Building Effective Change Leadership

Brandee Fantini – Principal

No matter the initiative, every proposed change is only as valuable as the activation behind it, including how work gets done, how employees own it, and how your customers experience it. Effective change leadership is critical to realize that activation.

One of the most effective ways to activate change is by creating new experiences. Change experiences are holistic, role-based, and business-driven practices that encourage people to carry change forward. Consistent change experiences foster new mindsets and behaviors over time, making it more likely the change will be fully adopted long-term and produce measurable results.

Even with this strategy in mind, organizational change can feel daunting. The change journey is bumpy and risky. The graphic below depicts the common performance dips employees often experience during the change journey:

Effective change leaders guide people through this bumpy journey by helping mitigate the real and perceived barriers to adoption and focusing on the larger structural and organizational processes at play.

Why change can be challenging

Change in the workplace can sometimes be experienced as a threat, whether to a person’s sense of status, certainty, autonomy, relationships, fairness, or something else. The human brain has a deeply established fight-or-flight response to perceived threats, which can lead to defensive or argumentative behaviors as people shut down, disengage, and avoid further conflict.

People can also perceive change as being wrong. When change is perceived as wrong, the brain is triggered into reacting with judgments and critical thoughts. Disagreement can persist on substantive grounds or it can devolve into nitpicking.

Most often, change isn’t quickly adopted because new ways of working simply take more time. People need space and time to practice working in new ways, form new connections in their brain, and repeat behaviors as they establish new habits and patterns.

What effective change leadership looks like

Effective change leaders can lead a dialogue around both the justifications behind the change and the reasons it’s not being adopted. If employees aren’t adopting a new behavior, there’s likely a good reason. For example, if an employee learns that her manager wants her to cross-sell other products, but her compensation is based on selling a core set of products, why would she  cross-sell other products if nothing is motivating or rewarding the new behavior?

Consider the following habits that effective change leaders practice. Where are you strong as a change leader? Where could you use more practice?

Drive leadership alignment through clear decisions.

• Build credibility with individual leaders. Authentic relationships go a long way toward solving problems and overcoming challenges.
• Share information in a way that enables senior leaders to make clear decisions and understand the expected outcomes of those decisions.

Authentically lead the change.

• Model the behaviors and mindsets you want others to adopt. Everything you do and say either drives the change or undermines it.
• Let colleagues know specifically how they can drive change, and then hold them accountable.
• Keep the change top of mind for yourself and others by bringing people together to facilitate idea-sharing and understanding.

Be open to feedback (aka listen).

• Be attentive by using responsive body language.
• Dig deeper than initial reactions to understand what’s driving a person’s feedback or concerns.
• Avoid defensiveness; instead, take time to process what the person giving feedback is saying. This means taking time to reflect on the feedback and how you’d like to address it.

Drive collective progress.

• Ask questions to help people think differently, such as: Why do you think that might be? What else might explain that? How might we do things differently? How does that make you feel?
• Identify, document, and tackle barriers; be vocal with people about what’s getting in the way of change.
• As change occurs, let others own as much of the process as possible.

Create change experiences.

• To change how people think about a concept, start by changing their experience with it.
• Use storytelling, visuals, and immersive opportunities to let people touch and feel change, and experience what it might mean for them.
• Recognize and reward people when they think about something differently or use a new method to make a decision.

Build personal resiliency.

• Take time to reflect and renew your energy (sometimes you have to step away to be able to lean in later).
• Build and lean on your network of supporters, including change advocates and personal mentors).
• Embrace a growth mindset—an attitude of positivity and openness to change—so you can persist despite setbacks, and let go of what you can’t control or influence.

As the pace of change continues to accelerate, organizations need effective change leaders who adopt change quickly and enable others to do the same.

Are you going through organizational change? If you’d like to connect with our team to learn more about fostering effective change leadership, give us a call at 859-415-1000 or drop us a line.