Reflections on "How To Support Your Customer in/through Change"
In today's fast-evolving business landscape, where business survival and the ability to deliver a quantum leap are linked with the ability to work well with partners, customers, and vendors to deliver outstanding results, leaders must be adept at navigating the boundaries of organizations to influence the circles of other organizations. This has led to changes in ways of working and leading, blurring the lines between companies. Collaborations and partnerships are essential for maintaining the agility needed to stay competitive. Yet, building support for change across these boundaries remains a challenging task.
When supporting customers through change with a non-traditional approach (one that goes beyond using direct reporting lines), focusing on outcomes and readiness is crucial. Here are some examples of shifts that have led to more successful outcomes in supporting the change in customers, partners, and vendors:
Shift from Our KPIs to Aligned Readiness
Recently, we were approached by a founder from a Southeast Asian organization who shared their vision and key performance indicators (KPIs). Their focus was on outcomes such as profitability, revenue growth, and market share expansion, and they wanted to move quickly to globalize, often as if they needed to start yesterday.
Rather than rushing to help them achieve their KPIs (and ours), we emphasized the importance of shifting focus from organizational KPIs to Aligned Readiness to better support them. What does this mean? It means ensuring that all aspects related to the change—strategic, financial, human, and organizational—are ready to deliver the change on both sides. This readiness is crucial not just at the project's start but throughout every stage, especially during any change or restructuring, up to the launch. We are unafraid to say no or highlight when an organization is not yet prepared.
Why is this approach important? If the timing isn’t right and we jump in prematurely, valuable time can be wasted. Hence, in this case, I requested to meet just one more director, the company’s finance director, to interview and clarify a few questions. I was granted this request. During that meeting, I discovered they hadn’t aligned their numbers sufficiently and lacked a strategic plan for a global project and expansion. I had to make the tough decision to explain to the founder and commercial teams why we needed to hold off to plan and make the change in stages with clear milestones of success. Through the ability to listen to your gut or see beneath what appears all well, it’s crucial to go beyond mere change assessment by asking strategic questions, meeting key stakeholders, and setting milestones for readiness before each stage. I spent time setting milestones for them to achieve before circling back to tackle each part. As a result, they reached their goals over a paced timeline, using far fewer resources than if they had rushed ahead.
Once readiness was achieved across geographies, I built support by leveraging my network and passion, treating the client's organization as if it were my own. In joint projects and developments, things can often get stuck. Having change management skills is essential to get things moving and bring them to readiness and launch. Clients appreciate it when you treat their investments and resources as if they were your own. This mindset shift—from focusing solely on organizational KPIs to emphasizing Aligned Readiness—is key to forming successful partnerships with customers.
It surprises me that many still rely on brainstorming, even today, in the marketing and advertising world. While brainstorming can generate ideas, it also has drawbacks such as groupthink, social loafing, and information overload. The outcome often depends on the participants' performance on that day. Consider when strategic partners, often senior leaders, are distracted during a session—answering calls or focusing on other tasks.
Shift from Planning to Exploration
For innovative development that drives change in client partnerships, we've found that the best ideas are born from inspiration and evolve over time. Instead of brainstorming, Exploration has proven to be a more effective approach, allowing us to plant ideas within a broader group. This new method requires bringing together pre-prepared deep generalists—teams that have pre-explored the issues. These groups come from a mix of multi-level, cross-functional backgrounds, and they share their insights in partnership discussions after thorough pre-briefings.
Why do partners value exploration? It involves considering anything and everything related to the topic, casting a wide net. For instance, when seeking change in beverage categories, it’s beneficial to cross-fertilize ideas and consider practices and rituals from different industries. Often, both sides arrive at similar ideas.
Not rushing decisions during the session allows everyone to reflect on the shortlist before making final choices. This pause leads to fresher, more innovative, and sustainable ideas, thanks to cross-functional perspectives. Most importantly, we avoid hastily selecting ideas, ensuring the best concepts emerge naturally. This mindset shift—from sticking to pure planning to embracing Exploration—is key to forming successful partnerships with customers.
Shift from Communicating to Engaging
It’s surprising that, even today, we use terms like “consultants” and “partners” alongside phrases like “change communication,” which often imply one-way communication focused on what to say and who to say it to. In contrast, engagement emphasizes who to listen to and what feedback to seek.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw a lot of top-down change communication being pushed out, often accompanied by surveys with poor scores and directives from steering committees and boards. Some partners suggested letting “them”—meaning vendors and change consultants through HR and procurement—handle change communication.
Traditionally, C-suite executives and management teams have been more focused on leadership and management. The way they execute these strategies to lower levels often happens in silos, following rigid, hierarchical structures—especially common and comfortable for many Asian leaders. However, the landscape is changing, and leaders are being pushed to adopt a more engaging approach.
To help partners or customer teams navigate change, it’s essential to cultivate an engaging and listening culture, staying in tune with the voice of the people—even if it means hearing complaints. This can involve joint forums, small meetings, collaborative FAQs, joint apps, or responses via chatbots, moving away from email announcements and pre-prepared communications.
What’s the difference with this approach? It’s heartening to see the strength of engagement versus communication with managers who initially wanted to be absent from the first forum now leading change hand-in-hand with us. This is quite an achievement, especially when considering that one of these leaders is almost 60 years old and belonged to the “old guard” labeled initially as not changeable. Through years of engagement, we’ve become so attuned to their issues that we can “read” situations and understand what lies beneath the unsaid, even when things are left unspoken. This mindset shift—from Communicating to Engaging—is key to forming successful partnerships with customers.
Shift from Managing to Co-creation
Co-creation is a collaborative approach where businesses involve external stakeholders, such as customers, partners, or experts, in the ideation and development process. This engagement allows for a shared creation of value, ideas, and solutions, ensuring that multiple perspectives contribute to the final outcome.
At our company, we push co-creation to its fullest extent, evolving the entire business model around that for creativity, quality, and cost efficiency. Despite skepticism in the early days when we introduced this, our approach to partnership has proven successful. Co-creation in our practice is characterized by an emphasis on core values, ethical work practices, strict discipline, and a profound sense of respect.
In many cases, co-creation efforts fail when a partner "manages" the process through a designated interface or bottleneck. This approach often translates into a more rigid and less visionary process, where the value and nuances of co-creation can be lost. Instead of fostering innovation and collaboration, the "management" of the process can stifle creativity and dilute the contributions of all involved. This shift—from Managing to Co-creation—is key to forming successful partnerships with customers.
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This article summarises reflections by Wong Mei Wai, Founder, CEO, and Chief Change Advisor at APAC Global Advisory, from the webinar titled "How to Support Your Customer In/Through Change." The webinar, co-hosted by Wong Mei Wai and Ursula Erasmus, was a collaboration between Issoria UK and APAC Global Advisory headquartered in Singapore. The article was written and captured by Chang Hui Tze from APAC Global Advisory.