Leading Through Change: Methods for Successfully Managing Organisational Change

Are you a manager in a company? It’s an exciting role, with additional responsibilities and duties and commensurate pay. It’s your role to lead teams to success and strive for the best outcomes for your division and the business more broadly.

Part of being a great manager is leading your team through organisational change. This article will discuss how managers can effectively achieve this, and we’ll cover some key strategies managers should follow to ensure everything works smoothly during a change process. So, if you’re a manager and you’re interested in this topic, continue reading to learn more.

What is Change in the Business Context

Before we delve directly into the depths of this article about managing change, it’s worth spending a little bit of time explaining what change means in the business context. Change in business is any alteration or amendment to the usual ways of working or business operations as they currently stand. A period of change in a business could be anything from a change of management or ownership of the company, or a company restructure, to a rebranding, moving offices or implementing new ways of working, such as agile or other project management techniques.

The Importance of Qualified Staff

Australian businesses need qualified employees who can lead the charge in creating an effective communications plan and action it, to facilitate any change. Ideally, these staff will have completed masters degree management type of qualifications, and other relevant degrees and certificates in management. This might be you or other key staff. The key reason for this is that your organisation will have someone in a dedicated role or even an entire team whose job it is to communicate, plan and manage the change and that it doesn’t fall squarely on your shoulders or the shoulders of another manager, as you or they may not be qualified or capable of effectively communicating change to stakeholders and managing the change process.

Involve Your Teams in the Change Process

Another way to best communicate change to your teams through any organisational change process is to ensure that you actively involve them in the change process as much as possible. You should source your staff’s ideas, input and crucial feedback on how best to implement the proposed change in the organisation and ensure this is fed back to upper management for consideration and action.

It is important to acknowledge your team’s ideas and feedback and close the feedback loop with them. This ensures that they hear back from leadership on whether their ideas and input were implemented and why. If they weren’t taken on board, you’ll need to explain a solid rationale as to why to help your staff manage the change process, which can be anxiety-provoking and cause stress and worry.

You should aim to empower your teams through open, clear and transparent communication to ensure that they make decisions and take actions that line up with the organisational change goals and objectives to make sure they succeed. Your staff are more likely to come along for the change ride as willing participants rather than having to be roped and hauled, kicking and screaming, through the change unwillingly if they are active participants in the change process.

Active involvement in the change process will create a shared sense of ownership, commitment and accountability for your staff.

Tailored Change Communications

A large part of organisational change comes down to communication. You might consider tailoring your change communications to different groups of staff, with different strategies for different groups. This can be done in a few ways. First, you can segment staff groups within the company that may have shared concerns or specific needs. You can then adapt your change communications to address these groups and their concerns specifically. Another way is to ensure that you use personalised comms, wherever possible, because your staff are individuals, and people have diverse needs while they’re at work.

Suppose staff members feel as if they are all alone in the changing situation within an organisation. In that case, it breaks the personal bond between staff and their employer, causing a huge rift in the leadership and employee relationship and even disrupting the level of engagement and productivity of staff employed by the company. To mitigate this, use personalised messages that will ensure that a shared sense of common purpose, humanity and empathy is achieved in the change communications process.

Why Communication is Crucial

We should expand on why communication is crucial in the organisational change process.

Communicating clearly and effectively is one of the most important business leadership skills managers can use to support their teams through any significant workplace change. Even if you have a dedicated role or team for change communication, leadership still needs to communicate with your staff throughout the process.

Frequent, transparent, open and clear communication with teams is the key to success here. As you prepare to inform your teams about an upcoming change in the organisation, consider your approach carefully and thoughtfully. You’ll want first to explain the key reasons driving the change and the major benefits the change will bring to the organisation, how it will impact their roles, as well as doing your best to address any obstacles or barriers that may come with the change.

When your staff members have questions about the change (and they will), you should be prepared to answer them frankly and honestly. Alleviate their concerns with open, clear and honest communication and ensure that you provide regular updates and listen to their feedback as the change process occurs.

Restructure Change Management

Sometimes, organisational restructures are necessary to reduce wastage and ensure efficiency and accountability. Just because a company restructuring process is complete, this doesn’t mean that your change communications should cease then and there. Responsible managers and other key staff should provide regular updates about the progress and success of the new organisational structure, as well as continue to communicate about where the new operating model could lead.

You should also, as we mentioned above, think about how staff can and should have a voice in shaping the new structure, such as defining new roles or operational requirements. Ensure that you gain staff feedback and insights on what has worked and what needs improvement, so that this is captured for the future state. Surveys and interviews work well for this.