Are the hearts and minds of your business transformation withering on the vine?
Changing your business takes a toll on your people, and there’s no doubt the leaders of today understand that much better than their predecessors. However, the nature of the executive demands distance from the day-to-day challenges your people face, and in the general discourse from analysts and consultants is also too far removed from the specific ways transformation efforts cost employees their confidence and well-being.
As someone working in a business that is ambitiously and rapidly transforming, the discomfort of change is often innocuous. It can feel like “Oh a new set of strategic priorities? How is this different from what we’ve been doing?” or “Our team moved to another org but the work is the same.”
When the complexity of your business increases, when the economy tips into turmoil, and the pace of your transformation accelerates, what used to be innocuous can start to feel personally harmful and unsafe to your people. These consequences are real for real people, no matter how far up the ladder you sit. Some would say this is what it means to work in big business today, and it’s not for the faint of heart. But I say that’s the kind of thinking that’s only going to achieve a cosmetic transformation, not the creation of deep and enduring value you’re trying to secure by changing your business. Your people are your business (we all know this), and so if you’re going to transform and unlock tremendous value, it requires changing the hearts and minds of the people who actually conduct your business.
But to change those hearts, your people have to trust you with them first.
Show your people where your heart is
You know this. Be vulnerable. Be honest about the problems. Reflect their feelings back to them. Remind them why you’re committed, engaged, and that you see the path to success. Tell them that it’s okay to be committed and frustrated, talented and insecure, dedicated and angry. Be present more often than you think. Show them you see the hardships, the obstacles, the conflict and you also see a way through it. Tell them what they can expect, even if it’s stormy seas. Most importantly, reinforce that you are all in it together, and know that a critical part of this togetherness is that you are present, available, and accepting of thoughts, fears, and imperfection.
Your people want boundaries
You have world class talent. They are all-in on the mission. You want them to have ownership, agency, and the freedom to innovate. They want this too. But when the business is in the midst of change, it can look like things are falling apart, and your team will feel lost, confused, and like they don’t know how to contribute anything of value anymore. They want boundaries, they want to be told what they don’t have to worry about. They want to be able to focus on what matters, and in times of change they can’t always make that decision themselves. They want to be allowed to not take on problems they can’t solve. They want boundaries in order to feel safe.
Take on stakeholder management
You have people on the front lines with other organizations in your company. Those organizations may be transforming at a different pace, their executives may not be aligned with you. In some cases, they may be waging open corporate warfare against your mission. Your people will experience a massive gap between what they’re told and what they’re seeing with their own eyes. Your organization may have a mission that is critical to the company’s future, but not necessarily everyone your people deal with will agree.
They are strong, faithful, smart people whose job it is to manage stakeholders. But in times of chaos, in the midst of indecision or prolonged course corrections, they likely do not feel confident they know the message or the strategy, and even less confident representing it in the face of conflict.
Remind everyone of the big picture
Remind everyone about the nature of transformation: that sometimes it goes as planned, and sometimes it doesn’t. Be specific. Was it a bad quarter that is demanding course correction? Is it a change in the macro environment? Is it systemic inefficiencies? Give people the same map in order to understand where they fit in the big picture.
But most importantly: remind them that the challenges they are dealing with, the conflict they are facing, the insecurity they feel is neither unique to them, nor is it their fault. Remind them that they each matter as individuals not only to the company, to the mission, but to leadership and to each other as people.
Deliberately manage the pace of work
Publicly take vacation. Institute company-wide no meeting days and extra days off for everyone. Don’t encourage your people to just take vacation, it is often more stressful when you’re feeling insecure about your job to miss out on work. Force everyone to stop working at the same time.
Make quick, but not hasty, decisions
Most of the time your transformation does not go to plan. Your people know when it’s not working. They know it because they feel the impact of it every single moment of every single day. Do not let chaos perseverate as confusion, lack of direction, or role ambiguity. Your people will assume no one has a plan, and will either take things in their own hands, increasingly display bad behavior like backstabbing, territorialism, gossip, or quiet quit.
The more time insecurity has to fester, the longer it takes to dissolve its effects. More frequent, decisive change and course correcting is better than prolonged indecision.
Be willing to take a public stand for the values of your people regardless of whether they have a material impact on your bottom line or not.
Acknowledge that your business is not the most important thing going on in your peoples’ lives, no matter how dedicated they all are. Acknowledge that there are very real conditions external to your business that matter, and that your people spend most of their waking hours as citizens of your business. Those citizens want to know that they entity they are giving so much heart and soul to is a place they belong. When you publicly take a stand for or against something - racism, gun violence, carbon emissions, you name it - your employees feel that the things they care about the most deeply matter in the place they live most of their lives.
Everyone in your organization is personally responsible for their happiness, their behavior, and their decision to remain working for your company. It is also simultaneously true that no one’s behavior happens in isolation or a vacuum, and we are all responsible to each other for the dynamics of our teams. It is also true that in a hierarchy where some people have more power, they must also carry collective responsible for their team’s well-being. Without the well-being of your people, you will not achieve your mission. And let’s not forget that well-being is not the absence of conflict, obstacles, or mistakes - it is about resilience, endurance, and good humor in the face of those challenges. Resilience and endurance live in the heart, not the head. Resilience and endurance are most effective when cultivated together as a community, not only through individual will power. This is why leaders are the only ones that can take this on.