So you have your burning platform, your guiding coalition and your vision – what next? Well the vision won’t achieve anything sat on the managing directors computer, it needs to be communicated to everyone involved in the change and that will be the topic of tomorrow’s blog. I have often been asked “What is the most valuable piece of advice you could give to a change leader?” My response is constant – “Communicate, communicate, communicate and when you have finished communicating. communicate some more.” People often report that the worst part of change is not knowing, that once the way forward is clear they can start making their personal decisions about their own way forward. Any change leader or manager who does not have a communications stream in their programme should be sacked immediately, sat in an office by themselves for a month without any communication and left to ponder what life is like when nobody tells you what is going on.
People will want to know why the change is happening, what is going to be different afterwards, how the change is going to happen, when things will happen, who is in charge and how it will affect them personally. At some level, the question that every individual will be asking themselves is W. I. I. F. M? “What is in it for me?”
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell offers some useful insights into effective communications during change. You already have your advocates, the members of the guiding coalition, and they must be the initial message bearers. They probably need a communications professional to help craft clear, consistent and accurate messages that can be passed on initially by themselves and subsequently by others in the organisation. I was working on the job only a couple of years ago when talking to 3 equally senior members of the management team I got three quite different messages about what was going to happen in one particular part of the business. This cannot be allowed to happen – it leaves employees and other stakeholders confused, it leads to significant mistrust and will inevitably leads to hours and hours of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.
Plan and rehearse your communications especially if you are going to hold any form of launch event. I did this with the board of the company I was working with who wanted to announce a significant piece of organisational strategy and change. With probably spent three or four days in total crafting the messages, wondering what the listeners responses might be to the messages we were sending, re-crafting them rehearsing them and then letting every single employee know within a 24-hour window. Yes, I’ll say that again, every single employee heard from their own director and within no more than 24 hours of other employees what was going to happen in the future.
Be prepared for questions, and misunderstanding – remember that you have probably taken weeks to get where you are and you cannot expect your audience to catch you up with a half-hour PowerPoint, followed by 10 rushed minutes of questions and answers. Your preparation will have left you with a set of questions and answers that you can hand out or put on your company website and there will be more emerge as individuals and groups start to understand the possible implications for them. If you don’t know the answer to any of the questions say so-the worst thing you can possibly do is to make answer up only to be proven wrong sumps later stage. This totally destroys trust. You will get a lot more respect for saying “I don’t know but I will find out and get back to you within 48 hours” than you will for waffling or making up stuff on the hoof. Of course once you promised to get back within 48 hours, or whatever, you must do so or fall even deeper into the pit of mistrust.
So your communications efforts have started, there is a long way to go, they must be kept open throughout the process. Even when there is nothing to say. I will say that again “Even when there is nothing to say, you need to say that there is nothing to say.” Too often I have seen a vacuum left when there really wasn’t much action being taken. There really wasn’t anything to tell everybody else but the trouble is that if you don’t say anything people make stuff up to fill the gaps and what they make up is not likely to be reality and will take you ages to disassemble and correct.
Communications is a critical part of any change efforts and needs to be handled as professionally as the engineers or IT specialists or chemists or whoever are handling the technical aspects of the change.
