Change Management And Leadership Styles

Leadership style during change is so important, you might tell people what is happening, but will it change their attitude and therefore change their behaviour? In my experience which is across many sectors, industries, professional roles and all types of change programmes I have to say no. And this is the problem, when a CEO and senior executive team think “change” will happen because they have hired someone to communicate the changes taking place and then when there is no impact on the business or the outcomes they were looking for they are disappointed.

Change programs are confusing for everyone, from frontline employees to all levels of leaders and managers. To successfully transform organizations you need to ensure that everyone at all levels of the organization will understand what the change will mean for them personally and in the case of leaders and managers they also need to be able to demonstrate that to their team. It is only ever in the context of the direct impact on people that they say “Aha! now I get it.”

So how do we use this analogy when we are tying to communicate change? Let’s look at this example.

An organization wants to communicate the financial results to employees and the usual approach is to post the employee annual report on the intranet. But this time they need to do something different, they want employees to understand why the company needs to improve and what shareholders base their decisions on. So they decided to run free lunchtime information sessions for their employees on how to invest in the share market and held them for one hour each week for four weeks.

The topics progressed from understanding the share market, categories of companies listed etc till the final week they examined annual reports. So in this final session they were reviewing annual reports and came to the last one for the session and after reading through the data the question was asked of employees, so who would invest in this company, few put their hands up. And you guessed it, the company was their company and with a collective Aha! the employees finally got the message.

As with all successful change programs, other relevant areas of the organization were included as a holistic approach to change.

So here is the important message for any change program. Information is important, employees need to know what is happening, when, why, who, what and by whom. However, equally as important when it comes to organizational change, employees need to be involved in the process to be truly engaged. This is where change professionals need to focus on the “Aha moments” and engage employees in the process of change.

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