Effectively Leading Organizational Change, Part 2

Eight Things the Best-of-the-Best Leaders Do to Lead Change

Over the last twenty-three years, we have conducted over 300 Employee Opinion Surveys with over 100,000 employees. We have learned a lot by isolating the Best of the Best Organizations and their leaders to learn what they do differently from their peers in the overall PBS Benchmark. One area where leaders in the Best-of-the-Best organizations excel is in communicating timely and pertinent information regarding changes. Organizations in the Best-of-the-Best Benchmark are rated 18 points higher when it comes to communicating changes in a timely manner.

Effectively leading change is an essential leadership quality in today’s rapidly changing environment. The following eight tips will help you to build a strategy to improve your effectiveness in communicating organizational change.

Genuinely care about your team: If you think about whether you should call your spouse or significant other and let them know you will be home late tonight, the answer would most likely be a “yes.” Why do you need to communicate with your partner? Because you care about them, they care about you and they would be upset if they did not know there was a major change in your schedule. When you genuinely care about people, you tend to over communicate because you know that if they did not know the information, it would have a negative impact on your relationship. The same rules apply in business. The more you care about your people, the more you quickly communicate important information.
Eliminate lag-time. Lag-time is the time between when you make a decision or gain new information and the time you communicate the information to your team. A customer calls and places an order, makes a request for information or provides you with important information that could impact how your team works with the client in the future. How quickly do you communicate important information to your team? Sharing information with employees as soon as possible is really important in creating an engaged workforce. The less lag-time, the more effective and focused your team will be; and the more time they have to properly prepare for the change.
Have a clear vision of why communication regarding change is critical for your team’s success. I have a vision of having employees who truly believe they are partners that think and act like owners. For someone to make a decision like an owner or partner, they have to have the same information that the true owner or partner is utilizing to make decisions. That means that, as a leader, if I want this type of culture, I need to communicate well daily and be very focused on being inclusive with information regarding any change.
Be focused on the goal: Some of our clients are currently going through software upgrades. Some employees are struggling with this change because the current software gets the job done. Some employees have even stated they are not going to go to the training for the new software until the old software is removed and taken to the dumpster. In this example, the long-term goal is to improve efficiency because the new software is capable of being used by both multiple departments in the company and by their customers; however, employees are not aware of the goals or reasons for the change in software. In this situation, leaders need to help team members understand and focus on three goals: improve efficiencies; interact and provide data to multiple departments; and provide an experience which is valuable to the customer.
Sell people on the problems, not the solutions. If you want people to adopt your solution and change, they must first agree there is a problem. Telling people what they need to change to be more responsive and provide even faster service to the customer is one method to sell change. A second method is to sell the problem. Ask team members the following question. “If the customer is demanding a faster response in delivering our product or service, and we refuse to make the change, most likely, what is the customer going to do?” This is a great example of selling the problem, not the solution.
Set up consistent, regular meetings. When it comes to change, especially changes that people are not excited about, team members will try to convince leaders they are too busy to meet. This is a trick. In the face of big change, conducting frequent meetings to discuss what is going well or right; what are the challenges and opportunities that need to be addressed; and what are the goals that need to be accomplished prior to the next meeting will be critical to leading successful change.
Be focused on success, not perfection. When it comes to leading change, it will take forever to implement perfection. Communicate to your team that the goal is a successful implementation of the change. Success means we will almost always need to launch the change before it is perfect. But, once the change is launched and it is not perfect, we will always make the changes that take us closer to perfection than if we had waited until it was perfect to launch.
Address the emotional concerns. Any time there is a change, it has the potential to rock people’s world. With the old way of doing things, people were both successful and on autopilot. When the change is made, it has the potential to shake an individual’s confidence because they do not have a guarantee of success until they master the new way of doing things. Listen and acknowledge people’s concerns. When you listen, people know you care about them and value their opinion. When people feel cared about, they are much more likely to take a leadership role in implementing the new change.

If you commit to implementing these eight practices to lead change, you will greatly increase your chances of success; yet don’t be surprised if your employees still meet you with resistance. For more tips on leading change in the face of resistance, watch for next week’s blog on Part 3 of Effectively Leading Change: Leading an Unwanted Change.