A Reflection on Navigating Organizational Change
By: Cindy Gao
Tags: Business Strategy, Change Management, Organizational Change

Every organization goes through change. Whether it’s a startup doubling its size or a behemoth shifting gears, change is necessary for organizations to survive and thrive. Because of that necessity, companies’ ability to handle and manage change is critical.

Unfortunately, organizational change is often orchestrated at the highest level of the company. As a result when change does happen, the process can make feel mysterious and even disempowering for many, resulting in unnecessary anxiety and thrash within the organization.

As I recently had the opportunity peek into the black box of change management, I hope to share some of my observations around what makes change management successful. For first-time change managers, I hope this provides a foundational overview of key questions and considerations. For those experiencing change management, I want this information to help you better understand what’s going on around you and, when possible, help push the process in a constructive direction. To be clear, I believe a company’s leadership is still responsible for the success of change management initiatives. That is why I have written the article speaking directly to those managing the initiative. However, I do hope that by demystifying the process, the whole organization can see the shared target.

The most challenging part of change management is uncertainty. Why is this change happening? How will my day-to-day change? How will that affect my experience and performance? These questions will gnaw at even the highest performers, shattering their concentration and grinding down their patience.

As leaders, your responsibility is to bring clarity in these moments. Your teams rely on you to help them understand what’s going on and how to react.

The Why

I recently started working with a sales executive who has an abundance of industry experience but seemed to talk past everyone on the team. In meetings, he would give three or four different potential solutions to a problem, leaving the team scratching our heads on what he actually wanted done. After some reflection, we realized that our discussions focused too much on the how and not enough on the why.

Communicating the why is the first step of a successful change. Only by hammering out a salient why can decisions across an organization be in alignment. Armed with a precise why, members of a team can work independently and come back with a coherent overarching picture. And especially in change management, where ambiguity and emotion run wild, your why is what unites the team.

As a business leader, the why is your chance to put forth a vision for the team. How does the new team structure align better with business priorities? How does the reallocated resources drive growth? Get the team excited about the destination and they’ll be more willing to brave the bumpy road there.

Make sure that the why is narrated by a trusted voice. A veteran with extensive experience, a superstar with credibility, a leader with strong grassroots rapport. You want the foundation of the why to be trust. In large organizations, this may mean cascading the messaging in each hierarchy. In smaller organizations, a town hall with a c-suite exec could work better. Think deeply about the cultures and values of the organization to determine who’s words will land best.

The why is the most important message to nail. As a result, change projects should be strictly confidential until the why is crystal clear, and probably until when most of the how is hashed out, which brings me into the next piece.

The How

Once the destination is clear, your team is going to want to know how you will get there. The how needs to be simple and specific, which is like asking for both the sun and the moon. Striking that balance is paramount if you want to avoid having confused teams and rounds of escalations.

To achieve simplicity, consider creating a couple guiding principles to help teams understand how you got to the how. These principles will be a bit more specific than the why, because they need to capture your thought process for making decisions around the change. Getting these principles right will help anchor the team amidst shifting priorities and teach them how to approach unexpected situations as they come up.

Consider the following example:

A team is going through a re-organization to create a new team to service a new customer segment. The message to the team can be very different:

Scenario 1: This new customer segment is a new strategic focus for us. The guiding principle is to over-invest in client relationships with new customers.

Scenario 2: This new customer segment is a good, high ROI opportunity. The guiding principle is to focus on scaling impact while keeping down costs.

While a new team is created in both of these scenarios, the way in which this new team grows and measures success would look entirely different.

To achieve specificity, make sure you’re bringing subject-matter experts (SMEs) into the conversation early. They are ideally folks who understand the day-to-day of the work and with management experience to up-level those insights when trade-offs are hard. Rely on the SMEs to highlight potential problem areas that require more detailed guidance and support. More importantly, ask the SMEs to tell you what areas don’t require the detail, so you don’t waste time on issues that teams on the ground can figure out.

Figuring out the how under confidentiality may be one of the hardest things to do. You constantly have to balance between maintaining a tight-knit circle and getting input from SMEs. However, if teams learn about the project before enough of the how is ready, the resulting thrash will be much worse. When I was part of a major change management project, a couple folks did not respect the confidentiality of the project. False information spread like wildfire and anxiety was through the roof. A couple suboptimal situations emerged from this result. First, the working team had to consider launching the project before it was ready, which would have resulted in a worse employee experience and business outcome. Secondly, as an overreaction to the first violation of confidentiality, the informed group for a later phase of the project was too small and failed to put forward a comprehensive roll-out plan.

Sometimes rather than trying to figure out everything before announcement, it’s better to announce what you know and set expectations on what is coming. This tactic will give the team the opportunity to pull together a better change plan especially if the project’s scope is large. However, this approach creates a couple potential areas of concern:

The ambiguity may cause more anxiety and concern. This can be partially addressed through an explicit timeline for when various decisions will be announced but cannot be wholly eliminated.

Those experiencing the change play may be confused about what role they are being asked to play. Can they influence the ultimate decision? Should they be providing feedback? How can they ensure their feedback is received? Setting expectations in this case is extremely important. If a decision is final, make sure everybody knows.

Figuring out the how is also often where teams run into the most contention as well. Ensure that every decision has a clear decision-making framework (RAPID) to help move things ahead when consensus is not possible or not efficient enough.

Laying out the how of a project is not easy, but the clearer the directions are, the less work you’ll have to do pulling stragglers back onto the right path.

What about Me?

No change plan is complete with a thorough reflection of its effects on people. Our teams make us successful and showing our care for our team during a challenge strengthens the culture and unity in invaluable ways.

The foundation of any chance is the value and respect placed in caring for the employees and their experiences. For a team re-organization, we should consider team members’ strengths and career objectives. For a layoff, we should consider what opportunities impacted employees can find within the company and help them pursue them. Demonstrating care for its people is the right thing for a business to do and is what will compel employees to work through the change when it’s hard.

Once decisions are made, the first step to a people-centric change management process is speaking to the audience. Business decisions that are self-explanatory to leaders who have extensive institutional knowledge may not be so obvious to those impacted by these decisions. Therefore it is critical to provide that full context and rationale, to bring those impacted by the decision along with you on that decision-making journey.

More broadly, there is a lesson around empowering empathy. When I had the chance to implement a new sales strategy that required two sales teams to collaborate, we initially faced extremely strong pushback. With their own distinct operating models and customer support models, neither team was willing to budge. However after hosting a series of brainstorming workshops where the teams had the opportunity to learn about each other, both sides were more willing to compromise. Sometimes as people with that ten thousand foot overview of the situation, we may forget that others don’t have this knowledge and context. The investment of the time and patience to build that shared understanding can go a long way.

Unfortunately, not everyone will agree with the decision even if they have the full information. Creating a clear avenue for providing feedback can be extremely valuable to not only make folks feel heard but also gather valuable information for future improvements. Common tactics that work well in this case are inboxes dedicated to receiving feedback for the project, office hours for live Q&A, and project champions embedded within affected teams who can keep a pulse on the group. Making sure there are methods for providing feedback and acknowledgement of the feedback’s receipt brings comfort, even if no actual change is made.

While all feedback deserves to be heard and acknowledged, not all of them are worth acting upon given the inevitable learning curve involved with change management. As a leader, you must not let your attention be pulled by the loudest voices but rather by the challenges that will most likely persist in the longer term. Sometimes, you’ll be frustrated with the team’s reaction, but remember that they’re human and need time to breath and adapt. Other times, you’ll have to trust in your team’s ability to think on their feet, as it’s impossible to predict 100% of the challenges that the change will bring.

Ultimately, change management has to start and end with people.

Conclusion

I hope this overview of change management provides a helpful layout of all the key levers for success. Every situation is different and may require you to lean deeply into one area above but skip over another entirely. However, by putting all the pieces together, I hope they provide a more cohesive view of why each piece matters.