Change or Die - How Leaders can Navigate this Ever-Present Mandate
A big challenge for teams is dealing with change. Just when a team gets comfortable and ready to settle into a nice cruising altitude, something new is needed, someone leaves, or news from the C-suite requires a shift in focus.
There is no secret sauce when it comes to handling change, but here are three simple tactics to add to your leadership repertoire so that the change process doesn't cause collateral damage to your team.
Cover the basics
Your people, if they're smart and able to think critically (which I assume your team is!), want to know why it's worth their time and effort to navigate the change, which always has some level of cost associated with it. Some promise of a future state, often unproven, will pull your team through the muck and discomfort of messing with the way things are currently.
If the change is mandated from a leadership layer more senior than your team, then the reason needs to be even more robust. If the change is decided collaboratively among the team, it’s up to you to build ownership among the team for the decision.
Bottom line, the needs to be owned by the team executing the change. The team also needs to have alignment around the change. Alignment around what exactly? Consider the full spectrum -- alignment around all 6 Ws surrounding the change: who, what, when, why, where, and how.
Questions you as the leaders can ask yourself as you cover the basics in communicating the change:
What is the right way to frame this change?
Why is this transition worth the effort?
Which parts of this transition can the team have autonomy over?
2. Look for misalignment
Alignment is the state of a team having enough shared understanding such that it can move forward together. Imagine each person's way of seeing the situation as a force vector. If those forces are oriented in the same direction, the mass will move in that direction. If those forces are pointed in opposite directions, the mass will not go much of anywhere.
As the leader, ask for and look for misalignment. Welcome it so that you can work as a team to build the necessary shared understanding to allow for progress toward the change.
You can help make misalignments a normal, non-threatening thing just in the way you invite them into the conversation:
"Is anyone still wondering about why this is the path we're taking? I'm happy to talk more about that."
"Is anyone feeling hesitant about this? Your hesitancy may give us important insight as a team to the places we need to think through more."
"What else do we need to clarify for this transition to go smoothly?"
3. Give your change a long tail
After the change is implemented, a natural system recalibration will happen. Meaning, it's hardly never a one-and-done kind of thing, even when there’s a clear line between old and new, like switching customer management systems. Keep the topic of the change on the table. If it's a transition to a new system, there will be kinks that need to get worked out. If someone leaves the team, there will be coverage needed for awhile.
Let time be an ally here allow the team to appreciate the benefits of the new order and learn from it. Honestly, the emotional whiplash of some changes need processing time. This processing directly affects the work product.
Questions you as the leader can ask your team to give change a long tail:
"How is implementation going so far?"
"There are pros and cons to our new approach. What's one thing you really like, and one thing you miss from the old way?"
"What's something we've learned about our team through this transition?"
In the tech world, where the message is often "change or die," the pressure of that message can be oppressive. The reality is that change is inevitable. The leadership tactics above have something in common: facilitating your team to talk about what’s going on. These approaches will help you use the change, even if uncomfortable, as an experience that can bring your team together, stronger than ever.
