CHAPTER 18
Leading Change and Strategic Transitions
Once you have defined and tested your strategy, you must ensure that your employees understand it and agree that it’s in their interests to support it. Sometimes this comes easy, but at other times, organizational change requires a more deliberate effort on your part.
If you’re leading your team through a new strategy or strategic change, you’ll likely get a range of responses, from “This is exactly what we need! I’m in!” to quizzical stares and tight-lipped smiles. Some employees may respond with open doubt, fear, or anger. Too often, these reactions take managers by surprise. To ensure that your employees fully understand the change and get on board with it, you must communicate a clear vision and overcome any resistance that may occur.
Articulate a Vision That Others Will Follow
David Bradford and Allen Cohen, both scholars of business leadership, have observed that significant change only happens when someone presents a compelling vision to draw out and channel the group’s energy. “People need to see that change will be worth all the effort,” they write in their book Power Up. “It is difficult to visualize interactive changes in the abstract.”
Think of a vision as a picture of the hoped-for end result of your new strategy: what it will look like, how it will function, what it will produce. It also helps to tie into something your followers already innately care about. To share that vision in a way that encourages buy-in:
Focus on people
“A vision always goes beyond the numbers that are typically found in five-year plans,” says John Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of the classic book Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. To reach your team at an emotional level, he suggests, tell a story about how the change you’re seeking will affect real people connected with your company—customers and employees. Draw this picture in some detail: For example, what will an improved customer interaction look like? How will the customer and the employee feel during these interactions, and how will it make their lives better? The sidebar “Three Key Aspects of Communicating Strategy” provides more ways to connect with and convince your employees.
THREE KEY ASPECTS OF COMMUNICATING STRATEGY
by Georgia Everse
Not all messages are created equal. They need to be prioritized and sequenced based on their purpose. I suggest using an inspire/educate/reinforce framework as you communicate with your team and employees about strategy:
Inspire
Messages that inspire are particularly important when you are sharing a significant accomplishment or introducing a new initiative that relates to your strategy. The content should demonstrate progress against goals, showcase benefits to customers, and be presented in a way that gets attention and signals importance. The medium is less important than the impression that you leave with employees about the company. Whether you’re looking to build optimism, change focus, instill curiosity, or prepare them for future decisions, you’ll have more impact if you stir some emotion and create a lasting memory.
Educate
Once you’ve energized your team with inspiring messages, your explanations of the company’s strategic decisions and your plans for implementing them should carry more weight. To educate your teams most effectively on the validity of your strategy and their role in successful execution, make sure you provide job-specific tools with detailed data that they can customize and apply in their day-to-day responsibilities. It is most important for these messages to be delivered through dialogues, rather than monologues, in smaller group sessions where employees can build to their own conclusions and feel ownership in how to implement.
Reinforce
It isn’t enough to explain the connection between your company’s purpose and its strategy—and between that strategy and its execution—once. You’ll need to repeat the message in order to increase understanding, instill belief, and lead to true change over time. These reinforcing messages need to come in a variety of tactics, channels, and experiences. Ultimately, they serve to immerse employees in important content and give them the knowledge to confidently connect to the strategy. You’ll also want to integrate these messages with your training and your human resource initiatives to connect them with employee development and performance metrics. Recognize and reward individuals and teams who come up with smart solutions and positive change.
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Georgia Everse is a communications and marketing executive with 30 years of experience and a proven track record of finding innovative solutions to complex business problems. She specializes in helping C-level executives find and articulate their vision and successfully use strategic communication to achieve their growth goals. Everse is a visiting professor for the Ferris State University MBA program, in Design and Innovation Management. She is currently a partner with Genesis Inc., a brand, strategy, and communications consultancy.
Adapted from “Eight Ways to Communicate Your Strategy More Effectively” on hbr.org, August 22, 2011 (product #H007MJ).
Practice, practice, practice
You probably won’t get your vision statement right the first time. As you gain more experience with the change process and learn about your people’s responses, modulate your pitch. Kotter offers this benchmark: “If you can’t communicate the vision to someone in five minutes or less and get a reaction that signifies both understanding and interest, you are not yet done.”
Weave your vision into everyday management
Your employees need repeated exposure to your ideas in order to really internalize them. “Executives who communicate well incorporate messages into their hour-by-hour activities,” says Kotter. “In a routine discussion about a business problem, they talk about how proposed solutions fit (or don’t fit) into the bigger picture. In a regular performance appraisal, they talk about how the employee’s behavior helps or undermines the vision.” By orienting employee interactions around your vision, you show your people how the strategic change will work and why it matters—and that you want them to take it seriously.
Find the right allies
People must accept the messenger before they accept the message. Chances are you aren’t that messenger for everyone, and that’s OK. Find people who are. Look up and down the chain of command for individuals whose colleagues see them as trustworthy and competent, and who themselves seem open to change. Focus on persuading these people, and ask them to play a leadership role with their peers. That could mean facilitating a meeting with the rest of the team, playing backup for you in a Q&A, or simply supporting your plan in regular interactions with their colleagues.
Court the uncommitted
Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, who teach leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and are in private practice with Cambridge Leadership Associates, advise that “the people who will determine your success are often those in the middle.” These employees don’t have anything against your initiative per se, but “they do have a stake in the comfort, stability, and security of the status quo,” Heifetz and Linsky write in their Harvard Business Review article, “A Survival Guide for Leaders.” “They’ve seen change agents come and go, and they know that your initiative will disrupt their lives and make their futures uncertain. You want to be sure that this general uneasiness doesn’t evolve into a move to push you aside.”
To recruit these players, sincerely acknowledge their accomplishments, as well as the loss and sacrifice that change entails. Help them understand the personal upside to adapting to change. Also make it clear that only those who can and will adapt will have a future on your team.
Overcome Resistance
Even if you take all these steps to gain support for your vision, your team members may still have some legitimate reservations. If you’re asking them to do something new, they may worry about risking failure or about changing their status from master to apprentice. Perhaps you’re asking them to throw out comfortable assumptions—that they provide a certain kind of value to the company, that the work they do is stable and prosperous. (See the sidebar “Cultivate Emotional Steadiness in Times of Change.”) Maybe change upends the established balance of power, bringing some skill sets and experiences to new prominence and devaluing others.
CULTIVATE EMOTIONAL STEADINESS IN TIMES OF CHANGE
by Lisa Lai
Strategic ambiguity pushes you out of your comfort zone. When strategies shift, or are hinting toward a shift, it’s normal to feel unsettled, and you’ll see this in your team too. Here are three steps you can take to help yourself and your team navigate the emotions of strategic ambiguity.
Be Proactive. Learn More.
In times of change, questions arise naturally: How will this impact my group? What if everything we’re doing today alters? What if this involves job changes, layoffs, or lost resources? Learn as much as you can so you’re informed, not just reacting to rumor and innuendo. Use your internal network and ask others in the organization for insight, context, and clarity. When you’ve done the hard work of sense-making, you’ll be able to anticipate the questions your team will ask and prepare the most effective answers you can.
Acknowledge and Navigate Your Own Emotions
Emotional steadiness requires that you be intentional about the way you show up in the workplace. Your role is to be calm, transparent, and steady, all while painting a vision for the future. Acknowledge your emotions and talk to a peer or your boss if you need to work through them. Play out the worst-case scenario in your mind and then move on to the more likely outcome. Chances are the reality isn’t as bad as what you might conjure up when your emotions are heightened. Commit to avoiding stress responses, frustration, rumors, or other nonproductive behavior. Your team members are watching and taking their cues from you.
Keep Team Communication Open
Strategic uncertainty can cause managers to communicate with team members less frequently and less openly. “If I don’t have clarity to provide, why not wait?” the thinking goes. But in truth, ambiguous situations require you to communicate even more than normal. To demonstrate emotional steadiness, share your own emotions and acknowledge those of your team in productive ways. Let team members know that what they feel is OK. But talk with them about your commitment to being emotionally steady even during times of uncertainty. Ask them to do the same and come to you if they are frustrated or concerned. Maintaining open dialogue will keep your team engaged and aligned until a clear direction emerges.
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Lisa Lai serves as an adviser, consultant, and coach for some of the world’s most successful leaders and companies. She is also a moderator of global leadership development programs for Harvard Business School Publishing. Find her on Facebook @Lai Ventures, follow her on Twitter @soul4breakfast, read her at soul for breakfast.com, or visit her website at www.laiventures.com.
Adapted from “Managing When the Future Is Unclear” on hbr.org, January 9, 2019 (product #H04QGH).
Dealing with these reactions is tough, but your leadership can survive some discontent. Here are two approaches you can try:
Cook the conflict
While it’s important to confront the fear and doubt that’s driving resistance, you can’t always afford to bring conflict to a head. Sometimes, open clashes can help resolve disagreements and channel your people’s passion in a constructive way. Other times, they simply put too much stress on the group’s morale.
To balance this delicate equation, Heifetz and Linsky recommend two techniques: “First, create a secure place where the conflicts can freely bubble up”—maybe an offsite retreat with an outside facilitator or an on-site conversation governed by a special set of rules for respectful, open dialogue. Insulate these conversations from your discussions about actually implementing and executing change. That means holding separate meetings, at separate times, with separate agendas. “Second, control the temperature” of the conflict by pushing people to tackle a tough issue when you think they can resolve it constructively and by backing away from disagreements or slowing the pace of change when the group’s morale becomes fragile.
Engage others in problem solving
When everyone is looking to you for answers, you may feel you need to provide them all yourself. But your employees must own this change, too, and they need to feel competent in the new regime. That means “forc[ing] yourself to transfer . . . much of the work and problem-solving to others,” say Heifetz and Linsky. If ever there was a time to delegate, it’s now. Encourage discussion, collaboration, and creative thinking among team members around specific problems or challenges that arise.
Change management is an important skill in today’s business world, where strategy-formulation initiatives, reorganizations, and audacious goals are increasingly the norm. If you lead your team through change successfully—at any level—you’ll increase the group’s productivity and deliver new benefits to your organization.
Adapted from Harvard Business Review Manager’s Handbook (product #10004), Harvard Business Review Press, 2017.