The Challenge
ServiceNow’s AMS Partnerships & Channels team was moving at a pace that was far beyond how the organization used to operate.
New AI models, platforms, and partners were entering the business all at once, and Jen Odess needed her team to keep up, feeling confident and prepared.
Primary goal
Help her team move through a transformation of the AMS Partnerships & Channels organization with confidence, not just compliance, while five members of her own leadership team were still new to their roles.
Going into the transformation, Odess’s own leadership team was in transition too. Odess herself was new in her role, and four more members, a new partner ops leader, a new business manager, a new revenue manager, and a new interim Canada lead, were new to theirs.
We’re asking our employees to come along that journey, to be excited, to be prepared, to feel confident, to be successful.
Jen Odess, GVP, AMS Partnerships & Channels, ServiceNow
That was why Odess brought in AchieveUnite: to make sure her people were taken care of and equipped to succeed at that pace.
The Solution
I think it’s less about barriers and more about unlocking the potential of the individual.
Jen Odess, GVP, AMS Partnerships & Channels, ServiceNow
She broke that down into concrete questions for her team:
Did people have the tools to succeed?
Did they feel psychological safety at work?
Did their leaders actually understand what they could bring to the table?
That belief set AchieveUnite’s brief: build trust and psychological safety first, at the leadership level and across every region, so the partner team transformation could move at the speed the business needed instead of the speed uncertainty usually allows.
AchieveUnite designed three connected workshops for the partner team transformation
The first coached the AMS Partnerships & Channels leaders on creating psychological safety.
The second brought the full team together around the transition curve and a culture of trust.
The third moved into regional breakouts, grounded in building trust and psychological safety at the regional team level.
The framework and the tooling was phenomenal. It absolutely met us where we wanted. But sometimes it’s just forcing the space to have the conversation. I’m a firm believer in a third party facilitating that conversation.
Jen Odess, GVP, AMS Partnerships & Channels, ServiceNow
AchieveUnite’s Tanya Caragol, Leadership and Influence Lead & Facilitator, led that facilitation, building real dialogue into every session instead of a one-way rollout.
It became this true dialogue, and everyone felt like they had a seat at the table.
Jen Odess, on how the sessions were run
Key insight
Odess said giving the team a consistent vocabulary for talking about the change, the language AchieveUnite’s framework gave them, was, on its own, something people told her privately was invaluable.
The Results
Odess rolled the changes out on May 1. She credits the pace of what followed to the trust built early in the engagement and the dialogue that carried through the rollout.
to complete every core component of the partner team transformation, from communication to a live enablement track.
We essentially completed all the core transformation components in 30 days… We essentially flipped a 180. Communicated it, defined it, supported the team, identified all the open questions, rolled out an enablement track, all in 30 days. And now we just keep continuing, but nobody else could meet that speed.
Jen Odess, GVP, AMS Partnerships & Channels, ServiceNow
In that 30-day window, the AMS Partnerships & Channels team:
- Communicated the change
- Defined the new structure
- Supported the team through it
- Identified every open question
- Rolled out a live enablement track
In Odess’s own account, that pace stood out within her organization. She points to three things together:
- Her team’s tenacity to move fast and commit to fixes
- The whole leadership team leaning in
- The trust built early, before the transformation was even announced
I needed to know I had their trust, and that they had each other’s trust.
Jen Odess, GVP, AMS Partnerships & Channels, ServiceNow
That trust carried into how Odess led her own team through the rollout, staying hands-on to clear approvals and exceptions before they became blockers.
It was perceived as we were one team. When you win, I win. When I win, you win, we all win together.
Jen Odess
An Ongoing Practice
As part of the rollout, Odess shared the team’s mission, vision, and purpose, giving people something to move toward, not just a process for getting there.
That mattered for helping the team step into New Beginnings: it’s easier to get excited about what’s next when you can see where you’re headed, not only what you’re leaving behind.
The transition model AchieveUnite introduced didn’t end with the workshops. The AMS Partnerships & Channels team adopted it as a standing habit:
100 AMS Partnerships & Channels leaders and team members marking where they stand on the change, together, at the start of every team town hall and AMA, sometimes again at the end.
“Town halls and AMAs are a space to come together, reground us on our common values, our common purpose, that we’re doing something that’s bigger than just us as individuals,” Odess said.
We can move fast, business can be booming, the pressure can be high, the stakes can be even higher. But if you lose sight of your people, it’s probably never going to work out… Do not take your eye off the human component of this whole business equation.
Jen Odess, GVP, AMS Partnerships & Channels, ServiceNow
Talk with us
Is your team moving faster than your organization is used to? Let’s talk about getting your people ready.