Change manage­ment in any organ­i­sa­tion is one of the most complex aspects of any busi­ness growth. When it comes to human beings, change is always a very deli­cate matter and modern manage­ment must tread with care when­ever they want to complete iconic changes within busi­ness prac­tice, culture and process. Change is one thing, but getting your team excited about it will be quite another.

There are a couple of approaches to choose from. You can take a harder, top-down strategy, which is inher­ently quite aggres­sive. An example of this would be to send out an email memo to managers which states that there will now be no over­time, no pay rise and no snacks in the office, which they then commu­ni­cate in the Monday morning team scrum…

…bad idea.

You could take a super soft approach and try to get every­body involved and on board. Should you get rid of all the snacks, or just reduce the options? What snacks do we keep? Is the over­time really that big of a deal? 

But you’ll most likely end up doing twelve company-wide surveys and drowning in a myriad of opin­ions whilst moving no further forward. Also, the disap­proval may be over­whelming so you second guess whether to change things at all.

We’d all love to play the good cop all the time, but it’s wishful thinking. It’s a rare thing to get every­body to agree and the larger your company, the less likely this becomes. So what is the answer?

Utilizing the best of both.

Like many things, top change manage­ment experts have conceded to a mixture of the hard and the soft. Change in any organ­i­sa­tion requires a balanced approach; the complainers will complain, regard­less. But done right, you’ll get enough people excited enough to deliver the change that will take your company to another level of effi­ciency and profitability.

1. Iden­tify the change and make the vision clear

Statis­tics show that 70% change programmes fail. The reasons for this vary from lack of resources to lack of support, but if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Pretty self-explana­tory but you’d be surprised how hard change manage­ment becomes if the direc­tive isn’t clear at the start. Do your research and clearly iden­tify what you want to change and why it will be best for the company and your team in the long run. 

Define the vision clearly so that you can commu­ni­cate clearly across all levels of the company. The time commit­ment matters to a degree but the main thing to focus on is deciding what the change should be and why the change should happen. Projects do tend to run over time, but this will be unbear­able if the vision isn’t clear enough in the first place.

2. Define the end goal

“Change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end.” Robin Sharma

Change is good, but to what end? People need to know what the bene­fits will be at the end of the process other­wise the team are discour­aged before they’ve even had a chance to be excited. Make sure you are clear about the results you expect from changing a whole system or upgrading to new tech­nology. If people can see light at the end of the tunnel, they’ll walk towards it even through the hard, tedious stages of change. Be clear from the start so confu­sion doesn’t work its way in before the change strategy has left the meeting room.

3. Use story­telling and symbolism to get the team excited 

Once you’ve decided what the change is going to be, and you’ve built a whole vision around it, it’ll be time to start the crucial part of commu­ni­cating that vision to your team. Often, the best way to do this is to find a way to tell a really compelling story and pair it with a symbol that helps people remember it.

Do you know how well you are prepared for this kind of manage­ment task? Take Emotional Intel­li­gence (EI) Test for Global Leaders:

For example, John Kotter, a professor from Harvard Busi­ness School told a story in an article about a mid-level manager who wanted to change how gloves for factory workers were purchased. Every factory purchased their own gloves which varied in quality and in price. Bulk order discounts could not be taken advan­tage of. This inef­fi­cient process was costing the company a lot of extra money. 

To get the managers onside with the proposal to centralise the purchasing of gloves, the manager collected 424 different pairs of work gloves from across the facto­ries and attached their prices to them. In a meeting, the gloves were dramat­i­cally dumped on the table; a visual repre­sen­ta­tion of the inef­fi­ciency made the change almost indis­putable. Need­less to say, there was little resis­tance there­after and the company saved a lot of money just by this one action.

A clear symbol, whether it’s a potent statistic or a picture of what you hope to achieve by changing a process or culture, all helps with building a compelling story and cementing why the change is impor­tant. Think long and hard about how you can use a symbol to get your team excited about a new change in the company. It really does make all the difference.

4. Get middle manage­ment involved from the start

Top level manage­ment can agree to your changes, but in many SMEs (small- and medium-sized enter­prizes) and larger organ­i­sa­tions, middle manage­ment plays a crucial role in imple­menting the change at a grass-roots level. Once you’ve defined the vision, it is a good idea to let the chief imple­menters have a look over it and poten­tially high­light any prob­lems or issues you may not have thought of. 

This gets them involved at a point where changes and tweaks to the overall plan can still be made. An atmos­phere of collab­o­ra­tion makes organ­i­sa­tional change less abra­sive and more likely to succeed.

Also, you can get some intel­li­gence about indi­vidual teams; who are the ‘influ­encers’ that don’t hold manage­ment posi­tions offi­cially, but hold sway over team morale? Could they be brought in to help and become cham­pions and ambas­sadors for change? Could they give you valu­able feedback? 

Involving middle manage­ment where appro­priate will help you deal with road­blocks early on. The atmos­phere of commu­ni­ca­tion will smooth the path and not leave people shocked and confused where there should be antic­i­pa­tion and excitement.

5. Assign tasks

The key to completing any project is to break it down into small, manage­able pieces and dele­gate tasks according to the strengths within your team. Your team will be much more produc­tive if they are given tasks that bring out the best in them, and you’ll be able to dele­gate work they can complete to a high standard. 

Assigning smaller tasks to get the momentum going will keep the team focused and feeling like progress is being made. As they see their work coming together, that will boost excite­ment levels because they are a part of some­thing big that will affect the company positively. 

They become agents of change which creates a greater sense of respon­si­bility and ownership.

6. Set up regular progress checkpoints

Writing down a vision makes achieving it a prob­a­bility of 40%. Telling someone about it increases the prob­a­bility of achieving the goal to around 65%. Phys­ical account­ability meet­ings will increase the prob­a­bility of achieving the goal to 95%. 

How’s that for incentive?

Set up regular check­points with your team to keep people moti­vated and excited to share the progress of the tasks they’ve been completing to help move the change on and keep the momentum going. If there are issues, it’s easier to iron them out and keep unnec­es­sary delays to a minimum. 

7. Deploy ambas­sadors (that aren’t management)

Once the change is clearly underway, get your manage­ment team to involve morale-boosting employees to do some minor work on the imple­men­ta­tion of the strategy. If a new data­base system is being built to manage customer data, get the employees to test it out. If a new system for regis­tering expenses has been built, get a couple of employees to run through the process. 

If they’ve gone through it and they enjoy it, any grass­roots grum­blings behind closed doors that you might not be privy to can be met with genuine first­hand expe­ri­ence to shut down any fears or misgiv­ings. Change cham­pions have the power and the influ­ence to make or break whether a change fails. You can’t please every­body, that much is clear, but you can do your best to get as many people on board as possible.

8. Get feed­back via focus groups

Your change strategy has been mostly imple­mented at this stage. You’re almost ready to roll it out across the depart­ments. But it’s not perfect. At this stage, while you’re adding the finishing touches, try and gather feed­back to under­stand if there are any glaring issues before a wider rollout. 

Have a chat with manage­ment and staff to hear genuine concerns and listen to any issues raised. Doing a complete about-turn isn’t neces­sarily likely, but you can still make some minor changes at this stage, so don’t miss out on this chance to find out vital infor­ma­tion about how people could be coping with the change strategy.

9.Tackle resis­tance head-on

Some­times, adequate commu­ni­ca­tion with managers and employee ambas­sadors isn’t enough. A harsh case of gossip due to incom­plete or incor­rect infor­ma­tion can cause a near mutiny in even the best thought-out plan. If this happens, don’t be afraid to tackle the issue head-on.

Often there is a root cause. If people are concerned about losing their jobs as a result of the change, it will natu­rally cause a nega­tive reaction. 

HR profes­sionals know that some­times this is the case. You’ll always be the bad guy to the people that lose their jobs. It’s heart­breaking but some­times unavoidable. 

In most cases though, job losses for existing team members aren’t on the cards at all. In fact, you could imple­ment a recruit­ment freeze for eight months while the change is completed. New employees will then come into a new system rather than wasting time learning the old system and then having to retrain for the new.

Commu­ni­cate such issues clearly while dealing with the gossip. It reas­sures people and assuages suspi­cions that could topple what you’re doing and create a feeling of mistrust between manage­ment and staff.

10. Commu­ni­cate clearly any changes made as a result of feedback

Continue to make your team feel valued by refer­encing changes you make as a result of their sugges­tions. It helps to main­tain collab­o­ra­tive morale within the team, and it helps in the final stages of your change strategy to cement and solidify the idea that you won’t be going back on the change, but the opin­ions within the team are still welcomed.

This way, you can main­tain buy-in and excite­ment from the start of the change project, right through until the end of it making it a largely posi­tive expe­ri­ence propelled not just by senior manage­ment but by middle manage­ment and grass­roots employees as well.

Managing change as a global leader

Getting your team members or employees excited about change is diffi­cult enough when everyone is working from the same office. For global teams, where members are working from different loca­tions and rarely, if ever, meet in person, the above-mentioned strate­gies become even more impor­tant to create a sense of excite­ment and unity.

And it’s up to the global leaders to foster it. Find out more about global lead­er­ship on this Global Lead­er­ship Maga­zine, or make it even easier by signing up for our weekly news on all things Global Leadership: