Case Studies
Teasing out the pain points of scaling an organization with Dutch internet-based computer file transfer service – WeTransfer
WeTransfer is a Dutch based tech company founded in 2009 – known as the simplest solution to send big files around the world, dedicated to making creativity easier for everyone. Today, they’ve evolved a set of beautifully obvious tools to keep their user’s ideas moving - not having to worry about the technology. Acknowledged as one of Fast Company’s most innovative companies in 2019, WeTransfer has seen a lot of change since it was founded – in fact in seven years since being founded WeTransfer has:
Landed their first round of funding with Highland Capital - a VC firm that raised over $3 billion in committed capital.
Hired their first external CEO, Gordon Willoughby, previously CEO of Amazon and Ebay
Acquired Present Plus, alongside co-founders Nalden and Damian Bradfield
Organizational Challenge
The WeTransfer team recognized that in order to scale fast they would need to get clear on their vision, culture, and organisational structure. They hadn’t aligned around value and vision in the early stages of the company.
Choosing OverTime Leader
The founders of WeTransfer needed a team that already had experience working in the technology and design sector, and could provide them with highly focused attention–they needed to work with a team small enough to know that it would not be distracted and distributed out across many projects such as is the case with large scale consultancies. With these parameters in place, they found OverTime Leader quite easily.
Solutions & Working with OverTime Leader
Over the course of three years we worked alongside leadership teams at WeTransfer to design and deliver:
Organizational strategy to define and align the right culture for growth
Leadership development programs for multiple levels
A product development culture
We worked across multiple teams to drive alignment, team dynamics, and focus. We helped ensure smooth international growth and led the onboarding of their acquisition of Product Studio 53 Fifty Three – a superbly designed sketching and drawing app.
We led multiple workshops for many different sections of the company. WeTransfer is extremely proud of our partnership together and will always be close to our hearts.
Our founder, Gillian Davis, worked with the executive team of WeTransfer to bring whatever underlying organizational issues surrounding culture that remained festering and unaddressed, to the surface.
“Gillian and her team have a great talent for teasing out the sorely felt but often intangible aches of an organisation. And then confronts them head on, with candor, grit, and humor. I can honestly say that their coaching was one of the key factors that gave me the confidence and purpose to step out of the limelight and embrace the challenges of leadership”.
— Bastiaan Therhorst, Chief Technology Officer, WeTransfer
Results Achieved
OverTime Leader enabled the WeTransfer team to find alignment amongst their team in shaping their culture, identifying necessary changes, and putting in place a roadmap of actions for how the WeTransfer team could initiate those changes.
“OverTime brings objective advice and is a great sounding board that has been invaluable to the senior leadership team here as our business has scaled and has so, changed significantly over the past few years. They have helped us understand better how we need to shape our organisation, how we can effectively ‘land’ those organisational changes, and how we need to show up as leaders in order to reach our goals”.
— Gordon Willoughby, CEO, WeTransfer
The team at WeTransfer gained clarity, alignment and direction from the sessions we designed for them, developing a culture that they could scale and live by. Having vocalised the necessary changes for the company, and armed with a list of tangible actions, WeTransfer emerged ready to take on uncertainty and has performed particularly well in COVID-19.
Lessons Learned
This project's biggest challenge was to get the founders of WeTransfer to define their company culture. As people grow a company, the culture can often get lost or fall to the wayside in the interest of scaling quickly. Thus, it was vitally important that the WeTransfer team come back and get centered around values, culture and develop a compelling vision, with the guiding hand of OverTime Leader, before continuing to grow their business further.
Driving a new team culture through OKRs within the global media network, Omnicom
Omnicom Media Group is a leading global media network that creates end-to-end solutions for clients. Omnicom provides services in four disciplines: advertising, customer relationship management, public relations and specialty services.
Organizational Challenge
In order to drive cross functional, organisation wide initiatives and change, their CIO EMEA, recognized that his team was going to need a new strategy. Coming from traditional IT, he knew that with the right focus and alignment his team could deliver even more business value. He wanted to shift his team from constantly receiving requests and proposals to being more forward thinking, solution oriented, and strategic. The team had tried using OKRs before but never managed to get enough traction. It was time to implement some outside guidance.
Choosing OverTime Leader
Recognizing the need for a complete, department wide restructuring, the CIO needed to turn to someone who could handle coaching high-level executive teams and who also was a veteran in the technology industry. For this, Ominicom’s CIO turned to our founder, Gillian Davis, a 10+ year tech sector veteran and professional coach and her team of expert facilitators.
Solutions & Working With OverTime Leader
We worked with the CIO’s leadership team over the course of eighteen months to align the team, using the OKR process as a starting point. This helped the team transform their meetings to be more strategic and less operational. They quickly felt more focused and started to work better together. This process enabled them to prioritise their objectives and to start having really impactful conversations around the positive impact they were having on the wider business and how they could start adding further value to it. We coupled the OKR process with tools and approaches to product and design thinking, and helped them better understand their role in leading change management.
Results Achieved
Nailing an OKR process down can create a complete shift in your team's engagement, confidence and ability to deliver in fast-moving organisations. It requires a shift in mindset and an openness to adapt to new ways of working.
“Having the OverTime team to support us with the implementation of department wide initiatives has completely changed how we operate, for the better. OverTime Leader delivers enormous business value.”
—Roman Kornauka, CIO EMEA, Omnicom
Using OKR’s reduced complexity surrounding the internal processes of the organization and led to real breakthrough within the Omnicom team.
"You can’t make everyone happy but you can start by making slow progress by creating systems and better processes that reduce complexity step by step. As a leader, it’s imperative that you role-model the practices and trust the process. Be open to hearing feedback, and reinforce how this change over the long term will have a positive impact on them personally. As a team that spanned different geographies and departments I noticed that it was when we started creating our own rituals that began to see a real breakthrough".
—Roman Kornauka, CIO EMEA, Omnicom
The team defined a vision around which to rally all of their projects, and they felt more empowered to say no to requests that fell outside of their key focus areas. They delivered more and were recognized by C-level stakeholders in other regions, and their approach has now been piloted in US markets. It was very rewarding for us to see our client recognized as one of Europe’s CIOs of the Year in 2019. You can read more about our impact here.
Lessons Learned
The main organizational problem at Omnicom was that Roman had reached a point where he knew it would be impossible to have the desired business impact without making some serious changes. By mapping out OKR’s for the Omnicom team, OverTime Leader created the lasting impact and a list of actions, enabling Omnicom to execute its change initiatives.
Another important lesson we learned is that in the face of change, it is vitally important to stay happy and to keep confidence levels up. Anyone who is driving change, or is in a pioneering team will recognize the challenge of working against the wider organization's culture. Politics, hidden agendas, lack of funding or representation at the higher tables. It is too easy to get wrapped up in that, drain your energy and take you away from focusing on impact. If you get stuck there so will your team and their collective progress.
“Staying positive is one of the most challenging tasks of leadership. If I pass all the pressure down to the team it won’t help them keep their confidence levels up”. —Roman Kornauka, CIO EMEA, Omnicom
So, along with doubling down on OKRs, the Omnicom CIO EMEA maintained elevated emotions in front of his team to guide them gracefully through change.
Overall, the OKR process gave the team a strong and unifying approach to how they work. It enabled them to get clear on their vision, direction and understand how to communicate their priorities that were in line with the rest of the businesses.
Scaling management Capability in a flat organization
Game studio Hutch prides itself on doing things differently. Teams at Hutch have the freedom and responsibility to make the best decisions for players, and the studio is committed to providing all their teams with this level of independence.
After participating in our ScaleUp Management program in partnership with BackedVC, the COO of Hutch saw an opportunity to bring a similar program in-house. He found our programme to be particularly relevant to the challenges Hutch was facing. The course seemed a good fit due to its long term schedule, that allowed time to discuss various challenges and topics in depth. Hutch is a rapidly scaling business that is centred around it’s people and culture, so a course that is centred around a coaching approach, self-learning and developing an understanding from the shared experience of the group was vital.
Hutch has been growing rapidly and as some of their more senior managers and leaders took on new responsibilities in their roles, they began searching for a more structured approach to managing their very autonomous teams.
Solution
We designed an intensive leadership program centered around the notion that the future of leadership is more hands-off than hands-on. We created opportunities for the team to reflect, learn, and experiment together, not only for their own leadership style but for stronger bonds as a team. We covered core topics such as:
Change management
Communication and influence
Facilitation
Driving performance
Each session was paired with a pre-thinking workbook, and each module had a short assignment so that they could test themselves and learn as we went through the program. The team left at the end with a full toolbox of management approaches, a group of peers they could lean on, and a consistent approach to leadership as the company continues to grow.
”Hutch has grown rapidly over the last three years to over 100 staff, and we were facing a series of challenges culturally and operationally. As we’ve grown as a company, we've tried to be mindful and respond to opportunities without sacrificing our culture. As part of the leadership program we were keen to hear from other companies in different industries that were facing similar challenges to Hutch.
The scale-up course seemed uniquely relevant to Hutch. Curated with specific topics and self-learning materials with a strong emphasis on coaching and learning from the group.It was surprising to find a diverse group of participants, could all be facing similar challenges.
It felt natural to bring the course in house, so the teams running projects could develop and nurture their leadership skills and further develop their own team cultures while learning from each other in a safe space.”
Andy Watson, COO, Hutch