Yettel Bulgaria

Yettel drives digital transformation through growth mindset

Background

Yettel Bulgaria is a leading telecommunications and technology company providing mobile, fixed internet, and digital services to millions of customers across Bulgaria. Positioning themselves with an emphasis on value and service quality, Yettel treats digital transformation as an important lever for strategic competitiveness.

Challenge

As Yettel embarked on an ambitious digital transformation, it faced mounting challenges in an increasingly competitive market, demanding agility and resilience.

To accelerate transformation, Yettel needed its top 40 leaders to lead by example – embracing adaptability, leveraging diversity of thought, and encouraging innovation. The goal was to embed growth mindset behaviours across leadership and inspire all employees to adopt a culture of learning and experimentation.

The executive team identified three focus areas to support their digital transformation:

1. Increase resilience, agility and innovation in the top 40 leaders
2. Encourage employee belief in their ability to develop and improve both themselves and the company
3. Foster a sense of conviction in the company’s direction and potential

Solution

Yettel partnered with Matthew Syed Consulting to deliver a 12-month Growth Mindset Leaders Programme, combining insight, capability-building and practical application.

Measuring mindset

Mindset Advantage diagnostic for 49 leaders, providing evidence-based insights into the nine behaviours associated with growth mindset. These insights into specific strength and development areas shaped the development plan.

Developing leaders

Over the following months, Yettel’s leaders engaged in a structured programme combining leadership workshops and a keynote from Matthew Syed focused on resilience, agility and diversity of thought. The emphasis throughout was on application. Workshops were deliberately interactive, designed around live priorities rather than hypothetical examples.

“I will forward the learnings to my teams and implement the practices in our daily work.”
– Yettel workshop participant

Learning practical methods

Leaders were taken through practical growth mindset techniques applied to live business priorities:

• Pre-Mortem – identifying risks and mitigation strategies for key initiatives.
• Assumption Reversal – challenging the status quo to generate innovative ideas.
• Marginal Gains – driving incremental improvements across processes.

“Assumption Reversal is a very interesting technique to incorporate in new product development processes.”
– Yettel workshop participant

Tracking progress over time

Yettel committed to track behavioural shifts through a pulse survey, to understand where leaders were implementing newly-learned practices and where there were opportunities for further development.

Embedding behavioural change sustainably

As Yettel continues their ambitious drive of being Digital First, through adoption of AI across all levels of the organisation they are looking to utilise the methods to help business teams identify opportunities for AI implementation with marginal gains, and set themselves up for success of AI initiatives by applying the pre-mortem.

The internal facilitators have delivered 12 sessions to the broader organisation, with more than 110 participants in each session.

Impact

The programme delivered measurable behavioural change and tangible business outcomes.

Growth mindset uplift across four key behaviours:

• Yettel saw an increase in Yettel’s key areas of resilience, agility and innovation.

Collaboration and innovation strengthened:

• 100% of leaders reported working with colleagues outside their immediate teams.
• 93% explored new ideas to apply at work.

Practical business impact on live objectives:

• 200 risks identified and 97 mitigation strategies implemented for digital transformation projects.
• 64 ideas generated to boost in-app digital payments, with 55 actionable steps identified.

Cultural shift:

• Managers widely perceived as fostering innovation (86%), with senior leaders improving visibility and support.

Sustainability:

• 7 facilitators accredited to deliver growth mindset techniques internally.

“Disruption is the new normal. Growth mindset equips our leaders and employees with the behavioural edge to stay ahead – challenging the status quo, learning faster than the market and translating strategy into sustained business impact. It strengthens not only how we transform digitally, but how we compete, innovate and grow – as a company and as individuals.”

– Anna Liutarevych-Petkova, Talent Management Expert, People and Culture, Yettel

Looking Ahead

Yettel’s journey so far has shown that digital transformation requires more than a strategy for the technology, but also one for the leaders and teams responsible for driving and implementing the change. Yettel’s leaders now have the confidence and capability to inspire teams, challenge assumptions and embrace change.

With these foundations, the organisation is ready to keep pushing boundaries and redefine what’s possible in a fast-moving, increasingly competitive industry.

Equip your leaders for digital transformation

Get in touch to see how we can help your organisation build better mindsets to deliver on the objectives you care most about.

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