Change is going to hurt a little. Trying new ways or working, letting go of old habits, restructures. It’s only natural as human beings to feel uncertain and uncomfortable. In my experience, people who act out or resist usually know deep down that change is needed. It isn’t necessarily change that is the problem, but that they don’t feel included in the process and don’t understand the reasoning behind decisions. And for this, you need to tell the story.
Times of change call for extraordinary communication.
If you don’t include the basics, you’re really in trouble. This is the baseline, must-share type of stuff:
- what is happening,
- what role individuals and departments will play,
- how the day-to-day work will be impacted,
- the timeline for implementation.
Without this, you’ll have total chaos. But even if you have the clear steps laid out, people still may be wondering… why?
It’s one thing to say things need to change, and another to show why this is so. If your leadership team is strategizing about change, you’re probably researching industry trends, collecting team and customer survey results, reviewing financial reports or projections. All of these things can help give meaning to the need for change.
You’ll also need to make it digestible. While conducting this type of research, you’ll uncover loads of information, and sharing everything could be overkill. Some of the data will be repetitive, some will be basic or irrelevant. But some of it will shape your thinking in new ways. Those are the insights you want to highlight! Curate and share those, along with some background information about your thought process. Distill it down to a manifesto, a few slides, a one-pager.
If you can, make it visual. Look at at Data Viz Project for ideas on how to visualize your data. For qualitative data, you can try word clouds or share anonymous quotes that are representative of major themes or sentiments.
And remember, we’re talking about a story here. That means it’s also okay to add some feeling. The emotional facets uncovered from the team, how the leadership team feels about what it is learning, the aspirational feelings you believe will be possible once X change is in place.