C C C Changes: Why lots of people suck at change management.

24 Jan

Change is hard. Tell me about it.

I’m currently trying to change my teeth-clenching habit, a habit I didn’t know I had, but my dentist is now convinced is going to kill me. It’s hard work noticing that I’m doing it. It’s even harder relaxing my jaw to stop it. I’ve been doing this for 30-odd years, and my jaw kinda likes working that way. The muscle ache this is giving me in my jaw is giving me headaches, and right now, I’m just a joy to be around.

So yeah, change is hard.

We’ve had a lot of changes in the SaaS industry recently. We’ve shifted away from “growth at all costs” to sustainable growth with (hopefully) profitability. Gone are the days of just hiring huge numbers of people for huge amounts of scale; CEOs all over the world are asking their teams to “do more with less”.

So why are so many people bad at change management?

Three things - Communication, Clarity, Direction

The vast majority of senior leaders suck at communication. Most of them are from a time when you did what your boss said; everyone was a manager and not a leader, and no one really asked why. These were also what some people might call “boom” times.

Communication, especially to younger audiences who have (if anything) grown up with an abundance of communication, is the most important part of being at work. They have to know what’s going on. Clarity is part of communication. Often, people communicate before they’re clear on what they want to say, and this causes all sorts of problems, confusion and anxiety. Direction is usually what most change leaders have some sense of. They know where they want to go. Depending on their personal style, however, they might not know exactly how they’re going to get there.

A direction with no clarity of execution leads to zero clarity in communication. Communication without clarity is almost as bad as no communication, which is the absolute most important thing about change management.

What drives poor change management? Often impatience.

You can’t turn this ship on a dime (or some similar American expression I picked up from Scooby Doo when I was 8). Usually, the bigger the company, the harder it is to make changes, big or small. It’s very easy to get stuck in the bureaucracy of change planning, which doesn’t actually change anything and depending on your situation, results stay broadly the same. If you take 6 months to plan out a change to bring your cash flow positive, well, you might not last the 6 months, eh?

But here’s the crux of the issue - you don’t need to know everything, and you don’t need to tell everyone everything.

Back in the day, when I was a graduate trainee at John Lewis, we had this thing called “PBOB”, which stood for “powered by our principles”. Basically, this was our manifesto of values and how we did business with each other. They’ve since changed it out for something more catchy, don’t worry.

Anyway, one of these values that we had was “open and honest”. You’d hope so, given it’s a company owned by its employees. One day, I was helping to deliver some change comms around a new annual review system we were implementing, and my boss said, “I’m going to be honest about everything that I can be open with you about”.

Game changer. And I’ve lived by it ever since.

So here’s the lesson: People accept that change happens. Not all change is good, not all change is bad, but all change is unsettling for most people for some reason.

You don’t need all the details; you can work things out as you go. But you need to remember that the higher up you are, the further away from the impact your changes have on people within your organisation.

Remember - Communication, Clarity, Direction.

Communicate early and often about your direction. Include why the changes are needed, and be as honest as you can be. Make your communication as clear as possible and follow up in a number of ways to suit all communication styles.

Make sure leadership is all saying the same thing and has equal clarity on the direction of the change and the reasons why.

Most importantly, be honest about what you can’t talk about. If you don’t know, or you can’t say, say that. Nothing derails a change plan like someone who doesn’t want to say something, so they say nothing. Avoiding questions and not leaning into difficult conversations undermines your clarity, your direction and, therefore, all previous communications.

If you don’t know the answer, say so. If you haven’t worked out what the answer is, say so. If you know but aren’t communicating because it’s sensitive, and if affects other things, say so. Communicating only the parts you want to and avoiding everything else is propaganda, and people don’t buy it.

That’s why most organisations suck at change management. Because they’re not authentic. No one believes the propaganda, so treat your people like adults and be honest about everything you can be open about.