Change without fear

Earlier or later, every organization will have to undergo a transition or change in order to remain competitive or simply grow. Whether onboarding new employees, creating a department or merging teams, these changes can have a great influence on the development of your business.

Join our Podcast to learn why managing change is so important and understand the results of an excellent leadership management style. 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Earlier or later, every organization will have to undergo a transition or a change in order to remain competitive or simply grow. Whether onboarding new employees, creating a new department, merging teams, these changes can have a great influence on the development of your business. However, organizational change isn't always easy and can become a serious challenge for the managers and all the team members who find themselves impacted by it. I am James, a management consultant with over 15 years experience in the field of leadership training and corporate change. And in this podcast I'd like to emphasize why change projects are one of the biggest team building exercises we can possibly do with massive potential for stronger loyalty, stronger teams. So please stay till the end to find out how I come to that conclusion. First, let's define what change is. So change means that something is going to be done different by at least one team. That can be processes changing either inside the team or the way teams interact with each other. Uh , reporting lines changing. Instead of reporting to a certain area of the business, now the team should report to a different area of the business. Maybe shifting from a functional approach to a more regional approach or if any methods are going to be changed. And especially the big one, if there's any form of large scale restructuring. Now most organizations only look at change when it comes to large scale restructuring. However, we need to look at change from the perspective of those who will need to really execute things differently in daily work. And that is the employees, what do they perceive as change? 'cause as soon as employees perceive something as a large change to the way they're going to be working, then a set of standard processes in everybody's brain kicks in . Some people get rather euphoric and they're really happy about it. They see this should have been done many years ago, months ago, and they want to drive it forward. And , uh, very quickly on board . However, most people look at what's going on and realize that they're going to need to do extra work to make this happen. They start thinking about what will it really mean to my daily business if we change the processes, the lines, the method , and they quickly spot that there's going to be challenges. And naturally what then happens is they air these challenges. And this is where change can start to become difficult. 'cause ideally, change is a positive process where leaders and team members work together, put in extra effort so that at the end of the day they can all have a better place to work, be more effective, grow the company, sustain jobs, and so on. However, as soon as employees start airing their frustrations and they air the same frustrations 2, 3, 4 times maybe in different ways, many leaders get a little bit fed up and at some point start pushing back. And as soon as that happens, change becomes more challenging because then it's not more leaders and employees working together towards something positive for employees. It quickly feels like leaders working against the employees and trying to force them to do something different that they just see loads of challenges in . I've seen this in organizations go on for years. Uh , one that I will never forget in a very large scale . Dax company was a very fast, fast-growing company and they changed reporting lines and changed structuring in the sales department. The aim was to grow the sales department even further. But nine months later, there were still people in the sales department worried about their job, still thinking that actually this change was about getting rid of them. And the root causes of this were simply a lack of good communication around the change. Very low involvement of employees in all steps of the change and just generally the expectation to get cracking and get it done. So let's look at four things out of many possibilities we have that can be used to make change a positive experience for all involved, make change happen quicker with less frustrations, more positivity and better outcomes. Number one, involve people. This can really challenge some leaders. 'cause what I mean by involving is involve employees and people from all levels very early on in the process, involve them before the final decisions are made of what exactly is going to be changed. In what way? Why is this important? Well, these employees will give you very quick feedback on what's gonna be difficult, what's gonna be challenging. They'll be able to bring in ideas towards the strategy and the way it can be executed. And those ideas can be crucial for the later success of the change program. They will, in nearly every case, help you shape a better strategy, a better way forward and a better change program because all of the concerns that they have at a very early stage, when you are still working in a smaller group of maybe five to 10 people defining what direction the change will go, every objection, every concern, every challenge they have then is going to happen anyway throughout the change program. If they don't bring it up at the beginning, employees are going to bring it up at a later date and then it becomes a lot more difficult to deal with. So the quicker we know employee and team lead and head perspective on all of the things relevant to the change, the quicker you can shape a much better plan. Forward involvement from the beginning also brings an additional benefit . It brings the benefit that , um, as these people shaped the change with you, it's not just a better change, but they will then, of course be advocates for it because it's something that they made . So you have people in the team already that are positive and can, let's say, share the information in a different way so that all other people at their level can understand quicker. Number two, communicate. Okay, this is a bit of an obvious one. However , there's one point I'd like to make about communication. Many leaders think, okay, I'm gonna do a town hall meeting. I will talk about the change. I will explain all the background information, why we're doing it, what direction, why we need this. And then everyone will have understood it. That is quite far from the truth because as soon as you start talking about a change, what happens is people go into like a fight and flight mode. So while you are talking, they're already thinking about challenges, they're getting a bit worried about things. They're thinking, Ooh , how are we gonna do that? And oh, that will be difficult. And what about this customer? While they're thinking about that, they're not actually listening to the input, they don't do this with any bad or negative attitude. It just happens naturally in the brain. So when we're talking about communication, there are many aspects of it. And the one I'd like to emphasize is that we need to communicate over and over again with people until they truly understand the strategy, why the change is happening, what all the background information is, and can ideally rephrase it in their own words. That seriously helps you to get buy-in three, listen. So once change gets spread into the teams and into the departments, it makes a lot of sense to carefully listen to what people are saying about it. And to do that, we need to run workshops. So looking at the change at a team-based level, letting people in workshops share all of the challenges they see and listening carefully to them because there is a very high likeliness that in every challenge they share, there's a lot of truth and these challenges will all need to be dealt with. So if we listen carefully and help people, then structure those challenges, prioritize them, understand the magnitude of them, then we can help them turn challenges into actions and actions into success. A Kanban system can be extremely helpful to group all of the viewed challenges per team, help them prioritize them, define what they need to get working on first, what will be most important to then start taking steps forward initially, small steps and then steps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And fourth and finally be with the organization. And we need to avoid at all costs. A feeling of leaders against employees at all different levels. That means if we involve, if we communicate and if we listen and help people sort things, then we have a change that is together. And having a change that is together is of course a massive benefit because yes, it's going to be tough. Yes, there are going to be things that are challenging to do and a skilled leader will utilize this situation to grow the team together. I mean, maybe if you remember to your past, some of the friends that you are still friends with today, or some of your business partners that you, you trust and rely on a lot, they're often the ones that you've gone through very difficult situations with. So going through tough and challenging times is a massive challenge to build a stronger team that holds together more and is proud of itself for being able to go through change. Positively strong leaders view change as the biggest potential for team building that they have. On that note, we finish for today visitors that gain the lead de or find us on LinkedIn on our business page or under the hashtag GTL podcast . We meet here again in two weeks with the fourth episode called Organizational Lack . Now have a great day.