When you’re transforming your company, nothing is more important than leadership. Leadership and change management are inseparable.
Without the cooperation and active participation of not only your critical executives but also your middle management and key staff, the restructuring of your company is doomed to fail.
Selling your company’s leadership on change management
Your first and best allies are the leaders in your company: your executives, your middle managers, your employee team leaders, and the less formal leaders such as the keepers of the grapevine, key secretaries, and go-to people.
Their leadership in change management is critical. But before you can get them to lead, you need to sell them on the changes.
First, be open and honest to the extent that you can. Don’t be rude by asking someone whose position is going to be eliminated to take a leadership role (though if they’re good leaders, you should attempt to find them other places within your newly-restructured company). Instead, focus on those who are staying.
Approach your restructuring goals as a marketing program. You already have their attention, as they know your restructuring will affect them profoundly.
Now you need to show them how the restructuring will help them, how it will make their jobs and lives easier, and what it will do for the company.
Once they understand that your anticipated changes are good, and how important is their leadership to change management, they will be eager to sell your program to their own staffs. At this point, you just need to keep them well informed.
There are two critical pieces of leadership and change management you should focus on. First, those company leaders you’ve sold on change management will, in turn, recruit their own staffs.
This will improve morale throughout your company. Second, you should maintain communication lines both ways between you, your change management team, and the leaders in your company.
Change management may look neat on paper, but it’s always messy. There are always unanticipated problems.
By using your company’s leadership and change management together, you are much more likely to pick up on those problems when they’re minor irritations, instead of having them erupt on you when they’ve become cancerous growths of problems. F
or instance, assume that one mail clerk does not realize that your financials need to be routed to a new place. Instead of going to the right office, they start coming back.
Your clerk tries to find out from his supervisor what’s going on, but no one seems to know. How long is it before your pile of returned financials start causing a real problem in the company?
But by vesting leadership in change management in your mailroom supervisor and his or her key employees, and by opening communication with them, they’ll have the answers to your clerk’s problems the first time financials are returned – or better yet, they will brief the staff so that the problem can be resolved proactively.
This is, of course, an oversimplified problem and real problems with change are likely to be much more complex.
Still, the same solutions apply: proactively preventing the problem through good communication and real leadership in change management from all levels of management.
Leadership and change management’s effect on morale
Whenever you have changed, your employee morale is going to suffer. It doesn’t matter how big the change is, whether you’re adding or subtracting employees, or just changing procedures. Employee leadership and change management can help company morale as well.
Instead of being permanently in the dark, a lower-line supervisor who knows about the big-picture changes is more likely to be able to explain the small-picture solutions to his or her staff.
If you vest leadership in these supervisors, give them the information they need to do their jobs and ensure change management is effective on their line and listen – above all, listen! – to what they think the real problems are, company morale will improve at the baseline and your changes will be more effective.
Back to the mail-room example: if your supervisor had been given information that you were going to be outsourcing most of your accounting, and your mail-room clerk had come to him to complain about the pileup of returns, then your supervisor would be able to resolve the problem through his or her knowledge of the big picture.
With communication back to you and your change management team, he would be able to let you know that someone forgot to make sure everyone had a new address for financials.
Upon investigating, you find that several related items were not properly communicated, and you can take care of this right away.
Two-way communication, vesting leadership for change management in lower-line employees, and being proactive are the critical elements when using leadership and change management together.
Trust your employees, and watch their morale improve even through change.
