What’s changing, what’s not and why that distinction matters
This is part of a series of ten posts exploring the questions behind The Sticky Change Sense Check, a free tool for leaders navigating organisational change. If you haven’t read our introduction, When change energy goes unmanaged: the human cost, that’s a good place to start.
We recently started working with a leadership team in the middle of a restructure. A part of it involved listening to a manager talk through questions brought to her by her team. Interestingly, she found these more difficult to answer than ones about the new reporting lines or revised strategic objectives.
“Is our away day still happening?”
“Does the flexible working arrangement still stand?”
The change programme communication addressed all the big things but the small ones, the ones that affected individuals, were somehow lost in translation.
One thing we know from our own experience is that people can put up with an enormous amount of disruption as long as they know what they can still rely on. The steady state. Indeed, they don’t necessarily find the proposed change the problem. The really unsettling part is the not knowing and the lingering doubts when leaders haven’t been specific enough about what’s changing and what’s staying the same.
Most change communications focus on the change itself - which makes sense. But the questions people actually want answered, particularly about the things they're relying on staying the same, may often feel too obvious to mention.
Stability as a platform for movement
Being deliberate about communicating things that aren’t changing is just as, if not more, important to help change stick in most organisations. People in uncertain environments instinctively look for the things they can rely on that don’t have to be renegotiated from scratch.
These things don’t have to be grand; they can be as straightforward as your team members or the organisation’s values staying the same. These are things that allow people to engage with what is changing rather than spending their cognitive energy on what might be.
Stephen Covey and Douglas Conant’s work on trust in leadership is useful for this. Their argument, that effective leadership during uncertainty is built on a combination of high credibility and high care, speaks directly to this. People need to believe their leader genuinely cares about them and clarity about what is staying the same is one of the clearest ways to demonstrate both.
What happens in the absence of clarity
When the change communications focus only on what’s new without indicating what’s staying the same or allowing for people to ask their questions, the rumours start. In the absence of clear information, people construct their own version of what’s happening from whatever information is available to them, whether that’s overheard conversations, changes in the behaviour of leaders or the wording of an email. Even the fact a certain meeting didn’t happen this week gives someone the opportunity to fill in the blanks themselves, sometimes incorrectly.
The stories people create are almost always more alarming than the reality. Where there is ambiguity, there is negativity. Uncertainty amplifies threat and once a rumour has taken hold, it is very hard to dislodge, even with accurate information. The mistrust that accumulates when people feel they weren’t told the truth, or weren’t told it quickly enough, can last longer than the change itself.
The specific challenge of ‘not yet known’
The biggest issue arises when leaders genuinely don’t know, when some things are still being decided and the honest answer to “What’s staying the same?” is “We’re not sure yet.”
The natural instinct for leaders in this situation is often to say nothing until there’s something definitive they can say. Leaders don’t want to make promises they can’t keep or raise questions they can’t answer. Silence, though, doesn’t get interpreted as neutral during change programmes. It often gets interpreted as confirmation that something (unpleasant) is being hidden.
The more effective approach is to be honest about the not-yet-known as well as about what is known. “We don’t have the answers yet but here’s what we’re doing to get them” is consistently more likely to build trust in the change than apparent certainty that later doesn’t come true.
Clarity is an act of leadership
Providing clarity is not just a communications task, it requires leaders to have done their own thinking first and to have worked out what is actually changing and what isn’t.
Clarity has to hold over time too. The message people hear at launch needs to be the same message they hear in the team meeting three months later and in the one-to-one six months after that. Clarity that changes its story, or says one thing formally and another informally, erodes trust faster than no clarity at all.
In our experience, this is often where leaders don't put in quite enough time or attention. The change programme has launched, the communications have been sent, and the leadership team are banking on people understanding because the next crisis is already hitting them. Sadly, though, this is where the more important human work of continuing to clarify begins. Not just once, but for as long as is needed.
In your current change effort, have you been as clear about what isn’t changing as you have been about what is, and do your people have that clarity?
If this has resonated, The Sticky Change Sense Check is a free, ten-question tool designed to help senior leaders, HR and OD professionals see clearly where their change energy is well-channelled and where it needs attention.
References
Covey, S.M.R. and Conant, D. (2016). The Connection Between Employee Trust and Financial Performance. Harvard Business Review, July 2016.
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