Leadership Styles: Engaging Employees With Change
The greatest challenge any CEO faces with a new business strategy is getting traction. In terms of developing an engagement and change strategy, determing strategies for how to deal with leaders that publicly support the change but in reality don’t is the first issue you need to deal with.
Some reasons why there is poor traction in leaders’ and employees’ involvement in business strategies could be: 1. Disunity in the leadership team 2. Launching initiatives with too much fan fare and failure to give project updates 3. Organizational change fatigue – frequent changes make people give up 4. Poor track record in sustaining change 5. Strategies to involve employees took a long time to implement
So let’s tackle each point and identify some things we can do as employee engagement specialists to minimize the impact of these impediments to successfully implementing change.
A divided leadership team One of the most overlooked aspects of change management is alignment of the leadership team with the new business strategy. One quick tip is to facilitate a session on how the successful implementation of change is largely dependent on a united leadership team. They need to understand their role in engaging employees in the change process and what employees will be looking for in terms of signs of support and commitment. This is the key message, whilst the leadership team may not all be in agreement, and it should be noted that they rarely are, they must be aligned. That is, they will give 100% commitment to the new strategy and what they need to communicate and do to engage their teams. This is important because the first thing employees look for is a divided leadership team to discredit the new strategy.
Commencing change with a big bang but after that no monitoring of successes or updates are made As a change specialist you should be able to persuade the Chief Executive Office and the company’s management team that your change management strategy is essential. Initially they will absolutely support the change and suggest that big events and communications strategies be done to inform the staff of the new business strategy. But it is most likely that between the day that the first measurable achievement of the change strategy and the launch of it will be lengthy which decreases the momentum it first had and eventually convinces staff that the change will probably not happen. You have to properly engage employees and persuade them that change is at hand but losing your credibility as a team of leaders poses high risks to success. One effective way to persuade employees that there is momentum to create a timeline and milestones that clearly indicate where you are and where you need to get to which will definitely have the team of leaders realize how important it is to engage employees to overcome obstacles in between.
Organizational change fatigue Constant organizational change in business strategies can make employees and their leaders disenchanted especially when earlier initiatives didn’t have enough time to work. Most of these new changes are not really new but are just enhancements of an original initiative. When there is a need to introduce a new direction there must be a link that connects this new initiative to those that are existing. For employees to become engaged in something new the design of the process of change must consider how it affects them. When this is incorporated into the process of involving others the “Aha” moment is sure to come to them and they will understand the reasons why.
Company has a poor history in change sustainability When employees have worked long enough at an organization they are less willing to accept new organizational change especially if previous ones have never worked before. This is why it is important for you to make sure that they know what makes this new change strategy different from previous ones and the plans for sustainability and success of the new changes; by doing this you send the message that the “ineffective ways” of implementing change can no longer apply. It is vital to communicate the importance of the new change strategy in all the stages of the implementation so that you take employees along with you for the journey, this way you enforce the idea that staff will no longer slip back to old mistakes but profit from the changes implemented.
Engagement strategies and activities take forever to execute The final point is that if you take your time involving and engaging staff and team leaders you threaten the success of your change strategy with poor leadership effectiveness. When you initiate the dialogue of the change strategy, you need to display transformational leadership and involve yourself explaining the time frame that is set, the milestone achievements and the impression that the change has on the organizational members. By doing this you will be able to enhance significant strategies that will aim further than simple messages and data concerning the change; but will improve on the strategies to increase involvement and engagement that will concentrate on the individual and how the change can positively affect their work and overall situation. By involving employees at an early stage, contrary to the traditional strategies of communication management alone, the staff will feel more ownership and responsibility for the change that they will help implement.
Changes to policies and business directions that affect a division or the entire organization elicit the same reactions among leaders and employees regardless of the type of organization they work for. There will be groups of individuals who will embrace organizational change even if information is not available, there will be those who say organizational change will never occur, and the third group will be the individuals who would rather wait for sure signs of commitment and visible signs of achievements before declaring their support for the strategy. For change managers the challenge is to focus first on the team of leaders to get their unified support and later deal with the three groups in order to secure their commitment.
Marcia Xenitelis is a recognized authority on the subject on transformational leadership and change management and has spoken at conferences around the world. For access to case studies and more information on the types of strategies you can implement to engage employees visit www.transformational-leadership.com for a wealth of free informative articles and resources.
