As IT organizations mature, and business needs progress, IT leaders need to make their teams more nimble. The former CIO of 7-Eleven and Blockbuster offers insights on how to make your team capable of transforming not only IT operations, but your entire company.

IT departments, as always, are in a state of transformation. Sure, technology changes and business pressures constantly force changes in the way IT functions within a business, but the last few years have elevated the level of change to the highest degree.

But making transformation truly effective requires strong leadership, with CIOs and IT executives who understand changing objectives and business needs. Keith Morrow spent years running enormous IT organizations at 7-Eleven and Blockbuster. His experiences have helped him map out a blueprint for creating and honing IT teams that can transform not only the way IT operates, but the way that the entire company achieves its goals.

Morrow, who now runs his eponymous consulting firm based in Dallas, spoke recently with Workforce News Editor Brian P. Watson about how IT leaders can form transformational teams that make significant gains for their businesses.

What follows is an edited, condensed version of their conversation.

WORKFORCE NEWS: What are the key elements needed to make an IT team “transformational”?

MORROW: It’s a lot about behaviors and mindsets. To begin with, if you’re going to undertake any change like that, you need a handle on what the future-state looks like. Job No. 1 is to get a plan for where you want the team to be, post-transformation. Your people will want to know what they can do to contribute to the change taking place, what’s in it for them in terms of upsides, etc. You need to prescribe what role they’ll play during and after the transformation.

Once you do that, you can start laying out the next steps, namely the specific behaviors—innovation, collaboration, consulting skills—that you and the business want from the team.

When you begin the transforming your team, how do you figure out who will serve in what roles? Is a top-down approach, bottom-up, or a mix?

First you have to determine the timeframe you’re working with—in other words, how quickly do you need to arrive at the future-state? That will drive a lot of your next steps. Do you need consensus building or top-down command and control? On a very fast timescale, you’re going to tend to go to the team and say, I need to make these decisions, but I need some input. We may agree or disagree, but we need to move fast.

7-Eleven was a long, long transformation, while Blockbuster was an instantaneous rapture of a transformation. You don’t have time for consensus building and buy-in when you’re on an extremely rapid timescale. You can communicate what you must do, but you don’t have a lot of time for expectation-setting or re-training for different roles. It’s a lot more command and control in a fast timescale. Some people may not have a place in the future-state—they may have to leave the organization.

You must be open and transparent in both scenarios so you can build trust, because trust will be key to getting through any transformation.

It’s never the same, and you have to tailor it to what the time constraints are.

In staffing up your team, where do the youngest IT workers fit in? Can they play integral roles, given their expertise, or will they play traditional behind-the-scenes roles?

To be honest, you really, really need them. The part they can play in a consumer-facing business (which is what I’m most used to), they’re one of the biggest customer segments you want to get in touch with and build at least a rapport with, if not a relationship and loyalty with. It’s important to understand their thought process and why they do what they do with technology.

For example, this generation views security and privacy differently. They’re more open—they’re more used to putting their life out there. They look to do things that get them engaged and interested. You have to find those things. One of them is that they can give you insight into decode what you need to do to get a product or service across to their generation.

Because they have learned IT in a different way, they bring a lot to the table that adds to the chemistry of the team. They’re also not shy—I’ve seen plenty of them make bold moves in embracing new technologies and methods, where a lot of older IT pros revert back to the way things have always been done.

They want things on their terms. They want a workplace that meets their needs. They want to communicate in certain ways. They want certain tools to work certain ways. But they do bring a dynamism and flexibility to the table.

A considerable number of IT leaders think the Millennial generation is more of a detriment teams, in that they don’t have a lot of corporate loyalty or team ethic.

They’re critical to teams. They’re all individuals. The key is to engage them and work with them on their level, on their terms. If you engage nuclear power the wrong way, it can be very dangerous—even lethal. If you engage it the right way, it can light up a city.

It’s a challenge and an opportunity. If you view any team member as unreliable or likely to leave tomorrow, then they will—that’s just self-fulfilled prophecy.

How do you get business partners to understand the transformation of your team offers advantages?

When you synthesize the vision of the future-state from all the different inputs, you have to engage the business early and often in terms of what the group needs to do to provide value (that it doesn’t do already), and what processes and capabilities must be there to support the business strategy (that aren’t there already).

They need to be brought in on the roadmap. They’re the ones who are going to let you engage—or re-engage—and give you a chance. You’ll probably also have to prime the pump with some goodies along the way, like solid results and quick wins, to get them over to your side. If you’re doing this in a vacuum (or an IT closet), it’s going to be meaningless. You have to craft it in such a way that the future-state is what your business partners wanted it to be. That’s where you get a win-win.

But you get all sorts people across the spectrum—like the ones who say they don’t want IT’s help, over to those who say they want to keep giving you chances and are very cooperative and understanding. It’s a challenge to engage those different business people in different ways to get them on board, by hook or by crook, but it’s essential for the business.

In your experiences at 7-Eleven and Blockbuster, did you see similar results/gains for the business? What should the business expect from an effective transformational IT team?

There are two major aspects. One is when you’re out in the business and you’re making things happen, you don’t always see everything on the horizon. The technology partner can help those people learn to “know what you don’t know.” IT can bring things to the table when they’re engaged with what the business does, functionally. A technologist can bring forth ideas on innovation and process change that the business people haven’t thought of. They don’t always know that automation and IT can make things work faster and more efficiently.

The second is time to market. If you can set up the right engagement model and do it over and over again, you won’t be searching for the right person or method to make it work. You’ve already engaged with your partners, so you can go through the steps, build a design and get into implementation quickly. What I’ve seen happen at times is that some business people don’t know who to request things from, they don’t know the governance process, and that it’s too bureaucratic and too slow.

At 7-Eleven, IT was the innovation center of the company and focused on time to market. We set up the process to vet the initiatives, to get them through quickly, to get them sanctioned, and to get alignment around them. The business knew about the ROI, risk and opportunity, and that they can put it on the train and get it to the station on time and on budget.

The other thing you can do is kill projects that are misguided or repetitious. In an environment where you have to make different calls on different requests, you don’t get any leverage or reuse. At 7-Eleven, we put in an ERP system, a portal, an information warehouse, and so forth, that we could reuse over and over again; all we had to do was open up a new section of the portal, put the workflows in there and get the reporting out of it. We could move very, very fast because we had a strategy to do that.

It’s that speed and innovation that you get when you get to the top of the pyramid; at the bottom is hand-to-hand combat, fighting over who will do what and what system will be used where. To orchestrate the right way to do things, you have to create a service organization that understands that when the business cracks the whip, IT needs to do our part—and with more gusto than the business has. In fact, we have to know their processes and systems better than they do.

Much of what you’re talking about is change-oriented, which many workers struggle with. What are the most important ingredients a CIO can use to get people to actually embrace change?

You have to break that future-state down into milestones, tasks and deliverables that people have to do. You have to have a defined mission. You have to constantly reinforce it.

Our entire performance management system was geared around those behaviors and how workers got to them or exhibited them. It’s usually broken into thirds. One-third is adaptable, and they understand the mission, and they work to get it done. Another third have their heart in the right place and they’re trying to buy in, but they struggle because they may lack the hard or soft skills. Management can do their best work in helping those people get over the finish line. Then there’s a third that will dig their heels in and won’t do what’s asked of them, come hell or high water. Management can really save time by being clear with these people and finding new places for them, because they’re never going to get to where they need to be.

Do you have to get rid of that bottom third?

In some cases, that will be where outsourcing takes place, where you identify some of those activities those people do and exit them in that fashion. Another management challenge is showing those workers that they’re a square peg in a round hole in their current role, and they have better opportunities in another area. There can be some real wins in getting people into something they feel better about. But frankly, to some it’ll need to be made unequivocally clear that, these are the expected behaviors, and it’s either up or out. In many cases, they’ll take themselves out; if they’re not on board with what’s expected and what the company is striving for, they’ll leave on their own. They have to come on board or jump ship, for the good of the team, because it only takes one bad player to foul up the chemistry of the team and bring down the real “A” players.

None of it is easy. I go for smaller teams. It’s more about the group of six or seven Navy SEALs on a rubber boat. You see these big project failures; what are their primary characteristics? People don’t know what their role is, what they’re accountable for, and when they need to be accountable for it. I’ve done post-project reviews of different failures, and I usually hear that there was no leadership, so everybody did their own thing. It’s very dangerous when there’s little or no accountability.

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