Several years ago, the division president of a large food manufacturing company called us for help. The company had completed a major reorganization three months earlier that involved merging two very different customer service groups into one global unit.
Crucially, this meant folding the call centers from each group into a single department. Just before our conversation, the president, Janet, and her fellow managers had completed their first pulse check survey to assess their progress.
Expectations for the assessment were high. Janet felt the company had done an excellent job communicating the upcoming changes and informing employees well in advance about key milestones. By her telling, the executive team had taken great pains to empathize with employees’ inevitable frustrations and head them off.
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The survey results were shocking—to the managers. Despite their efforts, employees were still deeply confused. They struggled to understand the point of the reorganization and described Janet and her team as poor communicators and change leaders.
Things only got worse from there. Customer call times increased substantially, and top talent defected. Clearly, the company’s change had not been managed—at least not in a way anyone would want.
This scenario is far from uncommon. In fact, there’s a very good chance you’ve experienced the horrors of poorly executed change management planning yourself, whether as someone tasked with implementing a flawed plan or an employee asked to carry it out.
Making Better Planning for Change Management
When Logic Fails
As the old saying goes, the road to disastrous change management plans is paved with good intentions. On paper, the sequencing of work Janet and her fellow managers laid out looked logical, but going from a spreadsheet to real-life can be a bridge too far for those on the receiving end of a change.
In its haste to shake things up, the company made a number of mistakes that had serious consequences downstream for staff and customers. For example: integrating its various CRMs before informing customers, and creating a new customer segmentation strategy that prioritized certain customers—without involving their sales force.
And then there was the conflict over which of the two call centers’ tech platforms would prevail.
The Only Constant Is the Need for Good Change Management Planning
When I had some space to think more deeply about Janet’s pitfalls, I realized that many other companies I’ve worked with have faced the same ones. The common mistakes managers and supervisors make are serious, but usually simple:
- Underestimating how long things take. I’m not the first person to note that change is hard—doubly or triply so at large, bureaucratic organizations (e.g., businesses). Even small changes can take a fair amount of time to properly test, iterate, and implement. Wishing it weren’t so won’t change reality.
- Attempting to do too much at once. Janet’s company had introduced so many new variables to employees that each became impossible to track. Their overarching goal, merging customer service groups into a single unit, fell by the wayside as they were forced to focus instead on putting out one fire after the next.
- Barraging employees with talk. Most change management communication strategies are little more than barrages of content. Too many change management communication plans, for example, consist of glitzy propaganda campaigns that feel completely disconnected from what people are actually experiencing.
Call-out/Tip
“Be the change,” said Gandhi. Indeed: modeling openness, flexibility, and acknowledging when things don’t work out is a great way to teach employees how to effectively prepare for and manage change. Be conscientious about your behavior in all settings, whether face-to-face meetings or larger conferences.
The perceived need to eliminate redundancies at all costs is another stress point. Redundancies are frustrating—I get it. But in the process of overhauling your systems, there may have to be some overlap until the new system is successfully in place. The alternative is a huge, yawning, customer-frustrating gap.
How to Change for the Better
Beware, Loyal Lieutenants,
How could the headaches described above have been avoided? To start, Janet and her fellow managers should have been more honest with themselves. Brutally honest.
It might not be pretty, and it might be plenty painful, but it’s the best tool a company has for honestly assessing their ability to go from Point A to Point B. If you’re working on an organizational change communication plan, that’s the foundation.
But honesty, as we all know, isn’t easy. In too many companies, there are lots of incentives to not be honest. As it turns out, though, all of those “loyal lieutenants” would usually much rather capitulate to a leader’s directions to do something than to push back on unrealistic timelines or plans.
Call-out/Tip
You have to listen twice as much as you talk. When it comes to change management, most of what passes for effective communications is nothing more than content dispensement barrages — a firehose of irrelevant information. For change to happen, employees must be heard.
- Ron Carucci
Put All Options on the Table (Or at least in Your Change Management Communication Template)
When it comes time to plan, how can leaders protect against making bad decisions? How can they make sure they know their shortcomings intimately when it’s time to make a change?
I always advise clients to ask their staff to describe three potential scenarios: a best-case scenario, a worst-case scenario, and the likely scenario. After each is properly sketched out, they should ask a follow-up question: “Tell me why I’m crazy for wanting the best-case scenario.”
The purpose here is to give staff members space and freedom to play Devil’s advocate, highlighting concrete reasons why the plan could fail. In the process, you’ll likely be shocked by the amount of stuff you don’t know about your own company. But you’ll be prepared.
The Power of Change
It’s Not You, It’s Me
To help Janet, we started by investigating the connections between the multiple initiatives that had been launched as part of the company’s reorganization. If after six months an initiative didn’t directly contribute to the reorganization effort, we shut it down, redeploying our resources to current needs.
To give one example, we worked to integrate the new CRM platform across the sales and customer service departments, which ensured that all calls were routed to the right place.
How did we accomplish this and other important changes? We talked to employees—and got their honest opinions. (It’s worth repeating: you have to listen twice as much as you talk.)
The result was that six months on, a new pulse check survey revealed far greater understanding and commitment to the overhaul. It indicated that employees felt heard and that they believed the timing and resourcing were now realistic.
Management had won some credibility back because they responded to the concerns they heard, and defections had stopped.
Now that’s the kind of change you—and your employees—can believe in.