Powerful questions & silence can put a halt to evasion and confusion.
Asking powerful questions invites clarity, action, and discovery.
Using the power of silence (Read more about the power of silence) to allow people to talk creates the possibility for learning & fresh perspective.
(Click here to download your copy of the 51 Questions!)
(Click here to download your copy of the 51 Questions!)
Whether your organization is implementing a new hybrid workplace model, merging with another company, or executing a new strategy, change management is critical to successful organizational transformation.
Leaders often focus on communicating the end state’s vision and benefits when leading organizations through significant changes. However, many additional risks to a comprehensive change management plan should be considered.
I have worked with many clients to help identify risks and craft strategies to address them—to arrive at the organization’s new end state faster.
From my experience, here are the most common barriers to transformational change.
Lack of an Enduring, Focused Communication Strategy
When asked whether they believed their organizations’ strategies were actionable, middle managers and individual contributors consistently scored lower than executives. Leaders know the importance of communicating change, but they frequently overestimate the impact of their efforts.
Regarding your communication strategy, an organization-wide email cannot be your only change management communication. A recent Microsoft study on email rates showed that only 40% of employees would read more than 30% of any given internal email.
Another critical factor in driving buy-in and engagement to organizational strategy changes is ensuring individual teams understand how their goals contribute to overall organizational success. Leaders must communicate corporate strategy in a way that helps teams tie their goals to organizational outcomes while leaning on managers and network influencers to reinforce those messages.
Read more about being the Chief Reminder Officer
Inadvertently Excluding Network Influencers
Ensuring that your organization’s leaders are aligned and bought into the organizational change is critical to successful change management – but what about informal leaders?
Network influencers can be found at all levels of an organization and frequently fly under the radar of executive leadership in large organizations. Because network influencers often act as information brokers and influence how others perceive the organization, they should be identified and considered in your change management efforts.
Identifying key influencers and collaborators to determine who should be prioritized for in-office return can also help drive productivity and ramp up the success rates of your organization’s change efforts.
Read about informal leadership.
Failing to Establish and Clarify New Team Boundaries
Failing to establish new working relationships, ownership, and cultural norms often presents one of the largest sources of frustration in organizational change. Depending on the nature of the transformation, teams can experience massive changes in processes and working relationships that are difficult to predict and coordinate.
From a risk perspective, poor coordination can lead to frustration, damaged relationships, and, ultimately, mistrust in leadership.
To prevent your organization from being blindsided by operational risks and missed handoffs, consider running a decision space exercise or a red team exercise with subject matter experts and division leaders who are changing divisions.
Not Collecting Bottom-Up Feedback
In all large organizations, frontline employees have valuable insights that are frequently overlooked.
During times of transformational change, your frontline can serve as real-time resources and feedback mechanisms to monitor the progress of your new initiatives or efforts. However, many organizations need more capability to provide frontline employees with a way of escalating and delivering insights to leadership.
Failing to consider your frontline can potentially slow your reaction time to challenges such as new competitors and threats, and overestimating your company’s ability can lull you into false security.
In the long term, the risk is that your people will lose trust in leadership, and you will experience lower productivity, low psychological safety, high turnover, and stifled innovation.
Read about eliminating Top Down supervision
While these four risks are the most common barriers to organizational transformations, the challenges you will encounter will be unique to your organization.
An organization transforming, by definition, changes over time – being vigilant in monitoring risk should go hand-in-hand.
Leadership is not for a select few people at the top of the organization; a healthy Organization has leaders at every level.
I hear it all the time, supervisors griping that their employees lack ownership in their work and projects. But the very same supervisors do not realize that they take actions that take ownership away from their people every day.
Hoping people take ownership is not a plan; leaders of healthy organizations implement systems and mechanisms that give ownership and eliminate mechanisms that inhibit a sense of ownership.
Read more about accountability.
Top-down systems rob people of their sense of ownership, so the more you can do to eliminate them, the better. I am not talking about monitoring data and results, as these should make the invisible visible.
The systems I am speaking about are where senior management determines what their subordinates should be doing and then holds them accountable.
I have experienced that people do their best work when they are accountable to themselves and their teammates.
When it comes to processes, adherence to the process frequently becomes the objective, as opposed to achieving the goal that the process was put in place to achieve.
It drives people crazy when the process becomes the outcome.
Edward Deming, who explored the principle of Total Quality Leadership, said that systems to monitor efficiency improved efficiency.
But processes that monitored the process caused the organization to become inefficient.
Monitoring processes, or how employees do their job, sends the message that we do not trust you.
And in the end, it drives employees away from taking ‘ownership.’
If you are clear about your intent and what employees are not allowed to do in carrying out your intent, you will drive ownership.
Read more about leading with intent.
Consider these questions:
How are you underutilizing the ideas, creativity, and passions of your mid-level managers responsible for their departments’ results?
Which monitoring systems can you hand over to mid-level managers and department heads?
What are the top-down monitoring systems in your organization? And how can you eliminate them?
What are the Four levels of Accountability Systems?
Level 1 – Chaos: People are not told what they are accountable for and therefore don’t do their jobs
Level 2 – Inefficient: People are told what they are accountable for but don’t do their jobs because of overwork or focus on the wrong things. This is most inefficient because resources are invested in monitoring, but work isn’t getting done.
Level 3 – Compliance: People understand what they are responsible for and do their work because there are systems to hold people accountable. People often feel forced into doing their jobs. This is where most organizations are and work towards, but this is top-down leadership.
Level 4 – Healthy: People are not told what to do because they have figured it out independently. And they hold themselves and their peers accountable for results with a minimum of monitoring systems. This is a highly engaged, energized, and healthy organization where people have engaged and ownership of their work.
In top-down organizations, accountability processes are designed with the idea that you, the employee, cannot hold yourself accountable for your work; therefore, your boss needs to do it for you.
In a Healthy Organization, people hold themselves and their peers to account for their performance.
Leaders in a Healthy organization are not to hold employees accountable but to help them keep themselves accountable.
Read more about organizational health.
How wonderful would it be if people did not have to attend dreaded accountability meetings? How powerful would it be if people felt safe enough to ask others, ‘Can you help me stay on track.’
This would inspire accountability and efficiency, creativity and energy.
I have received hundreds of performance reviews over my career.
There is one that sticks in my mind.
It wasn’t remarkable because of the content or the score.
It was remarkable because of one sentence. “You are courageous.”
I have been called many things in my life, but courageous?
She meant that I was willing to take calculated risks. That I stood up for what I thought was right, even if it was at a great personal cost.
Another boss from another career and another life once told me, “If you can’t explain it to your grandmother, you shouldn’t be doing it.”
I have learned courage from my heroes – men and women who stood firm against the slings and arrows.
And, when given a chance, did not choose the more comfortable, morally ambiguous path.
A Stony Nation teaching says that in the face of a coming storm, most animals will try to outrun the weather. The buffalo turn headfirst into the storm, keep the herd together, and walk out the other side.
Courage allows you to build trust.
It gives you a license to lead.
Why would anyone follow you if they don’t believe you have the courage to lead them through the storm?
According to my consulting, speaking and coaching clients, the coming year will challenge leaders and employees to find balance and a new purpose at work.
Companies everywhere have been struggling to find top talent. Yet when they do hire quality employees, they often don’t prioritize career growth or flexibility to nurture and retain their talent for the long run.
A lot has changed over the past few years in the face of challenging world events, including the hot leadership topics and workforce trends that companies must stay ahead of to retain top talent.
1. How do I create positive work cultures?
Work culture has taken its biggest hit in decades. With more employees dispersed than ever, workplaces traditionally in person see their talent drawn to greener pastures. There’s a risk of toxic “bubbles” building within companies that don’t appear to offer all their people the same flexibility consistently and fairly.
According to the Leaders I work with, workplaces will continue to become more diverse, flexible, dispersed, and challenging. As a result, leaders will play a more vital role in creating positive and magnetic work cultures for their teams. More inclusive and empathetic leaders can prevent toxic cultures from emerging and better foster and sustain the positive work connections that help retain key talent.
2. How do I move to real commitment?
All the changes in the world outside of work have fueled a strong desire from employees to see companies commit to new ways of doing things. Employees and consumers are voicing a stronger desire to see companies embrace changes to address significant challenges in business and society.
How can companies find the best path to success while growing a talented workforce that wants to stay with them through challenges?
Will more companies come to adopt a 4-day work week? There are strong signals that a reduced work schedule may better meet the needs of the modern workforce. However, when companies decide to move forward, they must understand that people want to see real change, not return to the old way of doing things.
3. Management—the burden fewer want to bear
A growing sense of crisis and change fatigue has been sinking in for leaders, many of whom have been overwhelmed by talent losses amidst rising inflation and hiring costs. As a result, companies are seeing an increased risk to their most critical talent pool that can’t be satisfied only by increased pay.
Considering how crucial frontline leadership will be to retaining all their other talent, companies must quickly prioritize leadership development and support before they take on critical losses at higher levels. This may mean extending leave time and other benefits to reduce the growing risk of burnout for leaders, who historically have been rewarded by bonuses alone.
4. Hybrid and remote teams seek stronger connections.
It’s lonely out there for many workers, especially those who are hybrid and don’t find connections as meaningful as companies might expect. According to a recent study on work loneliness, building lasting relationships isn’t about how much in-person time people are exposed to but about the closeness, security, and support they get in their interpersonal relationships. This means that even an in-person or hybrid work environment could fulfill the interpersonal needs of only some and not others.
How employees connect matters more than where they connect, so developing leaders with more effective interpersonal skills will help foster stronger team connections, no matter where they work.
5. How do I shift from “Great Resignation” to “Great Retention.”
As companies face the reality of operating in leaner, more expensive times, they have a greater need for retaining top talent. No matter what the buzzword du jour (and there have been a lot of them this year), it’s clear there are immense pressures to find and keep their best people. For many, this leads to a sharper focus on identifying high-potential talent and finding ways to mobilize and share their skills internally.
6. Soft skills rise to the forefront of leadership.
Influencers’ mentions of the leadership skills most needed in the workplace this year focused on critical interpersonal skills (e.g., empathy, emotional intelligence, communication, influence, etc.). Although they have always been important, these skills have gained attention as the workforce has had to confront increasing change and crisis after crisis.
Leaders have had to navigate more human and personal discussions with their teams, which can be challenging if power skills aren’t equipped. Leaders will need to continue to develop these skills to manage teams well. Leaders with stronger interpersonal skills will continue to be vital in helping teams manage the changes ahead, especially when building stronger relationships in hybrid and remote teams.
7. The new employee learning imperative
Accessibility is quickly becoming an imperative in employee learning and development. Employees want to learn to grow their careers, which is critical to retaining talent. So, companies must be able to deliver quality learning experiences to employees anywhere—whether they are in person, hybrid, or remote.
Since employee learning starts the moment they onboard a new company, their impressions about what learning quality they will receive can quickly take shape, not to mention their beliefs of what kind of place it will be like to work at. As companies grow more flexible and dispersed, so must their learning experiences. To better meet employees’ needs for flexibility, companies must provide great employee experiences that are equally accessible.
These seven questions prove we are not returning to “normal.”
So, we are all faced with the question: “Where do I place my bets?”
I want you to place your bet On Your People.
There is no better bet at this time.
If you’d like to have a quick conversation with me about how betting on yourself can yield massive returns, here is the link to my schedule. I look forward to it.
Mrs. CEO,
I am one of your employees.
I work in operations, and I don’t have a fancy title.
I like working here, I like what I do, and I love my career. My role here has grown in ways I never expected, and I am thrilled with my job’s direction.
I wanted to write you because I only saw you at last year’s Zoom Christmas party or on the website, but I never had the chance to talk to you.
I understand that you are super busy running the company, travelling, and keeping stakeholders & shareholders happy.
And I didn’t want to come off as a whiner, but I wanted to share a few of the things that I see, but you might not notice:
Corporate Strategy – I know your executive teams think about Strategy from time to time.
But at my level, I know my tasks, but I have no idea how I contribute to the company’s success. When I asked my supervisor, he threw his hands up and said It didn’t matter because Corporate had no idea.
Read why your employees don’t give a rat’s $%^# about your precious Strategy.
Company Values – Our corporate values look good on the banner and the website, but it doesn’t seem to impact me.
There are roadblocks everywhere to getting our work done.
And it seems better to keep our mouths shut than try to tell a supervisor about problems.
Read about values and keeping employees.
Performance – I have been passed over for a promotion several times. It never seems fair because nobody has ever taken the time to explain why.
I want to get promoted or get a raise, but the process seems mysterious, and nobody knows how the system works.
Read about avoiding performance management fails.
Town halls & Teleconferences – I think I know what you are trying to do, but they are hours long and full of last year’s numbers and technical jargon.
Read about how not to screw up talking to your employees
The company you describe in your presentations sounds like Google, and as much as I want to believe your description, it doesn’t feel that way.
I struggle to know why you see a different picture of the company than we do.
I try to have a positive attitude and look for ways to contribute more, but the people I work with are frustrated and discouraged. No one seems to know what is going on, the reorganization a few months ago was nerve-racking, and we are all a bit scared.
I want success for the company because I like it here. But I must admit, I am struggling to understand why our managers are not trained to help us get there.
Maybe you, or some of your executives, could stop presenting to us, stop by the shop floor, talk with us, and listen to us. You might learn that there seems to be something missing because things are not going well at my level.
We like you, the company and our jobs and only want the best for everyone. We need to understand.
Sincerely,
Your Worried But Loyal Worker
Written with credit to several online examples