This is part five of a six-part series. Earlier this year, just as the COVID pandemic was hitting the United States, we spoke with business leaders across industries, asking them to share their goals and challenges for their organizations as well as for themselves. Amid the surge of change since our conversations, these challenges have come front and center for any brand in the throes of disruption. Download the entire series in one PDF here.
As business leaders across industry shared their goals and challenges with us during our interviews, each articulated modern context for the fundamental challenges leaders have been wrestling with for decades. Among those: driving swift and effective organizational change. “It’s like trying to turn a ship,” said one participant, reflecting on an organizational initiative that didn’t take hold.
Organizational change, although absolutely every company must manage it, turns out to be fraught with failure. A statistic cited widely in change management circles is that as many as 70% of new initiatives fail to meet their objectives. Of the $1.3 trillion spent on digital transformations last year, it was estimated that $900 billion went to waste.¹ Why is organizational change so hard? Because, as any change management pro will tell you, organizations don’t change. People do. And if you’re trying to help a company change without a plan to help people change, chances are good your chances are … not good. Regardless of scope, if the change is important (and if it isn’t, why change?), consider the critical groups of people necessary to turn the ship:
- Leadership usually conceives of the change and is required to sponsor its deployment and engagement. This is a handful of individuals.
- Managers are closest to employees and must help personalize the change for their team members. Depending on your size, this could be dozens of individuals or hundreds.
- Employees must understand the change and likely will need to shift a mindset or behavior for the initiative to realize its intent.
Leadership
The breakdown of most initiatives we’ve witnessed happens with leadership during a critical transition from plan to action. We call it the “phew, I’m done” syndrome. Plan development requires an immense amount of work and collaboration across peers in leadership. By the time the plan is completed and unveiled to the world with much fanfare, leaders are ready to get back to their day jobs. But after completing and communicating the plan to employees, it’s time to engage them. Meet them where they are, ensure that they see the vision you see, and champion the change until the desired results are being achieved consistently. As a leader, keep a few things in mind about this juncture.
- The work is just getting started with employees. You’ve been working on this for weeks or months, and it feels like you’re at the finish line. But employees are now at the starting gate — and leaders must help employees cross the tape.
- Market context and business imperatives driving the plan have likely been hashed and rehashed, but leaders must externalize their belief in the decision now. Employees need a narrative about why new initiatives matter to them, their company, and their customers. This rarely gets explained in a way employees can relate to that helps them believe in the change, the organization, and its leaders.
- Change management of the new behaviors required by employees must include a leader to sponsor the initiative, from employee awareness through the sharing of successes. The right leader involvement improves success rates by almost 30%.²
“We need our teams to understand the vision, then believe, and ultimately own. We’ve done a bad job with the belief part.”
— Business leader interviewee
Managers
Prosci change management research says that 67% of employees stated that the preferred sender for messages about how the employee is personally affected is their direct supervisor.³ Yet this staff layer is often not given a role in change management for new initiatives. Employees look to their managers for cues on how to process change. Bringing managers in early and enlisting their help in outlining the role they will play helps avoid the “I’ll wait this out to see what’s real” mindset — that is, managers who don’t act right away, banking on the organization losing interest and moving on to a new initiative.
Engaging and equipping managers with the right tools can go a long way to improve an initiative’s success rate.
- Be clear about how the organization would like managers to lead and what is expected of them.
- Provide talk tracks to help managers articulate the narrative of the plan.
- Outline engagement exercises or conversation starters for managers to use with their teams.
- Ensure that managers are aligned with what the changes mean to them — it will be a challenge to explain the plan to staff if they can’t internalize it for themselves.
“We’ll need consistency to keep on it and not get bored. We tend to get distracted with the new, shiny thing.”
— Business leader interviewee
Employees
As overwhelming as it sounds, change happens one individual at a time. It’s imperative to acknowledge what employees have to process before they can lead the way on results. As certified practitioners in Prosci change management, we leverage its ADKAR model when designing change programs for our clients:
- Awareness: Change begins with understanding. What’s the nature of the change, why is it needed, and what’s the risk of not changing?
- Desire: Change depends on people’s personal decisions to engage and participate because they agree that there’s something in it for them and there are people who matter to them.
- Knowledge: Change requires knowing how to do things differently, which can require training on new processes and tools or learning new skills.
- Ability: Change requires action that takes everyone in the right direction through a demonstrated capability to implement and perform.
- Reinforcement: Change must be reinforced to be sustained. That means sharing successes and providing recognition and rewards.
Be as focused and explicit as you can with employees. Employees will continue to do their jobs in the way they know best and are most comfortable (read: the way they’ve always done it) unless they clearly understand what the new way could mean, how it’s different from what they’re doing now, and what tools they have that give them the ability to do things differently.
Change can be a challenge even in the best of times. During this tumultuous time of health and financial crisis coupled with social revolution, it’s all the more difficult — but likely needed now more than ever before. As you plan your approach, proceed methodically and mindfully with all layers of your organization, and please don’t underestimate the amount of change your leaders, managers, and employees are already navigating.
Have a critical project that brings a big change you’ll need to manage? We’re happy to help.
Kelly Hanratty, Client Portfolio Lead, Ogilvy U.S. Employee Experience practice
[1] Harvard Business Review, “Digital Transformation Is Not About Technology,” Behnam Tabrizi, Ed Lam, Kirk Girard and Vernon Irvin, March 13, 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/03/digital-transformation-is-not-about-technology
[2] Prosci, Best Practices in Change Management, 2018.
[3] Prosci, Best Practices in Change Management, 2018.
