Effectively Leading Organizational Change, Part 1

Five reasons leaders fail to effectively lead change

It has often been said, employees don’t like change. A more accurate statement is “employees hate to be changed.” Our PBS Employee Opinion Surveys tell us that some leaders are much more effective at communicating information regarding changes in the organization than others. When we work with leaders to create action plans to improve their effectiveness in leading change, we first ask what gets in their way of timely and informative communication regarding changes.  The following are some of the most common responses:

1. Lack of time: When managers are so busy putting out the fire of the moment, there is almost never time to communicate information about situations that have not happened yet because they are always trying to survive in the moment.
2. Lack of consistent team meetings: When managers are overwhelmed trying to survive the next hour, the thought of preparing for a weekly meeting takes a very low priority. Some managers are fond of telling us that since they are always working on a higher “at the moment” task, they believe meetings are a waste of time.
3. The information is too high level or confidential: When managers don’t believe employees can understand information or worse, can be trusted with information regarding change, they decide to withhold information. Recently, a manager told me that the employees just don’t understand how fast the industry is changing and how quickly the clients’ needs are changing. The challenge with these beliefs is that employees always find out the information from someone else (most likely from a peer from another department who is trusted by their manager) and then believe they have a valid reason for not trusting their manager. We are well aware that there are types of information that must be held confidential…things like mergers and acquisitions; player trades in professional sports; and financial reports in publicly traded companies. But, the numbers of these types of confidential situations are relatively small when you consider the number of changes that occur daily in organizations.
4. Information regarding the change is not important: Some managers have told us that the only thing their employees care about is what task they need to complete next and everything else is a distraction. Other managers have told us they did not think the change was a big deal to employees and just did not bother to communicate.
5. The change will not impact the employees in our department: At times, managers know of upcoming changes in the organization, but believe that if the change will not have a direct impact on their team, there is no need to provide communication.

So, What’s the Impact?

So what…so you don’t do a good job communicating change to your employees in a timely manner. You pay them to do the task they are currently working on, so what is the big deal?

Here’s the deal. When leaders don’t effectively communicate important information in a timely manner, the following five (bad) things happen:

1. You send a clear message that you do not care about your employees: By not communicating important information to employees regarding upcoming changes, your inaction actually communicates that you do not care about the very people who are trying to help you and your company be successful.
2. Bad decisions: When people are not clear on the future, they make decisions that will have to be rescinded or reworked that they would not have made if they had known more about the future and the changes that are coming down the pike.
3. Lack of goal alignment: When some people are clear on the upcoming changes and others are not, teamwork suffers because people are heading in different directions with different priorities based on the information they have been given.
4. Associates do not feel valued and respected: We have been told several times by employees this great line – “They treat us like mushrooms around here. Management keeps us in the dark and feeds us BS.” When employees do not feel valued, engagement suffers. When employees are not engaged (making decisions with both their head and their heart) the level of accountability, responsibility and ownership all drop when it comes to the quality of work an employee produces.
5. Productivity suffers: When information regarding organizational change is not communicated in a timely manner, we can guarantee you’ll need a higher staffing level than if there was great communication regarding organizational change. When people are not kept up to speed with the latest information, they end up working on projects that are no longer a priority; two people will wind up working on the same project and duplicating efforts; or more staffing resources will be needed to get a high priority item completed because information was not conveyed in a timely manner.

Now we have covered the reasons managers tell us they do not do a good job communicating change, along with the organizational impacts. Next week, in Part 2 of Effectively Leading Change, we will cover How High-Performing Leaders Communicate Change to bring about positive results in their organizations and the steps you can take to successfully communicate information regarding organizational change.