5 Rules for Leading Through Change Without Losing Your Team

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OUR WORK LIVES ARE GETTING MORE STRESSFUL

We are constantly inundated with media reports, LinkedIn blogs, and conversations around the water cooler about the amount of stress that we face in today's work environment.

I honestly don't know if it's any harder now than it was when I was a young leader 35 years ago, or perhaps our coping mechanisms have somehow diminished. Whether this new stress is real or perceived though is a moot point.

Some things we do know:

• The ability to disseminate information has far outstripped our ability to absorb it and to make sense of it;
• We are “on” for a much greater percentage of our day than we ever have been; and at the same time…
• We're dealing with major social and economic shifts, which make it even more difficult to know our boundaries, reducing our level of comfort, security, and confidence.

When it comes to dealing with wave after wave of transformational change in your organization, I totally get why it might be wearing thin on even your best employees.

In this episode, I look specifically at how to lead your people through the never-ending waves of transformational change, so that you can keep them focused, and keep yourself sane.

I start with a summary of an article in HRM Magazine that was recommended to me. I then ask the question, “Who on earth would want to be a leader operating under these circumstances?” And, I finish with five tips for managing your people's state when you have to execute the next transformational change program for your company.

PEOPLE ARE LOSING TRUST IN THEIR LEADERS

After 300+ full-length episodes of No Bullshit Leadership , I'm always looking for great content ideas from the leaders in our audience. I received a link to an article this week from one of our longest standing listeners. Ida King has been with us virtually from the start, and I had the pleasure of working with her briefly some years ago when I was living in Brisbane.

Ida is a high-integrity leader, who has a strong results focus. As I found out during my career, this isn't always popular. But when you have someone like Ida on your team, you know that you can trust her to give her best in everything she does. She has that rare quality of organizational courage.

The article that Ida referred me to appeared in HRM Magazine and was written by Kate Neilson . It had the catchy title Are We Barrelling Towards a Period of Organizational Ennui? It was based on research released a few weeks ago by Gartner with an even more provocative title: Australian Employees Are No Longer Inspired or Motivated by Their Leaders .

Even though these articles are built around the Australian context, I can tell you from my work in the US and Europe that this is an incredibly common theme.

The thrust of the article goes something like this:

• We managed to get through COVID by asking people to do more and investing in new ways of working. Now that our people have given everything to get us through that, companies are calling them back into the office, and this has made people feel as though they're not trusted.
• Employees feel as though their leaders are saying to them, "We trusted you then, you stepped up, and productivity went through the roof. But now we don't trust you anymore."
• Change hasn't slowed since the end of the pandemic either. Initiative after initiative is being layered on top of the last, and the stress is becoming unsustainable.
• This is exacerbated by the high turnover at CEO level – Gartner says the average CEO tenure in Australia is now as low as 18 months. This confirms the trend of declining tenures at the top, and remember, every new CEO wants to stamp their own style, authority, and symbols of change on the company they're leading.
• Organizations are finding difficulties everywhere they look, as cost and funding pressures drive them into a state of transformation.
• The perennial promise of technology enablers hasn't played out the way it was expected, either – people are still being asked to do more. This has caused high levels of change fatigue.
• And, of course, now leaders are talking openly about AI and its hugely transformative potential. They're painting a vision for how AI is going to create unparalleled efficiency by automating many jobs that are now being done by… oh yeah, their current employees! This is unlikely to boost goodwill towards the company.
• These factors have led people to become disengaged, demotivated, and resentful, unable to mount even a modicum of enthusiasm for the latest transformational change initiative.

The article suggests that CEOs need to ask themselves one key question: “Is our workforce even remotely in the condition where it could execute our latest change initiative?”

The Gartner research found that the level of disengagement has gone beyond garden variety change resistance. And in my experience, this is where transformation most often fails – at the human level of unwillingness and resistance.

THREE REMEDIES TO DEAL WITH “RESENTEEISM”

The article offers a couple of remedies for dealing with what they call “resenteeism”, which is another great click-baity term for the Urban Dictionary. This word defines the situation where people aren't leaving but they have zero goodwill for their employer.

Regardless of what you call it, I've always said that if you force people to do things that they want to do, well, you might be able to get them to do it, but they'll drag their feet. They'll find a way to get even with you when you are not looking… and you won't even know when and how they've done it!

This can even happen in relatively benign and stable periods. Most often, if your people feel as though they don't matter… or if they don't have any autonomy and empowerment… or if you overly micromanage them… anytime they feel as though they're giving more then they're getting back.

Let's have a look at some of the remedies that the article offers:

1. Work with the CEO and any change-focused executives to slow the pace of change. Of course, being the official publication of the Australian Human Resources Institute , the article says that Chief HR Officers are in the best position to do this.

Although this guidance is pretty sound, I'm just not sure that trying to convince CEOs to cool their jets is going to work in most cases. They are who they are, and most of them are going to respond to pressure from above way more readily than they’ll rely on advice from below.

What has a better chance of working is pushback from the accountable executives in each portfolio to remind the CEO that change only hurts when it's irrational. I did a podcast on this a long time ago: Ep.119: Change Fatigue , and that's really worth going back to and having a listen.

There's no point in bringing change unless you can clearly quantify the value that's going to be captured on the other side of that change.

The classic case of this is organizational restructures, which are often sold to the stakeholders as an essential tool to realign the organization to its distribution channels, or to better serve its customers. But in my experience, any structure works!

This is self-evident: If you take a longitudinal look at any company's performance through multiple restructures, its performance rarely changes. And if it does change, there are dozens of factors that play. Who knows what role a restructure may have played?

To have any confidence that a restructure is worthwhile, you would have to believe that the cost, confusion, and disruption that it generates is also worthwhile – and I've never met an executive who can do that successfully!

If you have the right leadership and culture, then any structure will work. But if you don't have the right leadership and culture, a restructure won't help!

2. Help employees to see the point of work. Okay, now we're getting somewhere. I'm going to come back to this one shortly.

3. Equip leaders with the capabilities, behaviors and skills that they need to lead a workforce in 2024 and beyond. Okay, maybe.

At Your CEO Mentor , we are in the business of training and developing leaders to be more competent – to improve their own performance and the performance of their teams. Having said that, training by itself won't give you the results you're looking for.

Your organization has to be single-minded about lifting the standard of behavior and performance of every leader. And your most senior executives need to have the appetite to replace any leader who isn't up to the task. The people who work for you deserve nothing less!

WHO WOULD WANT TO BE A LEADER?

The article goes so far as to ask the question, “Why would anyone want to be a leader?” A quote that really caught my eye, from Gartner Vice President Aaron McEwen , went like this:

"Shareholders expect leaders to make tough decisions and to be rational, objective, and dispassionate. But the humans [who] work for them expect them to be human, authentic and caring. That can feel like an impossible task, and it's showing up in the fact that people don't want to be managers anymore, because you have to carry cognitive dissonance 24/7 to be a leader in today's world."

Do you really have to be in cognitive dissonance? And, is this really a disincentive to becoming a leader?

Look, I'm not going to try to convince you one way or the other. Hard things are hard… and leadership is hard! But, I guess to make it worthwhile and rewarding, you have to believe very deeply in two fundamental truths:

1. Leadership is the platform that affords you the opportunity to positively impact other people. You have to want to have that impact: it lifts your focus above the day-to-day fray; it gives you purpose, and it guides your actions. If you’re not willing to take on a leadership role, well, the fact is your impact is going to be limited no matter how you cut it – and, eventually, you're going to find yourself sitting on the sidelines as a disgruntled employee, wishing you had better leaders above you!

2. You have to believe that leading for performance and driving positive change aligns the company's interests with your employees’ interests. This is a balance, for sure – and you know that you can never make everyone happy. The fundamental premise, though, is that if you stretch people to be their best, you're going to optimize performance for the company and at the same time you'll give every individual many gifts:

• Greatly enhanced career prospects;
• The ability to stand out and get promoted more quickly;
• A boost in self-esteem that can only come from achieving difficult things; and
• Massively increased confidence.

This is the recipe for giving people a great life by unlocking their individual potential.

?Of course, I can't make you believe these key principles. Nor would I want to.

All I can say is that, once you know these truths deep down in your heart, and your soul, and your gut, you will never again feel the slightest bit of cognitive dissonance as a leader.

FIVE TIPS FOR LEADING A CHANGE FATIGUED TEAM

I'm going to finish with my five tips for leading your team through transformational change.

1. For any transformation, be really clear about the why, the what and the how. What's the rule? Change only hurts when it's irrational.

“Irrational” is anything that doesn't deliver a clear value outcome. If you see irrational change coming in your direction, it's your obligation as a leader to fight as hard as you can to have the change reconsidered.

This isn't reserved only for CHROs. It's the responsibility of any leader who can see that the workforce impacts are going to dwarf any notional benefits of an irrational change. But it requires a level of organizational courage, a solid rationale, and great communication skills.

The best leaders know how to do this thing. They don't always get their way, but they always nail their colors to the mast as being honest, diligent, and strong.

2. Make sure you can describe the value of any change, not just the mechanics of it. Let's use the current return to office debate as an example: in my mind, this has absolutely nothing to do with trust. But the fact is that, even though work from home (WFH) was a workable short-term solution, it has significant limitations. It also has detrimental long-term consequences:

• You can't build culture from home;
• You can't develop talent from home;
• You can't stimulate innovation from home;
• You can't optimize the interactions with your team from home; and
• WFH is highly transactional: task assigned... task delivered!

Being in the same location as often as possible is a no-brainer. Anyone who says otherwise is just wearing their self-interest on their sleeve.

Don't get me wrong, this is fine for a whole bunch of tasks. But if you think that WFH is the ultimate answer, then all I can do is wish you the best in finding your next job once your company folds ??…

I genuinely believe that the negative long-term implications for culture, talent, and innovation are significant. Two years ago, this opinion was pretty unpopular, but I'm being joined now by a growing chorus of thought leaders who've arrived at the same conclusion I did.

The trick is, people need to know why you want them back in the office and they have to understand what you're trying to achieve. Can you communicate this adequately to your people? If not, they could be forgiven for just feeling as though you don't trust them.

3. When it comes to any transformational change, don't lie, don't sugarcoat and don't make promises you can't keep. Positive organizational change often has a human toll. On many occasions, restructures and reorganizations are just a cover story for removing cost by reducing the size of the workforce.

If this is the case, make sure you are absolutely clear with people about what's going on and what the objectives of the transformation are. If you communicate one thing and then it turns out to not be true further down the track, you'll find that you've earned your team's distrust – and rightly so!

That's why, for anything you aren't completely certain about, you need to convey that there's still a bunch of moving parts, and that some decisions are yet to be made, rather than ruling something out that you later have to implement.

4. If your transformation program is just a cost-cutting exercise, you've got one shot in the locker. If your transformation means that someone's going to lose their job, you need to plan it thoroughly. And, when I say thoroughly, I mean it's got to be planned well enough that you can say to people, "We wish this wasn't necessary, but it is. Once this is done though, we are going to be in great shape and we're going to be ready to move forward. This is a one-off event”. Any job cuts have to be one and done.

If you have to go to that well a second time, people learn a few things about your leadership, like:

• Maybe you're not competent, because you couldn't get it right the first time; or
• Maybe they’ll feel that the organization is in worse shape than it actually is; or
• Maybe they’ll just feel as though you're not telling them the truth about what's going on.

So, they start to sleep with one eye open, waiting for the axe to fall on them. Then, they start to dedicate their days to online job boards and networking meetings. Why wouldn't they leave the sinking ship? They're just going to assume the worst.

5. No matter what form the transformation takes, don't let people fill in the gaps in the narrative. You should be communicating constantly to keep people up to date with progress; to tell them of any developments; to let them know if the original plans have shifted.

In the absence of good communication from you, rumors will take hold. This is such a simple thing, but in times of uncertainty, our instinct is to remain silent. Why? Because we don't want to expose our lack of knowledge about what's going on. Or perhaps we're afraid of saying something unpalatable that people won't like because then they might not like us.

You should find this fact liberating though: people hate uncertainty way more than they hate bad news.

STRONG LEADERS RESIST IRRATIONAL CHANGE

All right, bringing this all together, change is inevitable and I can't see it slowing down anytime soon. Add to that the variables of social and economic upheaval, and the unknown future impacts of AI, and you have a perfect storm.

If you want your people to thrive through major change, you need to stop asking them to do things that don't make sense – the things that don't really make a difference to your company's performance.

So, be crystal clear about the positive outcomes that are going to be achieved from any transformational change. Don't layer transformational changes on top of each other. Apart from anything else, you're just never going to know whether or not the change actually worked.

Most importantly, don't pretend it's something that it's not. Sometimes you're just going to need to cut costs. So at least have the decency to be honest with people about where they stand.

They're going to feel less of that organizational ennui if they at least know that they can trust you to tell them the truth at any given point. And if you’re not the one driving the change, you need to fight hard to make the people above you aware of the cultural downside.

A fearless conversation now is going to save you and your people untold misery in the months and years to come.

This is from Episode 319 of the No Bullsh!t Leadership podcast. Each week, I share the secrets of high performance leadership; the career accelerators that you can’t learn in business school, and your boss is unlikely to share with you. Listen now on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or on your favorite podcast player.