Leading Successful Transformation – Long form Interview with Yvette Mihelic
How many years experience have you had leading transformations?
I have had over 7 years’ experience leading transformations.
What areas have these transformations been focused on?
Primarily customer experience and operational delivery
Which organisations have you led transformations of? St George Bank, Westpac Bank, Sydney Trains, Transport for NSW, Telstra.
Which of these would you say you are most proud of the outcomes from?
TfNSW and Sydney Trains – both fundamentally changed the customer experience and interaction with public transport for every resident and visitor to NSW.
In terms of ensuring an organisational transformation is successful, what are the key areas an organisation must address to enable effective transformation?
- Culture – What is the dynamic? Are our people ready for the change? How are we changing and most importantly WHY are we changing?
- Data – the data must be there to define the why, the how, the when and the success of implementation. Measurements must be clear, objective and in real time and cover deliverables across all touch points of the transformation.
- Leadership – Any transformation must have a top down/bottom up approach
- Strategy – If there is not a longer term strategy defined, the transformation may be counter intuitive for the organisations success.
Of these, which would you say is most significant?
Culture definitely – without the passion of your people, implementation will be mediocre at best, not embedded and sure to fail potentially leaving the organisation in a worse position that the original status quo.
Can you say which organisation you have seen this done best in?
Sydney Trains – the customer service team. Yvette commented on the significance of the changes made at the senior level, bringing more change tolerance and particularly a recognition that the business must move away from it’s historical prerogative as a worker-orientated entity to a customer-centric one. From this top-down initiative, flowed a further recognition that the business needed an employee group more diverse and reflective of the customers they were interacting with. Particularly at the ‘platform level’, a distinct shift in hiring practices (both of new staff and internal re-deployments) led to broader ethnic, gender and age ranges in customer facing staff, as well as attitudinal changes, especially in those in the ‘compliance’ side of the business – away from militaristic enforcement types towards customer relationship managers. These changes have seen an extraordinarily high return from customer engagement scores, and fare compliance has also improved significantly.
Which businesses would you say have learnt the most through a transformation process?
St George. It started for me with looking at the existing service model, which I could essentially define as ‘Serve the customer well and sales will follow’, and asking “That’s great, but what’s possible”? Looking at the data, I could see that customers wanted to be told if a better option was available and that was based on value over price, as well as the relationship with their personal banker. The key data out-takes showed our market share was stagnating. The CEO’s prerogative was to make St George a shining light which led to the impetus to launch the retail transformation. Stemming from the results of data analysis, we looked at how our conversations with customers can be used to build a greater and broader relationship with them. We engaged everybody at all levels of the business constantly to define the problem, develop, and then embed the solutions.
Champions were selected and seen as the new leaders, and everyone was brought along for the journey. We looked at the conversations that our top tier of people were having really well, how we lift those and have them consistent through the whole retail customer side of the business allowing us to improve organically doing more of what we were doing so well. The design of this went for 18 months, and the embedding for another 18 months. I really liked how we continued to look at the data points and seek out areas that needed more attention, we didn’t just implement and walk away and watch the dashboards tick over, we continued to look from the perspective of the strategic KPIs and then constantly looked to fine tune the outcomes of these.
What capabilities would you say are essential to any leader of a transformative business?
Openness to gather information and becoming a chameleon to all key stakeholders to understand their individual business wants and needs. Being a politician as to bring those that feel they are prisoners along on the journey and make them advocates for the change.
Are any of these more important than others?
I feel that being nimble and flexible to the needs of the business is important?
Which of these would you say you possess?
I like to think I have strength in bringing people on the journey, helping them understand the cause for change and creating advocates for not only the outcome, but also the process.
Can you give an example of these capabilities being beneficial in a recent transformation that you’ve led?
The Customer Channel Transformation Program for TfNSW defined, developed and delivered how the government and Public Transport and Road operators for NSW engage with the citizens and visitors to NSW across all information channels. Having multiple agencies with competing priorities at different stages of their own journey come together to define the future state provided many challenges. Working with diverse stakeholders required me to ensure that the process itself was refined and structured as the desired outcome involved many stakeholders to change their existing strategy to deliver a holistic customer experience across the Transport Cluster, rather than operator or TfNSW specific deliverables.
Is there a particular area that you’d like to improve on in order to be even more successful leading transformation?
I would like to be a little less “in your face” at times. I find that whilst I am respectful in my challenging of the norm, I can become a little too enthusiastic when sharing the vision of the future.
What are the essential capabilities of a successful transformation team?
Diversity in skill set, an understanding and belief in the process and a good internal network.
How important is having a diversity of skills, experiences and backgrounds in a successful transformation team?
Exceptionally (as per above)
What would you say are the benefits of diversity to the transformations businesses you’ve led?
An example from my current role at Transdev, starting a new entity within the confines of a culture which is traditional public transport. Public transport traditionally doesn’t necessarily stifle innovation but doesn’t immediately encourage it either. I was empowered to take a completely fresh and novel approach to how I attracted and recruited taken for ‘On Demand’ which has now been embedded. For me, diversity in culture is very important – For the Community by the Community is the term we’ve used, and we actively pursue people who have been out of the workforce for a while (typically 3-5 years), we have a high female proportion (47% in one On Demand Transport pilot) and we’ve positioned our drivers as Journey Makers to drive customer experience by adding value to the customer and not just move them around, in comparison to typical public transport drivers whose imperative is to get a vehicle from point A-G via B-F on time and carry some passengers along the way.
Our point of difference is personalisation and contextualisation, and thinking how do we bring that alive within the business, and the answer to that is through our people. I was able to engage our CEO to get carte blanche, enabling us to be bold to begin with, reaching far and wide and being relentless, so as to never give up. We’ve had bumps along the way in regards to culture, such a diverse group naturally brings with it conflict as well as benefits stemming from breadth of experience, perspective, strengths etc, so we’ve had to manage through those. I’ve done this especially by spending time in the business, by spending time with our people and understanding their motivations for coming to work, and by engaging leaders that report to me that are themselves a diverse group, and having them reflect on how they interact and have learnt to get the best from each other, and to deploy that learning and style in the groups they lead. We have a very strong focus on who we are and what we want to achieve as a business. Also being consistently transparent, always being respectful and ensuring that every communication however confronting it may be for the audience is delivered respectfully, then we are living our values and enabling our diverse group to benefit from very honest conversations. We’ve had less than 10% turnover, which is very low for such a new and busy organisation, and well as the lowest unplanned absence I’ve seen in my career (only 3 shifts missed since we launched as a 7-day operation 4 Months ago), customer satisfaction is 4.8/5 which I am especially proud of considering most had not driven customers before and come from such a diverse group many of which have been out of work for a long time.
Which would you say was the best transformation team you have led, and why?
Sydney Trains – it was a mix of old and new to the business, diverse backgrounds and experience and all had a belief in the end product delivery. The benefits that came from the diversity included the fostering of innovation, breadth of thought and internal and organic striving for excellence.
If you could chose one team capability from a transformation team, and wish it upon all in the organisation at large, what would it be, and why?
Knowing how to find and use data to drive an impetus to change an organisation for the positive.
How do you chose which transformations to lead?
It’s based on the size of the challenge, that’s what interests me, and it’s certainly not industry specific. In particular the challenge that excites me is cultural transformation – where there’s a well entrenched ethic of ‘we’ve always done it this way’. I love to demonstrate that there’s more potential that hasn’t been realised for the business. Customer expectations are always going to change and rise, and if the organisational culture doesn’t accept and embrace that change is the norm and that transformation is an acceleration of the norm, then the business is in strife. A business strategy should always land you ahead of where you want to be holistically as a business. The organisations that don’t excite me are the ones who are behind and are just trying to catch up. I want to be coming in to a business which wants to be market leading, and can articulate and identify this goal, those are the places I know I can add value. If the CEO can’t identify where they want to position their organisation to get to, and their C-suite isn’t aligned to this, the message of the “why” of transformation gets diluted and the results are always less than are required to achieve the business goals. This leads to silo’s being built and a defence mentality kicking in for those across the business to protect their “patch”.
