Change Leaders Create a Strong Sense of Urgency
By: Scott S. Bateman
Tags: Work, Management, Leadership, Change Management, Change Leadership

Credit: Pixabay Creative Commons license

Print newspapers have existed in America since 1690, largely following the same processes for more than three centuries. Try leading change in THAT industry.

Courts shut down the first newspaper after only one issue in 1690. The Boston News-Letter, the first continuous newspaper in America, began publication in Boston in 1704.

It started with a single sheet of paper with two columns of news on both sides of the sheet. The first ads appeared in that paper during the same year, according to the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Newspapers are largely unchanged in 300 years. Credit: U.S. public domain

Think about it. Newspapers from more than 300 years ago had news and advertising on paper. They had a purchase price, a printing process and a circulation process. They had publishers, editors and writers. The news and ads appeared in columns.

In those respects, newspapers of today are not much different. The processes are similar, although the procedures and laws governing them have evolved over time.

In one other respect, newspapers of today are much different. They have the Internet. Because of that fact and their lengthy history, newspapers are a laboratory for the challenges of change leadership in any industry.

The Problem: A Declining and Unchangeable Industry

Such an industry presents unique challenges in change leadership because a transition from print to digital means changing:

A tangible product to a virtual one

Compensation to reflect declining profit and revenue

How stories are written because they must be optimized for search engines

How ads are sold because they now must be dynamic, interactive and personalized

Production schedules from either weekly or daily to NOW

Circulation from household delivery to computer delivery

Even more painful is that fact that $100 million+ printing plants are becoming underutilized assets that eventually will end up worthless. Those employees will lose their jobs along with all of the circulation people who deliver print newspapers to newsstands and homes.

Fearing change

Print newspaper managers and employees have many reasons to feel threatened and frustrated by the growth of online publishing and the decline of print publishing. They have strong reasons to fear change.

The change leader must appeal to them by establishing a sense of urgency, painting a vision of how the change improves the future, constantly encouraging executives to keep supporting the initiative, and landing some wins that prove the benefits of the change.

Embracing, Opposing or Just Don’t Care

A threat on the horizon is noteworthy. Noteworthy becomes urgent when profits and revenues plunge in response to the growing threat.

Some employees simply don’t want to change. Credit: Johnny Cohen, Unsplash

Establishing a sense of urgency is a major challenge for the change leader if he or she is in middle or senior management rather than at the executive level. Executives will doom the process if they are complacent. Just consider Blockbuster Video, which sneered at a tiny upstart named Netflix.

Executives and senior managers who do understand the urgency will then have to face three groups of employees (including some managers) who must participate in the change process. The three groups consist of essential players who:

Embrace change Oppose change Just don’t care

As a general rule, the company that has been following the same practices for decades will have a smaller number of employees who embrace change and a larger number who oppose it. The number of don’t cares depends on the level of complacency in the organization.

Frankly, a combination of age and length of time at the company also makes a difference. Older employees who have been with the company a long time are more likely to oppose change than younger ones. Older employees who have been doing the same tasks for years often struggle to drop old ways and adopt new ones.

Leading the Embracers

Successful change depends on the change leader identifying as early as possible people who embrace the vision and process.

It’s really somewhat of a popularity contest. Consider this oversimplification. If only two people in a company of 1,000 people understand the vision and embrace it, how long will it take to reach that vision? If the total is 200 instead of two, how long will it take instead?

Let’s take a realistic scenario on how to identify and lead the embracers.

As a change leader, I had to attend many small group meetings as well as give speeches to entire buildings of employees. Facial expressions, comments and questions all revealed which employees fell into the three groups.

Using that information, I would follow up later with the embracers and ask if they had any other questions, wanted more information, etc. This one-at-a-time process took a lot of time and effort, but it eventually paid off. The “constituency” grew and gained momentum.

Change leaders sell the vision to embracers and potential embracers by acting as a persistent cheerleader.

Fighting the Opposers

If company executives support and initiate the change process, opposers must either change themselves, leave the company, get demoted or get fired. There are no other options.

I saw all four outcomes take place repeatedly during 20 years of leading change from print to online in the newspaper industry.

Executives will support opposers who serve and benefit the company in other ways. They will tolerate their opposition to a point. But when the benefit of the change outweighs the other benefit the opposer provides, the executives and change agent are in a position to force compliance or else.

In these situations, the change leader must practice patience, integrity and diplomacy. Integrity in particular is important because the change leader can’t get Machiavellian or risk losing trust and credibility.

The change process is a long-term chess game and not a real-life version of “Friday the 13th”.

Inspiring the Don’t Cares

Don’t cares range from employees with bad attitudes to ones nearing retirement, planning to leave for a new job as soon as possible, etc.

Moving the needle with them depends on success with the embracers. When the “don’t cares” see more and more embracers, they start to get on board, although maybe not with much enthusiasm. What the change leader doesn’t want is a problem or mistake that moves a don’t care to an opposer.

Either way, the change leader can do what she or he did with the embracers: talk to them whenever possible, share news about any wins, attend the same meetings to network and always look out for any opportunity to cheer them.

Change Leader Burnout

The process of leading change in any industry, especially ones that have been around for hundreds of years, is often painful because the process is slow and filled with risks, tensions and conflicts.

Burnout is common, especially among change leaders who want to get nearly everyone on board but only succeed with some of the employees. They run out of energy and patience.

Instead, the leader who looks at the challenge in terms of the three groups of employees — embracers, opposers and “don’t cares” — will find the process more fruitful and less stressful by tackling them one at a time and taking a long-term view.

Changes of this size can and do take years, even decades. But as some leaders eventually find out, the end result is often a beautiful thing, especially if the company or industry survives and even thrives.