My previous post outlined three key elements of successfully preparing and announcing changes in organizations from the perspective of the change author and driver. This post looks at change from the perspective of individuals on the receiving side of the change process — either those affected by the change or those who need to communicate the change to others, often while not having worked on the changes themselves. It explores how individuals can react to changes and focus their efforts and energy to support the change to the benefit of the organization and to foster their own development.
Accepting the change
Some changes are all but straightforward and will affect individuals, for example by changing how they work through rules, policies, or restructuring the organization. Regardless how well prepared, changes will lead to an emotional response and initial resistance. The worst thing you can do is to act immediately and succumb to emotions. The goal is to channel your energy into actions yielding material results. More often than not, you will regret critiquing, rejecting, or questioning change authors before understanding the full extent of the changes and its implications.
While it may not be easy, as first step you need to work towards accepting the change, thus building a foundation for further action. To help you gain some distance, let the change sink in and postpone your reaction to the next day. Afterwards, ensure you understand the communicated change and rationale. Helpful questions for your leader or the person communicating the change may include:
- Any clarification question to the contents of the message.
- What was the trigger for the change? What external factors were at play?
- How will the change benefit the team/company?
- How is my role affected? How am I personally affected?
- From when on are the changes going to be effective from?
- How can feedback be provided?
Noting down the assumptions you had when being presented with the change and contrasting these with the answers you receive, helps you compare your viewpoints. Having a full picture of differing viewpoints will help you in processing the change.
It’s important to note that as a manager and thus member of the leadership team, you are expected to accept the change by default. In cases where you have not worked on the change directly, this may be a more difficult ask. Your task is to discuss any of your concerns and questions with your manager and later commit to the changes and communicate these to others and your team as if you would have worked on these directly.
Providing feedback
When processing the change, a helpful strategy is to formulate and provide feedback. Change authors will appreciate a validation of their assumptions and whether the key points from their communication were received and understood. Further, they may connect you with ongoing efforts supporting the rollout of the change.
You can help by collecting feedback from your peers and sharing it in the form of a summary document. By getting support from others, you reduce the pressure on yourself as you’re not the sole author of the feedback anymore. You also validate your understanding of the changes, though it’s important to be aware of confirmation bias here.
When formulating constructive feedback, you can follow a simple structure. First, highlight what you are addressing (e.g. communication cascade, motivation, measures) and explain how this matches/differs from your viewpoint/experience or point out aspects that potentially were not considered. Finally, express the outcome this has for you or others. Optionally, you can include a suggestion on what can help moving forward. For example: “(…) The change was communicated mainly addressing X, leaving out Y who account for z% of the team. This decreased the mood among Y and made them feel excluded. Moving forward, would it be possible to ensure that Y is included explicitly in any follow-up communication?”
Supporting the change
The next step you can take after internalizing the change and discussing your feedback is participation in the change process. The better you understand (and believe in) the change, the more natural it will be for you to support the change. A good approach to start is by listening to your peers and getting insights on how they perceive the change. You may provide value in helping them understand the change, motivation, or implications of the change. Outlining how you perceive the change and what you see as an opportunity moving forward, will provide them with a different perspective, which they can relate to. You can help your peers to be helpful by outlining where they can support in the change implementation. Getting them involved will increase the buy-in and reduce anxiety for change through active participation.
Here a few practices that may help you in this task:
- Collecting feedback from peers along with suggestions on how to increase understanding and foster buy-in for the strategy.
- Hosting a discussion within the team to form a mutual understanding of the change.
- Volunteering for measures that are accompanying the change rollout.
- Voicing support for the change and showcasing the opportunities it creates for the individuals, team, or organization.
Supporting changes you wish never happened
Surely, you will encounter changes that you are not fond of or such that aren’t in line with your values or beliefs. There is little you can influence when things are decided and already in motion, so be aware of wasting your own energy here.
Instead, you can choose to be forward looking and get involved in future changes of similar type with the aim to correct mistakes that you think have been made. Alternatively, choosing to accept the status quo, you should ask yourself how the you can leverage the changed environment to your benefit. Explore how the changes affect your opportunities. What are things that will be easier? What are things that will not be required anymore? Are there new stakeholders or colleagues you can network with, which may help you achieve your targets?
Next step: driving change
Having supported a change and participated in its implementation gives you good foundations for initiating your own changes. It’s much more fun and impactful to work on a topic that is dear to one’s heart and build one’s own rebel alliance to initiate and lead the change. See Driving Change for tips on initiating changes and How to communicate major changes for advice on change rollout.
