Three Actions to Transform Your Pivot from an Announcement to Real Change
Is your team going from mission-driven to muddled-direction?
I’ve experienced this too many times when companies I’ve worked for and led have tried to pivot. It could be:
a pivot in product positioning
a pivot in leadership
a pivot in market segment focus
a pivot in customer type
a pivot in centralizing or decentralizing (and then re-centralizing) operations.
I’ve seen it all. And it looks something like this.
the leadership team meets (perhaps they have an offsite) and comes up with a “strategy”
they announce the strategy to the company – ONCE
they create revenue and margin forecasts based on the new strategy and present them to the board
they break down the strategy into parts and assign owners to parts and quota to sales
And they’re off!
Failure to Launch
Why hasn’t that worked? I’ve thought about this for some time now and here’s my top 3 reasons why these pivots fail.
⒈ Leadership has been thinking about this for months. The rest of the company has been told this once, maybe twice if they are lucky.
Check out the illusion of truth effect—the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure. Perhaps you’ve experienced it in other areas of our society recently?
In any case, it applies to all information, not just false information. The average person needs to hear a message three to seven times before they take action.
The average person needs to hear a message three to seven times before they take action.
⒉ Once the slide deck is presented, and the instructions are delivered, the only subsequent report outs are from finance.
Each month, a few leaders circle around the virtual table and stare at numbers. Are we hitting our revenue and margin goals? YAY! Are we missing them? OH NO! And if you get enough Oh No’s you may end up planning another pivot to fix the prior pivot.
BTW - there’s a bias for that! Action bias—the tendency for someone to act when faced with a problem even when inaction would be more effective. Often startups don’t think beyond the revenue target when defining the path to a pivot.
⒊ Most people really don’t handle change well.
We’ve all heard it. The employee who complains that what they are now being asked to do is more complicated than what they used to do. That the thing that they had built worked well enough.
We all suffer from it. And there’s no shortage of biases that form the basis of why we are slow to adopt change – loss aversion bias, confirmation bias, status quo bias…
Doing the same thing over and over is comforting. You have a problem when there are a handful of people who not only refuse to evolve but actively stand against the pivot.
You have a problem when there are a handful of people who not only refuse to evolve but actively stand against the pivot.
A Pivot Done Well
When my Sail to Scale co-author Heather Jerrehian took over as CEO of Hitch, a skills intelligence solution for workforce decisions, the company was not getting traction with enterprise customers. She had a choice: keep pushing a “better” product or let go of better and pivot to “different.”She chose the second. She and her team spent months with customers, not pitching, but listening.
What did they find out? Companies didn’t need talent mobility software; they needed a way to make sense of all the information about the skills of their employees scattered across multiple systems. That insight became Hitch’s pivot—from “talent mobility tool” to “skills intelligence engine.”
Heather knew she needed to change the positioning of Hitch’s product. But she didn't stop there.
Leadership Clarity - She used data from customer interviews to convince her board and team that the real value for enterprise was in unifying and analyzing employee skills. That insight positioned Hitch for a much bigger, more urgent problem for enterprises - skills visibility and intelligence.
Communicate and Repeat - Heather brought everyone along—internally and externally—repeating how, what and why of the new positioning consistently and frequently until it stuck.
Measure and Monitor - It wasn’t just that Heather declared a pivot. She ensured every team executed against it by flowing down KPIs (not just financial metrics, but also product and operational changes) and reporting progress regularly. Operationalizing the pivot allowed them to know when they were actually gaining traction in new customer segments.
These efforts resulted in an increased growth velocity 12-18 months after the decision to pivot – which drove Hitch’s successful sale to ServiceNow.
The Plan for Successful Pivots
What I plan on doing differently.
Explain the pivot (the why, the what and the how) to the entire workforce at least 4 times, through 4 different forums in four different ways.
Set goals, KPIs and report outs beyond the financials. Flow down assigned parts from leadership through to everyone in the company with clear measurable actions. And report on the effectiveness of those actions monthly.
When there is one person that is “poisoning the well” and not only resisting the change but also driving others to question it, sometimes it’s better for both them and the business if they find another job rather than be the anchor that continues to bring the team down.
What do you do to drive pivots forward successfully?