The track record for most change management efforts is pretty dismal. One missing element often dooms these efforts from the start: Most leaders focus on the what and the how, thinking that these items will carry the ball. Leaders often avoid the why because it tends to be more of an emotional message – and people are less comfortable with those.
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But the reality is that people make decisions based on their emotions, and then use the data to justify and validate their decisions. If you want your teams to actively support your change efforts, you need to do a much better job of engaging them in why it matters.
Why the why matters in change management
Let’s look at a simple and effective change management project plan, which should include:
- Vision for the change – what we are changing
- Rationale for the change – why it’s important to make that change
- List of related projects and initiatives – how we will achieve that change
Most of us can explain what we are doing and how we are going about it, but most of us either skip or struggle with why it matters. Since organizations don’t change – people do – explaining the why needs to be personalized.
Also, people don’t resist change, but they do resist being changed. Leaders must involve their people in defining the why and implementing the change. These efforts require a lot of communication. And it’s not enough to simply send a message; you also must test for how the message was understood, and adapt as needed.
Unfortunately, skipping this work is what makes the difference between people supporting the change because they feel they have to, and people supporting the change because they want to. This distinction is the critical make-or-break factor in the success of change initiatives.
Employees who feel that they have to do something usually feel like victims and will invest the minimum amount of effort and creative energy to deliver new results.
But employees who understand and emotionally connect with the rationale for the change – why it’s important to the organization and to them – feel inspired rather than manipulated, and will do all they can to creatively support and implement the target change.
A better way to explain the why
Often, when leaders attempt to communicate the rationale for change, they focus on why the change is important to them rather than on why it’s important to the team. They overlook the critical element – we call it WIIFM: what’s in it for me?
The best advice I have is to reverse-engineer your traditional communication process. Start with what result you want. For example, it might be staff enthusiasm and commitment to making an organizational change happen. Then identify what the team currently believes about the situation. They might think, for instance, “Going to a managed services provider means I’m going to lose my job.”
From there, identify what they would need to believe in order to enthusiastically support the change. For example, “Once we transition our infrastructure support to an MSP, I will be retrained to enhance my infrastructure engineering skills and learn how to implement DevOps. My work will become much more interesting and less stressful, and my market value will significantly increase.”
Finally, examine the gap between what your audience currently believes about the change and what they need to believe about the change, and design your communication messages and engagement process to close that gap.
There’s even more you can do to make change personal. Let’s explore five tips:
