their own decisions on how to change their work towards that vision. Essentially, the new vision becomes part of their job, not an extra task. This approach ties back to my previous answer about the importance of articulating and communicating the vision effectively to the teams.

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Interviewer: Even the most logical change initiative can be unsettling and disruptive for those affected by the change. When are leaders most effective in building support for change? How can a transformational leader open stakeholders' minds to their message?

Lenka: This is a question I've received a lot throughout my career, and it always makes me smile a bit because I don't like the expression "you need to get the buy-in." I believe in common sense and co-creation. When I talk about vision, things must make sense. It doesn't make sense to just create a vision, tell it to my teams and expect that everybody will love it. It will not work. There must be a purpose. People must feel that there is a reason to follow, so that when they make that purpose a reality, they achieve something impactful for them.

Purpose is one of the underlying reasons for gaining or losing employee engagement. If you want to succeed in a transformation, your employees need to be engaged. The transformation must be part of their work, and they need to work towards that vision only if it makes sense to them. They need to see why we are doing it. We are not transforming for the sake of transforming but to achieve a certain impact. If that impact doesn't speak to them, why would they even work for that company?

Instead of negotiating and persuading, I focus on value—answering the basic question of why we are doing it. Then the vision is about where we are going, and the rest is the work. I believe in co-creation. That's why I support different facilitation techniques and invite people to the table to discuss and co-create. For instance, in our transformation, we ran something called a transformation forum. This group consists of around 30 middle managers, who are crucial for the success of any transformation because they connect the senior leadership team, which defines the strategy, with the teams executing it. These middle managers understand the strategy and the on-the-ground difficulties, such as friction-causing processes and efficiency tools needed. I don't want to come to them and dictate the vision; instead, I present the vision and purpose and ask them about obstacles, support needed, and what they believe is most important. We let them discuss and vote on priorities, and then my transformation team works to address those priorities. Afterward, we re-prioritize and address other issues.

Empowerment of these middle managers is also a crucial part of this process. They need to figure out what's needed and how to change it, with my support but without micromanagement. Empowering teams and co-creating with them allows us to address real issues, some of which might be old processes that senior leaders aren't even aware of. Listening to and supporting our teams ensures they are free to work towards the vision without unnecessary obstacles. Middle management helps translate the vision and strategy from the senior leadership into actionable steps for the employees. Without this connection, you have a vision at the top with no understanding at the bottom, leading to a lack of real change.

 

 

Interviewer: What is the ideal composition of a team for managing organizational transformation, and how can a transformation leader not only build effective cooperation among multiple teams but also create an environment where each team member can thrive?

Lenka:In enterprise-wide transformation, all teams must be part of it, emphasizing collaboration, co-creation, and empowerment. Trying to centralize everything in one team would be inefficient. Instead, I build transformation teams to be nimble, focusing on orchestrating, facilitating, empowering, and shaping the culture rather than making centralized decisions.

The transformation team’s role is to understand strategy and vision, execute change, and, importantly, communicate effectively and build relationships. They must build trust within the organization, ensuring that everyone involved feels free to speak up, provide input, and ask questions. Effective transformation teams need to maintain clarity, facilitate cooperation, and ensure everyone joins the effort to move forward.

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Interviewer: I learned that during organizational transformations, system thinking plays a role in how you handle complex scenarios. When confronted with a challenging decision, do you rely on your intuition or prefer using different tools and methods to guide your choice?

Lenka: I've done a lot of self-profiling, and I've come to realize that I'm actually very rational when it comes to decision-making. For me, things have to make sense. If something makes sense, the difficulty isn't in making the decision itself but rather in facing it—stepping up and delivering the news. That's often the more challenging part, not the decision-making process.

Making decisions isn't necessarily the hardest part because it's about informed decision-making—it's about doing your job properly. Before making any decision, you need to understand the context, and this is where systems thinking is incredibly helpful. However, you also need to have strong business acumen. You must understand the consequences of your actions.

Systems thinking helps you see the broader picture, but you still need to grasp the specific consequences of your decisions. For example, if I do this, what will the impact be on our members or our business partners? Beyond that, understanding people—their motivations, fears, and concerns—is crucial. This understanding allows you to craft your message and deliver your decision in a way that keeps people motivated and engaged.

You need to show your team that they aren't just employees; they are partners in the transformation. Even though formal hierarchies exist, we're all in the same boat. If you want people to trust you, you need to trust them in return. If you want them to treat you as a partner with whom they can openly communicate, you need to exhibit the same behavior towards them.

These are all skills and techniques that fall under leadership. If you do your job well, it’s still demanding, but you shouldn't feel like you're in the dark, facing a tough decision alone. That's why it's important to build trust, relationships, and structures around you—so you have fast access to information, allowing you to make decisions confidently, knowing that you're making the right choices.

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Interviewer: Let's talk a little about the future of transformation. What are some emerging trends in organizational transformation that leaders should be aware of and following that, what advice would you give to leaders who are about to embark on their first major transformation project?

Lenka: I started working in 2001, and my first job was as a consultant. Back then, when a new project started, it was a big deal. There would be a kickoff event, speeches, and sometimes even cake. The company would mostly operate as usual, but then a big change would come along, requiring a formal project launch. That’s no longer the reality today.

Over the past 20 years, the way we work has changed dramatically. What our data shows now is that, regardless of the profession—whether you’re a program manager, project manager, Scrum Master, or Agile coach—you need to be very fluent in different ways of working. And by fluent, I mean not just knowing different methods but also being able to switch between them seamlessly.

With the progress of digital transformation and disruption, there has been a significant shift towards making our services and products digital. This shift has fundamentally altered the way we maintain and deliver changes. That's why leaders who drive change need to be adaptable and versatile in their approach.

Another major trend is remote work. This has had a huge impact on leadership. Leading a remote team is very different from leading face-to-face. It’s not just about communication, building trust, and other power skills; it’s also about the tools you provide for your people. It’s much harder to maintain team cohesion in a remote environment than when you have everyone physically around you. In a traditional setting, you could simply raise your hand and clarify something on the spot. Now, you have to schedule a meeting for that. It’s a very different dynamic.

Additionally, there's the interconnectedness of the world—the global nature of our environment. Changes now cause ripple effects on a global scale, leading to what we call perpetual transformation. It’s no longer efficient to run separate digital, sustainability, and agile transformations simultaneously. You can’t do three different transformations at once, but you need all of them. You need to become more digital, more agile, and more sustainable.

This means you need to create a perpetual transformation where you're constantly addressing the needs of the future and mobilizing your teams to work on that transformation as part of their normal job. I think, in the future, we might stop calling it transformation altogether. The term suggests that there's a beginning and an end to the process, but it’s really more of a constant evolution. Everything is happening faster, things are more fluid, and you have to be able to embrace uncertainty. Building resilience is crucial because the demands are higher than ever.

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Interviewer: You once mentioned that success comes through our work, that we do not only need to work on the outcomes but we need to put enough effort in working on ourselves. Can you describe your approach to self-development and continuous learning? How do you balance it with your day-to-day responsibilities as a Chief of Staff to the CEO at PMI?

Lenka: Behind my desk there is my library. It’s not that I sit down and read books all day, but I know where to go if I need advice or if I need to refresh my understanding of something. That’s one part—having a trusted source of information. I’m fortunate because, thanks to my job, I actually know many of the authors of these books. Knowing them helps me because I trust them, which motivates me to read their books, understanding where they are coming from.

Some people prefer training, and I also engage in training from time to time—more like executive education. For example, a year ago, I did a course at MIT on artificial intelligence. Before that, I completed a full program on digital transformation. These are areas that interest me because I like to understand technology. I also listen to various webinars and read a lot, which is part of how I gather information.

The second key ingredient is practicing active listening every day. To work on yourself, you need to set your ego aside—put it under the table or throw it out the window—and really listen. People are giving you feedback constantly; you just need to listen to it and understand how you need to improve to be more helpful and to support your teams better.

It's not just direct feedback from your teams saying, “Hey Lenka, do this differently.” It’s also about listening to the silence. If you ask, “What do you think about this?” and no one says anything, that’s feedback. It means something is wrong. Why aren’t they saying anything? What does it mean? You need to constantly listen to both the silence and the noise, and then work with that feedback to improve yourself.