To Execute a Unified Strategy, Leaders Need to Shadow Each Other

Research has shown that companies that adopt a “one-company” operating model instead of one that prioritizes local autonomy are 2.3 times more likely to rank among the top quartile of healthy, high-performing organizations. Global multinationals like Unilever, Siemens, Accenture, Honeywell, and Microsoft have used this approach to achieve scale, streamline processes, and deliver integrated services worldwide. A one-company approach, characterized by an integrated strategy, aligned organizational structures, and common firm-wide practices, is essential to ensure a consistent client experience, especially during strategic transformations. We’ve found that this approach also fosters employee trust and loyalty to the firm and to each other as they navigate the uncertainties and complexities inherent to transformation. Our experience working with major industry incumbents has shown us that as firms transition from a product- or service-centric focus to providing comprehensive “solutions” as a unified entity, they’re often held back by silos and traditional mindsets. Capturing the full value of operating as one company is elusive—but for the organizations that succeed, the rewards are transformative. Achieving success requires superior internal collaboration and mutual commitment toward ambitious strategic goals. We contend that collaboration cannot simply be taught—it must be experienced. Employees need to wear the hats of different functions, geographies, or business lines to truly grasp the challenges and contributions of diverse departments and align on strategy execution. Yet a fundamental challenge confounds this seemingly straightforward task: The “how.” How do you design for organizational collaboration? How do you scale with speed, especially if you’re a large organization? We’ve found that the solution is employee shadowing. Overcoming Barriers to Collaboration Consider DNB, Norway’s largest bank. In 2020, it achieved record financial results, but it faced an emerging challenge. The financial industry was undergoing a period of unprecedented digitalization, triggered not only by the arrival of new entrants leveraging digital technologies, but also by growing demands from customers and regulators. DNB’s CEO Kjerstin Braathen and her executive team were working on a strategy to accelerate DNB’s transformation from a traditional bank to a digital one. Braathen wanted to instill a sense of urgency, calling for all parts of the bank to unite as “ONE DNB” to drive strategy execution. According to Braathen: “What has changed in the last 10 years is the need to onboard the entire organization to drive strategy and innovation from within. Growing a culture of empowerment to experiment and learn is easy to say, but hard to do in a bank that operates in a heavily regulated context.” When DNB approached us with the goal of working as ONE DNB, Braathen was clear: “We must stop seeing business, technology, and functions as separate parts. What never goes away is the need to cooperate and the fact that everyone must be responsible for the business.” The organization needed to innovate and deliver more value to customers by improving its understanding of information flows across all business processes. In response, we proposed a robust employee-shadowing process, grounded in prior research on strategic implementation. Ineffective listening, insufficient empathy, and feedback aversion are key barriers to collaboration. Ineffective listening means that managers lose out on critical learning, thereby missing opportunities to accelerate growth. A lack of empathy leads them to underestimate the challenges other units face, entrenching the silo mentality with managers who mistakenly conclude that they’re the only ones doing important work. And the reluctance to seek and provide feedback means that the company loses out on key improvement opportunities. Shadowing can help leaders actively overcome all three of these barriers. The Six-Step Shadowing at Scale Process The shadowing process provides a window into another person’s job across hierarchies. By seeing their colleagues’ challenges, problem-solving approaches, team interactions, and how they leverage interdependence with other units, employees start developing a common understanding and building company-wide connections. Shadowing works best when it’s reciprocal, as the mutual observations enrich the quality of the learning. Thus, the shadow relationship often evolves into a strong collaboration. Here are six steps to implement shadowing at scale: Step 1: Identify the participants. The benefits of shadowing are maximized when a large group of people goes through a similar process of generating insights about collaboration, resulting in aggregate-level findings. Thus, identifying a larger group of participants is key. Shadow pairs can sit in different levels of the hierarchy, but participants should have a shared objective—for example, maybe they’re part of the same internal learning program or working on a large-scale strategic project that requires intense collaboration. The shadowing process can be successfully applied both in virtual and physical settings. The organization’s L&D function can play an instrumental role in structuring the shadowing experience, briefing participants, and putting together the shadow pairs with an eye toward maximizing exposure to unfamiliar areas of the company. Our experience confirms that pair stability should be a non-negotiable. Not only do dozens of swapping pairs become logistically impossible to manage, they also undermine the purpose of finding a learning opportunity in different (and unexpected) situations. Establishing this key principle helps create the foundation for shadowing at scale. Step 2: Prepare and contract for shadowing. To prepare for shadowing, employees must engage in self-reflection, asking themselves questions like: “What leadership or business challenge can an observer help me with? Which areas should I focus on (e.g., confidence, communication, conflict resolution)?” They should also talk to their manager, who can help them identify the most relevant tasks or meetings they should get exposure to. These reflections must be captured in writing and shared with the shadow partner before the pair gets together to kick off their shadowing experience, marking the first step toward building trust and setting clear boundaries. During the pair’s kickoff meeting—potentially in a non-stressful “walk and talk” setting—the focus should be on the contracting process. Participants define what success looks like, promise confidentiality, and agree on the ground rules for giving and receiving feedback. Step 3: Experience “silent shadowing.” Shadowing in silence, with no digital distractions, is key for enhancing attention and capturing non-obvious insights with the mindset that “everything is data.” Employees should be able to dedicate half a day to on-the-job shadowing, which could include attending meetings, observing normal workflows (in customer service, the production line, R&D center, etc.), participating in training sessions, or even sitting in on vendor negotiations. The success of the mutual shadowing will influence the subsequent frequency: While some pairs continue to shadow each other once or twice a year to deepen their insights, others decide to find new shadow partners and broaden the scope of their observations. For example, while shadowing the head of consumer brand, an IT lead acquired essential insights into customer needs during a meeting addressing the challenge of updating identification for children turning 18 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Later, the IT lead was able to propose a better technical solution rather than delivering rushed fixes that lacked sufficient context and required repeated adjustments to match customer expectations. Counterintuitively, we’ve found that when shadowing takes place at uneventful meetings, the idleness often sharpens the observer’s senses, and they notice more—for example, underlying emotions and team dynamics, latent conflict, or inclusion and exclusion issues. Shadows should take note of their observations in real time to prepare for the subsequent journaling process. Step 4: Journal and debrief. The purpose of journaling is to capture reflections during and after the shadowing exercise. To maximize its value, the journal should be templated to cover the distinct aspects of your company’s strategy, such as “ensuring sustainable value creation,” and its ways of working, such as “living the company values,” so that employees can map what they’ve learned and observed to the company’s goals. The benefits of journaling are two-fold: It deepens learning from the shadowing exercise and provides valuable feedback when the shadow pair exchanges journals. Step 5: Debrief in pairs. After each shadowing experience, the shadow pair should schedule at least an hour to share their journals and debrief with each other. Simple guiding questions include “What did I observe? What did I learn? What insights surprised me?” The more concrete the examples, the better. Next, the pair provides feedback to each other—being both appreciative and honest—circling back to the original reflection questions from Step 2 to help ground the insights. Step 6: Embed insights through group coaching. Bring three shadow pairs together to cross-share their experiences with an internal coach or business partner. It’s essential for the coach to help foster an open, non-defensive environment. Each pair reflects on their experience followed by a group discussion on organization-level learnings. While the common themes are interesting, leaders can glean deeper insights when people highlight what they learned about the company that they didn’t know before. To ensure momentum and scale, each person must define two action steps and commit to cascading the process with their respective teams within a given timeframe. The coaches should report back to the L&D process owners about which elements of the company strategy are resonating, and which employees are struggling with. Finally, the L&D team, often in partnership with an external facilitator, must bring it all together in a session with all participants. Drawing on the coaches’ final feedback, the facilitator can stress the employees’ roles as agents for change, leading to a broader discussion on strategy execution and organizational agility. Adhering to the process and templating at each step are critical success factors for companies exploring shadowing at scale for the first time. Impact Since applying this approach at DNB, we’ve implemented shadowing in companies from other industries. Close to 350 people were shadowed virtually and 130 in person, with comparable outcomes. While there is often initial skepticism about the effectiveness of virtual shadowing, our experience shows it works, though it does require additional support from the coach to ensure a disciplined process. Done well, shadowing can be a game-changer. Through improved listening, enhanced empathy, and strengthened psychological safety, the shadowing process is a powerful mechanism to create deep and wide impact that manifests in several beneficial ways: Shared understanding of how you, I, and we fit together as one company. Shadowing allows employees to gain insights into unfamiliar areas of the organization (think IT ↔ Retail, Innovation ↔ Compliance, or Sales ↔ Finance). While overcoming silo thinking is the most obvious benefit, participants have reported developing a nuanced “mutual admiration” for each other’s jobs (and feeling thankful that they weren’t in the shadow partner’s shoes). An impact survey one year after the program at DNB indicated that two-thirds of participants engaged in process improvements from customer needs analysis to complaint resolution, contributing to an improved end-to-end customer journey. Hyperawareness about what’s happening in and around the organization. Participants noted that they tended to underestimate some of the company’s fundamental strengths, such as its size and customer-focused DNA, and overestimated progress in certain areas, such as digitalization. Shadowing also raised awareness of the different subcultures within the company, such as those in the customer call center, compliance, and IT, helping participants appreciate these differences while thinking about customers in a comprehensive way. Better problem-solving using multiple lenses. Shadowing facilitated the discovery and transfer of best practices as well as learning about the strategic choices made by other departments. In some cases, shadow pairs achieved immediate impact. During Covid, for example, DNB had to update its files with physical copies of national IDs for new customer segments—young adults turning 18 and immigrants—so they could transact digitally. With branch offices closed, customers were unable to submit their physical IDs for verification. During the shadowing exercise, a member of the innovation team became aware of this retail banking problem. Drawing upon his tech expertise, he proposed using advanced facial recognition technology paired with high-resolution passport photos to make the ID update possible. Hence, DNB solved a pain point for customers and demonstrated its customer-first strategy. All of these benefits help create the conditions necessary for initiating culture change by reaching a critical mass across the organization. . . . Having implemented shadowing at scale in multiple companies, we’ve found that senior executives continue to engage in shadowing voluntarily, viewing it as a valuable learning opportunity for strategic problem-solving and for developing their personal leadership and coaching skills. Notably, most organizations seek to reinforce the one-company approach by linking it to a shared company objective, such as doing right by the customer and building the business. And shadowing at scale serves as an effective tool to power up the one-company approach.

To Execute a Unified Strategy, Leaders Need to Shadow Each Other

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