According to Mckinsey, 70% of transformation projects fail to live up to expectations, because employees don’t feel engaged in the change. This article uses a simple model, THREAD to help you engage your teams in change. The model proposes that leaders: Talk authentically and passionately about the vision for change; repeat it as often as necessary; explain the ‘why’; acknowledge pain and uncertainty; and drop an anchor.
Change is not coming. There is no future change.
Change is happening now. It’s in the present. And it’s going to keep happening. Describing the present as VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) is an understatement!
A global phenomenon
Since 2008, we have seen greater fluctuations in the global economy than ever before, and we’ve seen how little it takes to undermine market confidence completely. The world of technology has ripped up everything we know about how to run our lives let alone business. We still don’t know how AI and large language models are going to impact us on a very practical level.
And in the past four or five years, geopolitical instability has dominated news broadcasts, from European land wars, military posturing in Asia, ongoing internal disputes across Africa and increasingly polarized politics in the Americas.
Stating the obvious
A leader who announces a new organizational change program is merely telling people what they already know. So, selling the vision for their particular type of change is going to be an uphill battle. Culture naturally resists change. Humans prefer certainty, so trying to change an organizational culture is painful. Getting the change management strategies right is one of the hardest tasks facing leaders.
Every leader knows their business has to grow and that involves organizational change. A successful business must anticipate and react to the changing world context. So, it can’t focus on maintaining the status quo.
But when you start to change an organization, you’ll meet resistance straight away. You’ll have to deal with the old-timers who roll their eyes, because they’ve seen it all before. There’ll be the experienced loyalists, who will be fearful that the bits they love about their organization will be thrown out.
Subverting change
There will be the doomsayers, for whom changes and redundancy are synonymous; gossips who ‘know’ everything, but aren’t really allowed to share what they’ve heard… Those who think that leadership are hiding some very bad news somewhere in the change program. You may even have some who don’t wait to see what you’re planning but go straight to polish up their resumé and LinkedIn profile to look for a new job.
Unfortunately, your job as leader is to make a radical culture change, while maintaining morale, holding on to the key talent and pushing the business forward.
Making change work
Having worked with some of the world’s biggest businesses over more than 30 years, we’ve compiled the things that make change stick, and which takes your people with you. We’ve seen the change management strategies that work, and those that add to the chaos. These are the things that the most successful change leaders we work with are doing right now. You just need to TREAD carefully:
- Talk authentically and passionately
- Repeat as often as necessary
- Explain the ‘why’
- Acknowledge pain and uncertainty
- Drop an anchor
Firstly, talk authentically and passionately.
It’s almost so obvious as to be not worth saying (but we’ll say it anyway) – if people don’t think you’re convinced by the change, you’re unlikely to be able to persuade them. And no matter what the brochure says, people will look to what you say and how what you say matches what you do. Effective change communication can be the difference between transformation and disaster.
You need to talk authentically and passionately, and you need to be visible.
Talking one-to-one to people is much more effective than town halls and webinars. Don’t spend too much of your time with senior leaders – they have enough of your time already. Invest in small meetings with key teams and key individuals all the way down the hierarchy. Share your passion, unfiltered by comms teams or diluted by a recording or rephrased in someone else’s writing.
Clearly, in an organization of 200,000 employees, you’re not going to meet all of them. But meet as many as you can and you’ll recruit informal change champions who can spread the word and enthusiasm. A successful business transformation strategy depends on successful and authentic communication.
Secondly, repeat your key message.
Change programs are sunk by gossip and misinformation. There is so much noise and conflicting information that your people need help to hear what you’re saying. So, repeat it. And repeat it again. Different fora, different channels, different words – but be consistent in maintaining the message and get your peers and reports on board with the message as well.
With this comes the warning that too much change causes confusion. Focusing on one message should also focus your mind on the key change you want to make without getting distracted by the many minor changes that will come because of the main one.
Thirdly, explain the ‘why.’
You may think that the reason for change is obvious. The exact causes may be right in front of your face. But for many of the people who work in your organization, things aren’t too bad. They have ups and downs – and that’s what they expect from a job. Maybe, this is just another of those downs!
Leaders offer suffer from proximity blindness – they are dealing with the strategic data so often and are so used to planning what’s going to happen next that they forget that their employees can’t take a step back and see the big picture. They’re focused on the next email, the next document, the next meeting and don’t notice the world changing around them. This is the central purpose of a leader – to see the whole picture, but they mustn’t forget that few others have the same perspective.
Fourthly, acknowledge that change hurts.
Human beings love comfort and the status quo. Instinctively, we are most comfortable with things are certain and stable around us. And no matter how often you repeat it, for most of us a change program is a euphemism for redundancies.
If you can show that you empathize with that pain and fear, you will earn greater trust. Build it in to how you talk about the change and how you present the process and outcomes. Because the rosier the picture is that you paint, the more people will expect pain.
I worked for a company that was bought out unexpectedly. The team administering gathered the employees together and said that nothing would change. It was only after the meeting that we noticed a few key employees hadn’t been at the meeting. The pain, shock and distrust were much more intensely felt when we found out they had been packing up their personal stuff during the meeting having lost their jobs. The reassurance that all would be OK caused much more pain – particularly as we had worked with some of those people for many years and considered them friends!
And finally – drop an anchor.
The irony of change is that if you can focus on the one or two things that won’t change, the change is likely to be accepted better. Give people something stable to hold on.
This is important. Each of us thinks we’re doing a good job. A change program tells us implicitly that we weren’t quite as good as we thought. That can undermine confidence, so showing that some of the things we did in the past remain and are still valued helps us keep that confidence. Familiarity with something comfortable reassures us that we can cope with everything else.
An anchor in this context is not pulling us back but providing security and stability in the middle of a storm of change and uncertainty.
Successful transformation
In 2011, McKinsey surveyed 2000 executives to examine the success of transformation projects and change management strategies to see if they achieved the desired improvements in performance. 70% of the leaders they spoke to said that there had been no measurable increase and that by their own judgement, the organizational change programs had failed.
More recent research from Gartner (2023) suggests that the biggest causes of change failure are lack of employee involvement in decisions, not enough people understanding the purpose and direction, and a lack of leadership empathy. The TREAD model won’t help you if your change program is ill-defined or confused, but it can increase the chances of successful implementation of change with results that you can see in the performance and productivity of your organization.
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