Change is a given, how you manage it is not: Best practices from leading CMOs

There are actually three things guaranteed in life. Death, taxes....and change.

Last Friday's CMO Coffee Talk featured a robust discussion on change management, led by Brenda Robinson who shared some great insights, best practices and new data on how companies are managing change in today's unique environment.

From "what's in it for me" to creating a culture prepared for change in advance, the chat highlights below cover a lot of ground.

If you are a B2B CMO or head of marketing and want to join a community with 1400+ of your peers, let me know.

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Successfully handling change is about being comfortable with feeling uncomfortable

Managing change is often an after thought versus proactively planned at the project start

Keeping level headed with ebbs and flows, while also maintaining leadership

Ability to accept that you can’t control the outside world.?All you can control is your actions and responses to the situation.

The ability to thrive, not just survive, through adversity

Resilience = how fast you adapt and move forward

Roles that were clear before are less clear now. Event marketing?

Endless uncertainty about what’s coming, and how much to push a team to productivity without overloading them

Decision fatigue is real.

Agreed! Too many decisions with no clear answers most days

We've had a lot of org change and it's not always clear who the decision owners are

It’s hard to convince people to stop booking inefficient meetings, but taking a hard stance on it might help (must have an agenda, must send notes, no more than X people)

And as working parents, the whole issue, widely covered, around “The kids are not alright…”

Here is the WSJ resilience fatigue link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/still-feeling-pandemic-miserable-there-are-ways-to-dig-out-11643725802?st=c5mlo4bdfpp80ya&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

I stopped accepting meetings without an agenda and it's alleviated some of the meetings to have a meeting.

If there’s no “cost” to booking wasteful 30 minute meetings, they’ll never stop and it definitely chips away at your productivity

Now I’m working on mandating notes with clear action items (my meetings are one thing because I control it) but when joining other meetings and there are no clear action items or decisions at the end it drives me crazy.

I manage change with my team through a "I've got your back" culture

“Change fatigue” and “change capacity” are great terms to frame this

I also feel like our "change capacity" is just getting eaten up by all the uncontrollable change due to pandemic factors, how are we working, how are our kids going to school, what are our routines, and so on, that we can't seem to focus on the changes that our businesses may be asking for.?I find we are dragging our feet on the business change, but not for clear reasons, I think this might be it.

Change Management must be a process, Kottler had 7 key elements of CM: Frequent and open communication about the change and the need for change, A structured change management approach, Dedicated change management resources and funding, Employee engagement and participation, Engagement with and support from middle management, Transition effort is aligned with organizational cultural attributes and values

I find the issue is not fatigue but rather organization structures that are built to resist change, which tend to be filled with people who are generally change resistant.

We have implemented Wednesday is a no meeting day thru all of 2020 and it has been well received.??Unless there is a critical issue that needs one.?Truly critical.??Also, Covid has increased the number of meetings.?Better discipline around who all needs to be in the meeting, with agenda and outcomes documented.

I’ve been very aggressive about making people take a day off if they’ve just gone through a stress personal or professional experience.

Breaking down the process and working through it by asking the right questions to guide critical thinking and providing radical candor throughout is imperative to success.?Folks don’t have the capacity to break things down if they haven’t been through a massive organizational change before.

“You can make the decision and you can say ‘no.’” Once in a while the person you said no to might escalate, and once in a great while, I might have to overrule you. If that doesn’t happen every once in a while, you’re not saying ‘no’ enough.

In my last role we made status meetings optional (unless indicated we needed everyone) and notes were always circulated, rotating note takers. It helped take that pressure off.

Forced 1:1 are also stressors.?Fluid communications need to allow for the speed at which decisions and change is happening.

Also, can we redefine what "HAS" to happen each day??Is our sense of urgency right sized?

We look at projects with 1 - ability to execute and 2 - impact probability rating. Then find that sweet spot

Aspirational OKRs with aggressive goals can be ideal, but hard for some to understand when they are used to hard and fast deadlines and metrics. We shifted to aspirational OKRs this year, so far so good, but a few folks with lots of questions and some uneasiness in the transition.

The walls have imploded on work family and home family for many and much of society as a whole, this is also depressing the meeting, making friends, dating, choosing mates part of life esp for our younger employees

The energy and excitement across our company (particularly the younger team members) since our in-person company kickoff last week has been significant. I realize not everyone can get together in person right now, but if we find ways to inspire and excite people, that can make the load feel lighter. Instead of just trying to take stuff off their plate, how do we make them feel like what they're doing has value and is making a difference.

We had an in person SKO last week and the energy created by seeing people in person was stunning.

There is a big disconnect between what employers are thinking they are addressing mental health and how employees think they are.

I’ve used our monthly/quarterly performance reviews to focus not just on achieving stated objectives but how did they achieve them, how well did they work with others, how did they pull their weight in achieving those results (as often the results are team orientated), what peer feedback was, etc. It helped the employee realize the need for balance, and “showing up” and open the conversation for managing change more effectively to perform.

Probably the biggest underlying reason I am leaving my job is the resistance to change.

Huge change management initiatives need to be positioned in a way that the folks participating can see the benefit for them (resume making moments through the journey and the benefit at the end of the journey).?Clarity and consistent communications are key to success.

Important to know why those groups are fighting the change. It’s usually not nefarious.

Don't you think the Fear of Change is generational. Look back at some great generations where change was all around them, look how they deal with todays changes. This leads to how you grow up, if you don't experience change then when STUFF comes up you panic. With a younger work force this is now uber important on how you deal with it.

I think the more years you have the more opportunities you have to experience change and build resilience.

On the generational thing - part of it is We (the CMOs) need to decide what kind of environment you prefer - do you like having a bunch of early in career people who need all kinds of coaching or do you want later in career people who have seen a lot but may sometimes be harder to move.

All change occurs at the employee level. Whether it affects the organizational, departmental or team.

The art of saying no is a skill but if done right, no one leaves hurt. Once you do it - very empowering!

I am launching a new campaign internally to drive change called “To Be” and we added a portion called “To Not Be” to address these ideas.??Working with the management team across the company, it is shocking how many “To Not Be” items are getting put on the list.

I think competencies are key and are often not valued enough or properly implemented, but they can effective in guiding behavior and how ones personality can ascribe to those competencies - not all of them, but ones you can champion

I think one of the most common missteps with change efforts is underestimating how much time it takes to affect/expect change.

This is one of the best articles I have read in a long time: https://review.firstround.com/give-away-your-legos-and-other-commandments-for-scaling-startups

LEGO actually has a business product called Serious Play: https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/serious-play

You need to form alliances with other executives so they hear it from other people besides you.?Otherwise you become the sticky wicket/squeeky wheel.

Grass roots buy-in before the big reveal is key!??They need to advocate for the change as well.??Who is the biggest influencer/champion that you need to get onboard before announcing change amongst those who are most affected.

“Continued growth means continued changes in expectations.” So true!

Have worked with leaders who want to delegate the change management and be invisible - kind of a set up in my book.

Let’s talk about change management, not just adding adding adding all the time, but realizing that when we have major new expectations, that we need to remove things away from our team’s responsibilities.

Love this quote by Simon Sinek: “There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it."

A really relevant conversation is we all sell technology for the most part. Our technology is inherent change. So how do we help our clients change better? How much should it be sales’s job, vs Customer success, vs Marketing, at making sure our clients are changing, so they are using out technology well.

How can you effectuate change when you don’t know what changes need to be made.?People in the seats need to be thinking about change for betterment not change for change sake.

Change management is really hard right now because there are low attention spans, people are distracted, burnt out, not great listeners in some aspects…

Change mgmt. is about changing habits...it takes time to change habits...its never one and done

Just having open conversations with your team about the stages of transition can be very helpful. i had my team listen to 2 transition podcasts by the table group and then we had 2 open discussions about them. the feedback and participation was amazing.

People will engage if they believe they will be heard, and influence the outcome.

I don't think a spiff for something like that is going to inspire change and people to be motivated to take ownership of it. I like the focus on autonomy, giving them choice and ownership and letting them come up with the solution. (reading the book Succeed by Heidi Grant Halvorson who talks about this)

Getting people to engage and take ownership is a two way street. It’s part of a culture. A spiff isn’t going to move the needle.

How can we build a culture that already works well in a constant changing environment so that when a big change comes up, the culture is already in place to effectively manage it?

Taking the pulse check at that point may be too little too late. Taking continuous pulse checks to quickly identify and squash any culture issues before the infect more of the team is what will be my focus in my new role. HubSpot does this well and is the model I'm trying to learn from.