Research by ROI Communication on change and communication found that change programmes fail if employees don’t grasp the rationale for the change. Roger D’Aprix, vice president of ROI Communications found that:
“the only way you can rationalize the change is by reference to the marketplace and the forces that are driving the organization…”
It’s important when communicating the rationale for change employees need to know:
- Who is our competition?
- What is the competition doing?
- What choices does the customer have in dealing with us as an organization?
- What are the customer’s needs and demands?
- What about our shareholders and the financial community — what are their needs and expectations?
- What technological forces are affecting our organization, our products and our services?
These questions create a powerful context that make the change meaningful. This helps employees understand that the organisation is not changing for the sake of change and that the change is not about driving a managers personal agenda.
In addition to a clear rationale for change, leadership is of utmost importance. During times of change leaders need to be more visible, more transparent, open and to keep the focus on the vision. D’Aprix puts it this way.
“Leadership at a time like this has to be extremely visible and doing lots of face-to-face communication… the good, solid leaderships do this fairly naturally. The bad ones keep it all secret and quiet, and they pretend that everything is fine. That’s a recipe for disaster.”
Communicating and leading change is a difficult task, however if you spend the time to answer the why the how takes care of itself. If the why is compelling, the how is emerges from the passion, participation and wisdom of those engaged in the journey.
Technorati Tags: Change, Communication, Vision, Business, Leadership, Research, Management
Related posts:
John Riley
Pablo
uberVU - social c...
Atsu23 (Atsu Sakaki)
Calvin Bacon
Cassandra
Christine Polewar...
dagnabbit_ (auburn)
davidburkus
donna wells
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I think there is another dimension to this as well.
The people that is in someway afflicted by the change, should be enabled to get ownership in the change. Often many of the changed that needs to be done, needs to be done in their environment. They should know how to make that change better than anyone. If one can be part of a change instead of a change that happen around you, it will lower the resistance and increase the chance of success.
In practice this means you as a leader, need to not only tell the why’s but enable the employees to make the decision on the what to do about it. If the competitor is doing it a better way, ask the employees how they want to solve that specific problem. How can we be better than them? Add small suggestions to get the ball rolling.
Thats when change is good. It brings forth ownership and involved employees will work hard on making the change happen.
Well at least thats my thoughts on the subject…
That’s true. It’s important that the explanation is clear and that everyone understands it. Otherwise, it would be a waste of time if someone is confused.
I’m with you on that list. Sometimes, instructions are not clearly delivered to employees. It may create a negative environment or just plain failure in the plan.
I think this is a common mistake of most businesses. Most of the time, employees don’t understand the instructions because some of them are doing it on purpose, while sometimes it’s just hard to understand.
I think, being a manager, the main thing one should communicate to his/her reports is what the changes mean to THEM. Yes, communicate about competitors, shareholders, technological forces, BUT summarize this by telling people: “And here is what all this means to us …”. Good luck, folk! Thanks for the post and the comments.