How to Drive Business Transformation: Michael Polk's Path to Growth

Growth and transformation are challenging for any business leader, but experienced executive Michael Polk has made it his life’s work. Plenty of leaders fear change, but Polk thrives on it. “I've grown through all of my different career experiences, but I have had the most fulfilling roles when I am learning and trying new things,” he says.

Drawing from a decades-long career at industry leaders like Procter & Gamble, Kraft Foods, Unilever, and Newell Brands, Polk’s insights offer a roadmap for CEOs to navigate the often-challenging path to profitable growth. Polk breaks down his well-established approach to making sharp strategic choices early in a planning cycle and single-mindedly allocating resources to the opportunities those choices represent.

Identify Value Drivers

In his experience, true success comes to executives who learn to identify and then harness the value drivers in the business. These value drivers can take many different forms. Value drivers can be a brand with unique positioning and a functional product-based point of difference, or a business model point-of- difference in the way a company goes to market or an advantaged set of capabilities for business and brand development. All businesses have value drivers. “What are the portions of the business that can contribute the most to the overall success of the entity?” Michael Polk says.

Once the CEO and his or her leadership team establishes the strategic roadmap (or the choices of where to play and how to win, the CEOs role becomes that of disciplined resource allocator. Polk explains. “Once the strategic game plan is established, the CEO must become a master communicator, establishing for the organization the context for the choices being made then actively leading the strategy into action through the team.”

For example, the former Newell Brands CEO led the transformation of Newell Rubbermaid into Newell Brands, a multinational consumer discretionary platform company. Over an 8-year tenure as CEO, he and his team transformed Newell from a holding company to an operating company, and through 35 M&A transactions (17 acquisitions and 18 divestitures), Polk transformed the portfolio to focused consumer facing business with scaled commercial organizations in each geography focused on selling the entire portfolio of brands to its key retailer partners.

Make Focused Investments and the Harder Right Choices

“In many of my experiences, I've found that companies are very, very democratic in the way they allocate resources, whether it's human capital or money,” Michael Polk explains. This can be a difficult reality for marketers to embrace but Polk believes resources should be allocated to the businesses that have the greatest right to win in the market. “In turnaround situations, you have to be much more choiceful, and that means you've got to take from some businesses and give to others,” Polk says. This decision is often an unpopular one, but it’s ultimately in service to the good of the company. Polk says, “The consequence for leadership is that you may not be the most loved leader in the world when you're leading a transformation. You'll be respected, and the company will be better off, but you won't necessarily win a popularity contest,” he adds.

Earn Trust

CEOs can only steer the ship; they rely on managers and employees to execute. “You have to bring the organization with you. You're never going to do it on your own. You have to make sure the team is charging up the hill with you,” Michael Polk says. “You have to be really clear with what your intentions are.”

In many cases, Polk’s reputation preceded him. Having a reputation for successful turnarounds can help CEOs gain buy-in, but that isn’t always enough. In Michael Polk’s experience, nothing beats trust and social capital. “You have to earn followership in new environments,” he explains. “I'm an introvert by nature, so getting in front of auditoriums full of people every month is not a natural thing for me, but I know how important it's for me to do it and do it well.”

Personal connection is important, but transparency is also key to building trust. For example, Polk, now the current Implus CEO, provided as much information to employees as possible during a turnaround at Implus LLC. Every employee received a copy of the company’s new “Double-Down Strategy,” showing which strategic choices the company would make and why. “I think there are devices that can help people stay grounded while you're driving change,” Polk says, “Effectively it is very useful to complete a strategic roadmap on a page that your team can keep in front of them.”

Michael Polk’s Blueprint for Resource Allocation

Polk is convinced the “intangibles that come from the strong front of the room leadership often show up on the P&L.” Leaning into a business’s value drivers, ruthlessly routing resources, and fostering trust with employees isn’t easy, but that’s what it takes to drive business transformation. Although he is the first to tell new leaders that delivering the hard-metric outcomes matters a lot, for Michael Polk, growth is about more than just numbers, “The satisfaction factor for me has always been more about seeing the organization build the muscle memory to perform and my personal growth has come through enabling that outcome and building lasting relationships with the people I have worked with,” he says.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes.