Whether the change that's ahead involves re-vamping your foundation of purpose, values and organizational vision or a broader culture change, we see companies struggle when it comes to activating their strategy. As a result, they’re losing an estimated 40% of their strategy's value to breakdowns in execution. That's a lot of effort, time and cultural capital wasted! Often the x-factor is how leaders show up.
In this post, we’ll share our insights into what it takes to get change right (and to make it stick) and highlight the action leaders can take to avoid critical risks and ensure successful adoption and integration.
Engaging leaders and employees throughout the process
This is at the heart of all the work we do. Taking a human or employee centred approach is critical because it helps people feel that they are part of the process. When we incorporate their experiences and perspectives, they feel seen and heard. This doesn't mean that we talk to every single employee - in fact we strive to achieve representation of roles, tenure, demographics and accountabilities by using a mixed methods research approach. We aim to directly engage 10–15% of the workforce in empathetic research and augment that with structured, quantitative data.
In our work with large corporations comprised of thousands of employees from crown corporations like BC Hydro to with globally distributed retail brands with Amer, we can’t possibly engage every employee in interviews and workshops. In fact, we would risk saturation, the point at which we stop hearing new information, if we engage too many people. However, by developing intentional research plans that engage all employees at differing altitudes and touchpoints, we ensure they have the opportunity to be heard while ensuring we are doing the “right” amount of research. Methods like surveys allow us to stretch our reach wide and gain broad insights, while collaborative workshops allow us to go deep and explore the “why” behind experiences.
This intentional engagement across methods leads to insights that, when shared back with the organization, serve to bring each person along in the understanding of the change ahead. It avoids the understanding and belief gap that a 'big reveal' can trigger if information is held back until later in the process. Sharing with transparency helps employees understand what the organization is saying yes and no to, the rationale for the change priorities that are selected and how the new experience will impact them.
What to watch out for:
- Not sharing how you are engaging employees and leaders across the organization so people know when and how they will get a chance to contribute.
- Poor communication about the change progress.
- Asking for feedback and then not doing anything about it. Listening without acting is harmful and erodes trust.
What leaders can do: Communicate with transparency
- Be honest. If things aren't rosy, your employees know it. Even if you may not be clear on how you're going to fix the issues, the first step is acknowledging what's broken and committing to working on its resolution.
- Create a regular cadence of reporting throughout your change journey (i.e. executive/steering committees, company-wide townhalls) to share progress (even if incremental), reinforce wins and learnings and set realistic expectations. When pivots happen, share what led to them and why.
- Be prepared to share what you've learned and your rationale for how this shows up in your priorities and changes. You don't need to act on every suggestion that you heard from employees, but you need to explain what you are responding to, what you aren't and why and how this balances with business objectives. This is a critical step in bringing people along in the change journey.
Recognizing the powerful role of fear and resistance
People and organizations hold on to their past experiences with change. When they aren’t great, the weight of these memories can create the expectation that nothing will be different when embarking on a journey towards new beliefs and behaviours. Organizations that get change right understand that fear and resistance play a powerful role. They recognize that these strong and valid emotions and reactions aren't there to be "solved". Instead, they welcome fear and resistance and seek to understand where the feelings come from and why they exist. They actively use these insights to validate employees' experiences, orient them as they confront the changes expected of them and navigate the uncertain journey into the unknown and support the transition as the change asked of them becomes more familiar and comfortable.
There is no single, universal "experience" across people in organizations and as a result, successful change addresses these differences. Our job is to understand the variations in experiences, have empathy for the people living them and then design ways to guide people from where they are today to where they need to be in the future. When we make the space to incorporate this variety of experience, we don’t just “manage” resistance and fear - we flip it. The mindset evolves from change being something that happens to you, to something you are a part of. It’s a really empowering, powerful change activation lever when you ask people in the organization to all step forward and “meet” in a shared new space.
What to watch out for:
- People being impatient with the change and as a result either give up or fall back on old habits (known as “shadow behaviour”).
- Leaders who aren't aligned with what the change is that needs to happen or why it's important to the business.
What leaders can do: Cultivate safety
- Create the conditions of psychological safety for people to "feel the discomfort" that's at the heart of change fear and resistance.
- Engage other leaders in understanding that they too need to change. This involves unearthing what's holding them back and addressing their concerns/fears.
- Encourage space for reflection, acknowledging that change is a personal and non-linear path.
- Be authentic and vulnerable; change is hard work and we won't get it all right the first time.
Change is an emotional journey. Organizations (and leaders) that embrace this rather than suppress it will succeed.
Embracing the adaptive challenge
It’s important to understand that the type of organizational or cultural change we are discussing is not a "technical problem" that can be fixed with the application of a known solution. Organizations are complex and unique. Success in changing them demands an adaptive mindset to solve adaptive challenges.
An adaptive mindset recognizes and embraces that we don't necessarily know all the steps from the beginning, which can be unsettling for people who are used to a very process-driven approach to change.
We expect that we will need to experiment, sense and respond, try and learn. Organizational conditions change as a result of every intervention or action we take, and responses can't always be easily predicted. However, having an adaptive mindset doesn't mean that our actions are not intentional. We typically work from a research-informed backlog of priorities and adjust based on outcomes and learning.
What to watch out for:
- Not holding leaders or each other accountable to their commitments.
- Holding on to a mindset of perfection instead of learning.
- Not measuring the impact of change and evaluating whether efforts have worked or not.
- Not paying attention when conditions change and adapting in response.
- Losing momentum because of the complex nature of adaptive change.
What leaders can do: Be authentic change champions
- Recognize how critical it is to model new behaviours for others and recognized that the change needs to start with them.
- Develop and share commitments to the desired changes and incorporate into coaching, performance feedback and communications.
- Celebrate those who are demonstrating the change and recognize the progress people are making progress as they work towards the new state.
- Acknowledge and validate people’s current discomfort while reinforcing a commitment to moving forward differently – with a learning, experimental and curious mindset.
Creating meaningful change
Perhaps your organization is one of the 40% that had a great plan but was unable to realize the critical change you needed to execute it. Paying attention to the factors we've shared, activating your leaders and watching out for change hazards can help you and your organization create more meaningful, lasting change. And become part of the 60%!
