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To be more effective at change, managers need to change how they approach change.
“Traditionally, leaders have looked to inspire change by focusing on the desired outcome and the benefits it will bring. But employees who don’t trust the organization’s ability to change no longer believe that this vision will become reality,” Gartner HR consultants Kayla Velnoskey, Ingrid Laman and Carolina Valencia write in Harvard Business Review.
Those employees may be smarter than their bosses. The consultants say we are in an era of ungovernable change, when change itself keeps changing in ways that cannot be fully controlled by leaders or their organizations. You need to watch out for a convergence of four factors that can play havoc with your plans:
- Not only is there a larger volume of change, but changes are stacked, one happening on top of another.
- Not only are changes happening faster, they’re also continuous without a clear start or end date.
- Not only are changes larger in scale, they also have multiple interdependencies, such as one technology implementation failing to properly integrate with another.
- Not only are changes unpredictable, they’re externally driven, with impacts coming from all sides, most notably technology, politics, economic uncertainty and societal trends.
To counter that, the consultants recommend three strategies:
- Communicate that change is a journey, not a destination: Given your employees don’t believe your vision will find reality – a Gartner survey of global companies found such disbelief among 79 per cent of respondents – you must meet them on their own ground and acknowledge transformation is a journey without a clear path or even a fixed destination. Instead of promoting the benefits of changing, create urgency by highlighting the risks of inaction. Tell them consistent small wins on the change journey are the metric of success.
- Enable change-ready employees, not change enthusiasm: Treating change as a special occasion and building excitement for an individual event doesn’t meet today’s reality. You have to build the right mindset for handling the emotional journey ahead so they can become comfortable with discomfort. During regular work, not fancy workshops, coach them on these six change reflexes: Being open to new experiences, effectively managing time, understanding the context in which the business operates, using technology effectively, working well with anyone regardless of prior experience and regulating emotions.
- Foresee multiple possible scenarios, not just the current change: In an era of ceaseless, ungovernable change, you must routinize the change mentality. That means empowering employees to analyze and prepare for how likely future scenarios would impact the team. “Normalizing ongoing change and building employees’ change reflexes means that when change changes – as is inevitable during this era of ungovernable change – employees will have a more intuitive understanding of what to do next. Rather than waiting for guidance when, say, a software implementation reveals the need for a new process, employees with change reflexes can independently adapt, building new workflows as the change evolves,” the consultants write.
David M. Sluss, a professor of management at ESSEC Business School in Paris warns that when change is unrelenting it’s easy to bemoan employee resistance and hidden agendas of various parties. You can then easily succumb to a hero complex, overinflating the credit you deserve and your personal ownership of the change.
“That can make leaders less likely to listen to others’ ideas for improvements to the change solution and/or more likely to take any criticism of the change as a personal insult. Being a hero for today’s change may also shut off a leader’s capacity to recognize a need for tomorrow’s change – hindering future growth,” he writes in MITSloan Management Review.
He offers three tips:
- Don’t go solo with a solution but instead build a coalition of experts: Many leaders wait to build such support until after they have decided on the change solution. That can feed into the hero complex because it’s easy then to pick coalition members who understand – and already support – the solution rather than people who deeply understand the actual problem that the change needs to solve.
- Don’t sell a change vision but instead tell the problem’s origin story: Rushing to sell the vision can neglect making everyone really understand the problem and its history. You want them to feel the pain of the problem, which can help them buy into the need to act.
- Don’t assume the culture must change but ask how the culture supports the change: It’s common for leaders to insist the culture must be transformed to attain the necessary change. It may be wiser to ask these three, more well-rounded questions: What about the solution supports the current organizational culture? What about the current organizational culture supports the solution? What about the solution may need to be revised to best align with the current organizational culture while still solving the problem?
Change the way you approach change and the organization may actually change.
Cannonballs
- What’s a Bobblehead Meeting? Executive coach Dan Rockwell says it’s when warm bodies gather to affirm the boss’s brilliance.
- A new study discovered that CEOs who, as children between the ages of five and 15, experienced natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes or earthquakes reported significantly fewer workplace injuries in their organization than comparable firms – about 24 per cent less, on average. It’s not a result of their overall risk aversion preferences but instead appears to reflect distinct managerial choices, pointing to values shaped in childhood.
- Consultant Ghassan Karian argues we haven’t gone far enough with DEI and must add the missing lens: Class. Working-class employees who break into elite professions are paid less, promoted more slowly and often feel culturally out of place. They don’t support DEI because it doesn’t include them.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.