Many organizations spend the first quarter of a new year implementing organizational changes. These plans could impact organizational structure, operating procedures, performance standards, or customer service practices. Regardless of what area of the organization will be affected, any type of change is going to involve a lot of work.
Change management, or change leadership, is increasingly falling in the hands of organizations learning and development (L&D) teams. Upon reflection, this shift makes sense. One of the primary roles of any L&D department is to ensure that an organizations team performs at their highest level in a way that aligns with the organizations mission So how can we, as L&D professionals, help facilitate organization-wide change?
Simply put, force the question: “Why change?”
Pinpoint the "Why"
Often the leadership team spends hours upon hours in meetings, in which all the details of a change plan are discussed and laid out. However, what is too easily overlooked in these lengthy meetings is ensuring that everyone in the room is on the same page as to why the change is happening. Now you may be asking yourself, “Why should we even spend effort on that, isn’t it the details that matter?” And you are well served in asking that.
In these situations, it is too easy to blow right past what is arguably a basic generality, the reasons behind a change, and jumping straight into the “how” of implementing it. While the details of incorporating change into an organization or department are important, it is crucial that before any changes are actually made the people who are going to be most affected by the changes—your frontline staff—not only understand why the changes are necessary, but also see the value in those changes and what’s in it for them.
The idea of starting from the “why” is not new, nor is it my own. It comes from Simon Sinek’s famous TED Talk on the Golden Circle. The premise of the Golden Circle is that all human action and behavior is driven by “why” or emotion.
Consider the phrase: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy what you believe.” This is the core refrain Simon Sinek repeats through his lecture, and it applies here as well, to organizational change. Sinek makes the argument that loyalty to a cause, product, company, or plan is created when the two parties core beliefs are aligned, and that cannot happen unless the person knows the “why.”
Think back to that time when you put your hand on the hot stove. You were probably told by your parents many times to not touch it, but what they probably did not tell you was that if you touched the hot stove it would burn your skin, causing a lot pain. Without a more detailed explanation from your parents about why you shouldn’t touch the stove, you were unable to contextualize that putting your hand on the stove would then lead to pain. Of course, once you actually put your hand on the stove and felt the pain, you never did that again. Experiencing the pain (and emotion tied to it) led to a behavior change, because know you know the relation between the activity and outcome (the why).
A New Approach
The same goes for organizational change, your staff is always going to be asking, How will this affect me? Why should I care?” All too often we ignore that question, or worse, let it go unanswered. To ensure that question is addressed, I propose a three-phase approach to creating buy in for organizational change: listen, communicate, and involve.
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Listen. Before any communication plans are created, any marketing materials are disturbed, or announcements are made, the leadership team in charge of implementing change should arrange meetings with frontline supervisors. These managers spend a great deal of time with frontline staff and handling any internal or external customer feedback. They are going to be your best resource in anticipating how frontline staff will react to any organizational changes. Asking them what the primary concerns are of the staff will help guide your creation of a successful communication plan.
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Communicate. Once you have received feedback from your frontline supervisors, the next step is to actually communicate “why” your organization is looking to make some changes. Because you already met with your frontline staff to anticipate any problems or concerns the rest of the staff might have with any proposed changes, you will be better equipped to head off any fears frontline staff may have. Better yet, you can tap into the intrinsic motivators of the staff. If you are able to align the purpose of the changes with what motivates the staff to do great work, you will find yourself with more change allies than naysayers.
Involve. Now that your communication plan has created more buy in, you will have no shortage of frontline staff wanting to be involved in the change process itself. Create a tiger team or change committee that is comprised of mainly frontline staff. When people are part of creating a process, they are more likely to take ownership over the final product and more willing to provide constructive feedback. Instead of feeling like they are being changed, your staff will feel like an integral part in making the change happen.
Final Thoughts
In today’s app-based work environment, the old adage that “the only constant is change” couldn’t be any truer. As L&D professionals, we need to rethink our role in facilitating organizational change and leverage all the recent work that has been done on employee motivation and engagement and apply it to change management plans. If you incorporate this three-phase plan and get your frontline not only actively participating in your change plan, but also actively engaged in it, then you will end up with a staff not wary or suspicious of the changes but champions ready to conquer whatever you put in front of them.
