The Idea in Brief
You’ve just announced a major change initiative that will catapult your company ahead of your aggressive competitors. Your employees’ response? Anger, alarm, alienation, and confusion. Why?
Change is intensely personal, requiring each individual to think, feel, and do things differently. Change is about managing emotions traditionally banned from the workplace. Trust is particularly critical to successful change—and particularly difficult to establish in the midst of change. So how do you win your followers, one trusting employee at a time?
Picture your change effort as a delicate mobile made up of content, processes, and employees’ emotions and behaviors. Instead of breaking the mobile into pieces, trying to manage each separately, balance that mobile so all the pieces move in concert.
Successful balancing requires:
- Employee trust, which you build through predictability—clarifying the company’s intentions and ground rules and “walking your talk”—and capability—articulating the role each person will play in the change effort.
- Employee empowerment—genuinely inviting everyone to co-create the company’s desired future.
To create this environment of trust and empowerment, you need a powerful support structure: a Transition Management Team.
The Idea in Practice
The Transition Management Team (TMT) has these responsibilities:
Establish context for change.
- Via organized discussions throughout the company, the TMT spreads word of the organization’s vision and competitive situation. Individuals and teams can then align their activities with the company’s new direction.
Stimulate conversation.
- The TMT orchestrates early, open-ended conversations about the change among all parts of the company. The pay-off? Breakthrough thinking and new insights—from everyone.
Provide resources.
- The TMT assigns specific authority to individuals, and gives them the resources to do the job properly. The team also can kill off projects not contributing to the larger effort.
Coordinate projects.
- As companies shift into fast-paced change programs, teams and projects proliferate—as does confusion. The TMT aligns teams and projects to support the larger change effort, and explains to the organization how the pieces fit together.
Ensure congruence of messages and behaviors.
- To protect the change effort’s credibility, the TMT watches for—and addresses—inconsistencies among management’s policies, success measures, and rewards (e.g., redirecting managers who espouse empowerment but then shoot down new ideas).
Provide opportunities for joint creation.
- To provide true opportunity for employees to create the company’s future together, the TMT coordinates and supports the exchange of information employees need to make smart decisions and take effective action.
Anticipate and address people problems.
- Since people issues are at the heart of change, the TMT gathers and distributes information, horizontally and vertically, to address concerns about the change effort.
Prepare the critical mass.
- The TMT ensures availability of the resources and strategies necessary to replicate and transfer the learning gained from the change effort.
Change is intensely personal. For change to occur in any organization, each individual must think, feel, or do something different. Even in large organizations, which depend on thousands of employees understanding company strategies well enough to translate them into appropriate actions, leaders must win their followers one by one. Think of this as 25,000 people having conversion experiences and ending up at a predetermined place at approximately the same time. Small wonder that corporate change is such a difficult and frustrating item on virtually every company’s agenda.
