Normalizing Change

Happy opening NFL weekend friends!

My team, the Bengals, just locked up our franchise QB Joey Burrow for an additional five years, so a lot to be excited about here in Cincinnati. And yet our team has some new faces this year too. Change is a big part of every NFL team. Each year turns over players and brings with it free agents and draft picks, new strategies and new hope. In some ways this is what every high performing team in any organization is continually going through.

One of the primary jobs of leadership is to facilitate change. In fact it may be the central job. That is, if nothing is changing there's not much need for leadership.

A few years back I got a call from a friend who was CIO at a large Fortune 500 company. He said, "we need your help with change management. The issue isn't managing a specific change. The issue is that people keep asking when will the change stop; what they're not seeing is that it won't. That's the whole point. Change and agile adaptation need to be the norm.'

While the work for this organization had to do with establishing new norms, new "ways of working" and helping leaders practice agile leadership (literally creating space for them to practice different ways of leading meetings and discussions with teams), there are four techniques I think any leader can use when trying to normalize change.

Priming. Priming is the concept of sharing an idea - in this case a potential change - very early in the process. e.g. "Our sales structure isn't working great; so this year we're going to begin exploring models for how we might improve that." It sets the stage for a change that is further off in the distance but begins to get people thinking about it out in the open. The opposite of priming is the water cooler talk. "I heard executives are talking about changing the sales structure." If it's being talked about in closed rooms, it's being heard much more broadly than that. That's a reality. Priming sidesteps this and creates trust by allowing people to know what's being thought about and, through their relationships with leaders, start to share their own ideas and give shape. When the change actually does start to roll out, it's much easier to get adoption and understanding as anxiety is much lower. When priming is used well, you'll often hear "Oh we've been talking about that for a long time so that makes sense."

Creating a cadence of change. TiER1 has a very agile organization model where people change roles regularly. Many much larger organizations do this as well in different ways. Consistent with that, we have a process of looking at the entire structure - including who is in what key roles - every six months. Every six months we announce multiple changes to roles including who is leading various functions, clients and agile teams. This does a number of positive things for us. In addition to keeping us agile and dynamic it helps connect new people into new roles with new ideas and creates more relationships across the organization. But it also helps normalize change. Simply knowing that we make these changes so regularly helps the organization get used to it. There are no massive reorgs required and there's no drama when people come in and out of roles. Rather people see it as normal and expected and are excited to see what's next. Having a continuous cadence of change can help reduce the friction that change can bring.

Create a communication rhythm. It seems trite but communication is the most underused strategic tool. Rhythmic communication about where you have been and where you are going is super helpful. Too often change is managed discreetly as if each change is its own thing. All changes very likely connect back to a central direction, strategy, purpose; they are part of a system. Continually connecting the dots through rhythmic communication - whether weekly posts from a top leader, a series of podcasts, monthly video calls or whatever - about what's happened recently what's happening now and what will happen in the future - and very importantly why - is a great way to help people experience change as continuous and normal.

Create space. Change does require energy, very literally. Our brains need to process and adapt and our brains consume enormous energy. Creating space for people to process and internalize change is helpful. Assigning topics to groups for discussions in their regular huddles or on-going meetings, creating cross-discipline cohorts to process and navigate changes, or even regularly randomly pairing up senior and mid level people together to talk informally about how things are evolving can all be ways to create space for people as change is normalized.

The bottom line is high performance requires continuous change. And helping people embrace change as a very normal, natural, even energizing part of our work helps create a healthier environment and reduces the friction that can come with it.

Good luck to your team this year! And to all you Bengals fans…Who Dey!!!

"Points of Impact" is a weekly publication expressing thoughts on how we might approach our work differently to have a better impact on others and the world. For more related perspectives, check out Impact with Love: Building Business for a Better World.