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How To Communicate Difficult Organizational Change 

How To Communicate Difficult Organizational Change 

How To Communicate Difficult Organizational Change 

How To Communicate Difficult Organizational Change 

by Daniel Lock 03/12/2018

One thing is certain, at some point in organisational life, as a leader you’ll be required to deliver news that change is coming. And some may not like it.

Announcing change can be intimidating and challenging for the leader. If not handled deftly it can wreak havoc on the how well the change progresses. Resistance and outright mutiny can result.

Based on my experience in organization change, my involvement in leadership training, and our conversations with over hundreds of executives, here’s six ways managers can engage their people in change and connect with them.

Allow way more planning time than you think is required to develop the content, the delivery, and the crucial follow-up

You’ve seen the Ted talks, and perhaps comedians and they look so polished and effective on stage. But ask them how they make it look so easy and they’ll tell you it’s in the preparation. Lots of preparation.

Preparation isn’t the only consideration. It’s also important to communicate more often and in more channels. In the first instance, you’ll expect to hold a town hall style meeting or video conference to introduce and explain the change. Expect to also conduct follow ups and feedback sessions conducted by appropriate levels of leadership.

Coordinating announcements and sequencing when and who will deliver them is an important factor. It sometimes seems like we’re having meetings to plan a plan, but good planning and sequencing of communication events will save time, and pain, over the long run.

Multiple opportunities for understanding conversations is critical to effective change. And equally, receiving the change in the correct order and from the right leaders is critical to credibility.

 

Train all levels of leadership to emphasise context

Don’t assume middle and front-line management will communicate the messages well. Conduct briefing sessions and work with them through role plays if required to help them in the delivery. In sensitive conversations are easily misinterpreted.

On the receiving side of an organisational restructure early in my career a manager told us we “lucky to have a job, let alone get paid more for additional responsibilities”. I’ll never forget that. The resentment and gap of trust and relationship was palpable. We remained that way for some time, despite the overtures of senior management.

 

Describe the urgent case for change

The organisational inertia of managing the day-to-day and the inevitable problems that arise will cause a business to drift.

An interruption is needed.

Because without a prodding outside force creating a crisis of sorts, leaders won’t sit down and do the careful thinking, planning and strategizing to make success happen.

To illustrate why it’s important to create an interruption or crisis, consider this study conducted by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen. She conducted research with obese women, wondering how do our expectations impact goal achievement. It’s important to make the urgent case for change in order to galvanize people from the status quo. After all, change has costs and can be painful, so they need a solid ‘why’. Describe the impacts and missed opportunities to customers, staff, the business if you don’t change.

 

Personalize both the impact and the resolution

Have empathy for how people are impacted. Moving down from the why, beginning talking about the ‘what’. If you talk only at the why, people may become confused about what applies to them; and Ambiguity is one of the key reasons for resistance.

So, for example, come prepared to meetings having thought through potential impacts to people so you can answer these concerns on the spot. This alleviates anxiety, as if you don’t know the answers you must go away to get them, which can take considerable time. Employees will appreciate the attention and support even if they’re negatively impacted.

 

Give the affected people as many options for as much participation as you can

People don’t resist what they create. This allows for autonomy and pride. While some changes really will impact people negatively, such as redundancies due to reorganisations, if you don’t the why and what with empathy and then asked for their input, they’ll help you generate practical ideas.

 

Ask and answers these questions:

1. Does the proposed change create a future the realization of which fulfills matters of fundamental interest or importance to the relevant parties.

2. In the realizing of that “created future”, the people you are leading (those who must act to realize that “created future”) must see an opportunity to fulfill their concerns.

3. In the realizing of that future, the people you are leading must see an opportunity for self-expression.

4. In the realizing of that future, the people you are leading must see an opportunity for them to personally make a noteworthy contribution to the realization of that future.

Thinking through these questions, if you see gaps, move to fill them immediately.

 

Demonstrate empathy and responsibility, not just authority

The Freakonomics team recently looked apologies and what makes for a good one. The answer was to acknowledge the impact on others, combined with a concrete and believable plan for restitution to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

The same approach can be used when introducing difficult change. By taking responsibility for the impact of the change on others, whether you instigated it or not, builds credibility.

 

Summing up

These 6 tips and approaches will get the communicating challenging organisational change. It can feel laborious and tedious to spend time in meetings planning for every contingency.

So, where do you stop?

The guiding question to ask yourself to keep on track is not, “Have we communicated enough?”, but “Have we reached our people?”

Daniel Lock helps organizations unlock value and productivity through process improvement, project and organizational change management. Find out more about him at daniellock.com and check out his latest in-depth post, CHANGE MANAGEMENT PROCESS: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide where you’ll learn not only the fundamentals of change management but why these are critical to achieving business outcomes. Make change work for you and add to your tools and techniques.

Twitter: @DanielLock

Daniel Lock

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Afraid of failing? That’s why we need to cultivate a fail fast culture

Afraid of failing? That’s why we need to cultivate a fail fast culture

What does it mean to cultivate a fail fast culture? 

What does it mean to cultivate a fail fast culture? 

by Janet Sernack 26/11/2018

I recently met with a client, who was seeking our ideas, information and input towards what might be involved in cultivating a fail fast organizational culture. It was an interesting discovery conversation, causing me to explore what needs to be in place to create permission, vulnerability, safety, courage and trust for the deep learning’s that mistakes and failure provide in advancing creativity, invention and innovation.

How could developing a fail fast culture help organizations unfreeze, survive, flow and flourish with the current levels of fear, ambiguity, uncertainty, volatility and instability in 21st century organizations?

 

What does fail fast mean in its original context?

In software development, the intention is to discover and detect where a potential problem might occur in the overall process, to speed it up and minimise time and costs. The focus is on iterating and steering the project to success as it develops, rather than creating a lot of software before showing it to the end user – to minimize the risks involved in their acceptance of it. This enables developers to test their products and get immediate customer feedback, to ensure that what is being developed is in tune, and aligned with what customer’s think they might want, or want.

How can failure be perceived as feedback and learning?

Working this way teaches people the value of developing customer intimacy and an empathic understanding as to what constitutes value in their eyes. It is an ongoing learning process where feedback, whether positive or negative, enables people to adapt, respond and improve quickly.

Learning from this agile way of working, it is one way of taking the “emotional heat” out of “failure” as an emotional reaction, a visceral experience and perpetration against someone.

There is an opportunity to potentially reframe failure as “feedback” and as a “learning process.” To enable people and organizations to iterate, pivot and continuously improve through intentional behaviour, system and artefact changes – in ways that provide increased value that people, and customers appreciate and cherish.

What gets in the way of people applying this rationale?

Growing up in western civil societies and school systems, we learn to see failure as a mistake, as a shortcoming, stupidity or imperfection that we are responsible for and ashamed about.

We often feel that we must make excuses about it and apologise for it. In fact, we live in world where governments fail, relationships fail, businesses fail – so none of these failures are a cause for celebration, they are merely signs of ideas in progress.

According to Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Disney Animation; “Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are the inevitable consequence of doing something new (and as such, should be valuable; without them, we’d have no originality).”

 

• Visceral reactions to failure

When we fail, we unconsciously sink into a series of reactive responses, that engage us neurologically and emotionally resulting in a range of irrational cognitive (thinking and feeling) distortions, which usually involves disappointment, confusion and shame.

We then move away from and avoid solving the problem because of these pervasive un-resourceful states and act defensively, which usually involves laying blame, making justifications, excuses, and operating from denial.

People then move away from and avoid solving the problem because of these pervasive un-resourceful states and act defensively, which usually involves laying blame, making justifications, excuses, and operating from denial as illustrated below in Diagram 1.

People then move away from and avoid solving the problem because of these pervasive un-resourceful states and act defensively, which usually involves laying blame, making justifications, excuses, and operating from denial.

This is often a very useful iterative process, and according to Ed Catmull, who has failed more times than we can imagine, it’s important; “To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.”

 

• Be-ing wrong and judged

When we are made to feel (by our own internal processing or externally by others) “wrong” we know that we both self-judge and that others will make a judgement about us. Many of us are concerned about how others see and approve of us, and like to compare ourselves to, and please others.

When we find ourselves being judged in this way, especially for making any kind of mistake, that people make unfair and often generalized and distorted assessment of us and then delete all our other abilities.

Being judged questions and invalidates our competence “I/you screwed up” voids our confidence “I/you just don’t have it in me/ you” and minimizes our capacity to successfully complete the job or task at hand “I/you am/are a wimp”.

 

• Be-coming the failure

This affects us deeply and in effect, we “be-come” the failure, feel violated, disappointed ashamed and fearful of its punitive consequences; being fired, disregarded for promotions and special projects or being required to take the blame and “fall on your sword”.

 

How can we start to allow failure to be-come the “norm”?

As Ed Catmull says; “If you create a fearless culture (or as fearless as human nature will allow) people will be much less hesitant to explore new areas, identifying unchartered pathways and then charging down them. They will also begin to see the upside of decisiveness; The time they’ve saved by not gnashing their teeth about whether they’re on the right course comes in handy when they hit a dead end and need to reboot.”

 

• Be-ing strategic and systemic

Creating this type of culture requires boldness, courage, commitment and determination by the Board and the Executive Team to frame and lead the way forwards, and push the envelope towards the desired positive future state. At Pixar, “failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration” in fact, “if you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: you are being driven by a desire to avoid it/ And for leaders, especially, this strategy-trying to avoid failure by outthinking it- dooms you to fail”.

• Be-ing purposeful and meaningful

It involves investing in a longer term, strategic and systemic perspective of the organization, that inspires, motivates and pulls people towards and creatively engages them in co-creating a desirable future and the possibility of making their, and their customers worlds a better place.

• Uncoupling failure The focus is to then be willing to uncouple their own fears of failure and risk adversity, to develop self-awareness and self-mastery to confidently, empathically and authentically lead the desired changes and “create an environment in which making mistakes doesn’t strike terror” into people’s hearts and minds.

• Learning, teaching and coaching people

It is then possible to teach and coach others how to uncouple their fears towards failure and its negative consequences, to support and enable people to “normalize” failure by;

Developing tolerance to surprises and problems and shift the way people think and feel about pushing the envelope, making changes and taking smart risks.

• Cultivating the generative discovery skillset that sees, responds to and solves problems by being empowering and enabling people to be, think and act differently.

• Support them to recover, renew and replenish their hearts and minds when they make mistakes and fail when learning how to shift the business game.

Doing this builds people’s trust, receptivity, curiosity, participation towards taking responsibility for developing a “fail fast” culture and the innovation agility to birth it, operate and sustain it successfully.

At ImagineNation™ we provide innovation coaching, education and culture consulting to help businesses achieve their innovation goals. Because we have done most of the learning and actioning of new hybrid mindsets, behaviors and skill-sets already, we can help your businesses also do this by opening people up to their innovation potential.

Find out about The Coach for Innovators Certified Program, a collaborative, intimate & deep personalized learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 8-weeks, starting January 22, 2019: https://www.imaginenation.com.au/programs/innovation-coaching/

Contact janet@imaginenation.com.au to find out how we can partner with you to learn, adapt and grow your business in the digital age.

Janet Sernack

https://www.imaginenation.com.au/

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TOUCHING INNOVATIONS 2019

TOUCHING INNOVATIONS 2019

TOUCHING INNOVATIONS 2019: What to expect

TOUCHING INNOVATIONS 2019: What to expect

by Talentese Team 30/09/2018

We’ve got great news to announce – Talentese is going to be a recruiting and matchmaking partner at TOUCHING INNOVATIONS 2019 – a dedicated Internet of Things Startup Event happening in Berlin (Feb 14th+15th 2019, at Deutsche Telekom Representative Office).

 

iot conference 2019

TOUCHING INNOVATIONS 2019

 

50+ speakers, 20 exclusive exhibitors and 15 startup pitches from different IoT fields – there’re lots of things to do that you should fit into 2 days!

Besides 200+ IoT founders and market experts, we are expecting 100+ tech investors of all kinds on site, such as VCs and business angels, plus leading corporates, accelerators, venture builders and media representatives – in addition to other exciting participants from industry and research.

A must attend by IoT startups seeking funding, partners, customers or M&A, by Venture Capital Firms, Business Angels, Corporate Ventures, Corporate M&A, Innovation Hub Executives, Investment Banks, Accelerators and all IoT adventurers.

In a wide range of presentations, international experts will cover various topics and take you through the latest trends and research in future tech, e.g. about IoT sensors and actuators, smart textiles, wearable technology, artificial intelligence & machine learning, AR & VR, as well as patents & copyrights, lab & venture building, valuation methods for tech startups, growth & exit strategies, and many other topics.

Speakers include managers, CEOs and market experts from: Berlin Senate, Triangle Venture Capital Group, FunderNation, AXA Startup Center, Google Cloud, Carl Finance, Fraunhofer FOKUS, DIN, IHK Berlin, TARGET E-Sports, TIGGES Lawyers, Redstone, bunch.ai, FideliumTech and much more!

And Talentese is going to help everybody maximize the time at the event – we are going to be waiting for you in the Matchmaking area 2.0!

You can expect much more than just networking:

Round tables & discussions on the hottest field-related topics

Career consultancy and employer presentations of the participating companies

Career, connections & acquaintance matchmaking

 

Can’t wait to meet you all there!

 

APPLICATION and TICKETS

IoT startups wanting to exhibit, speak or pitch please contact info@touchinginnovations.de.

Visitors, save your tickets with an exclusive Talentese discount of 15% (seats are limited): https://touchinginnovations2019tickets.eventbrite.de | Use promo code: TALENTESE_TI2019

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