3 Skills You Need for Managing Organizational Change.

Are you facing changes in your workplace that make you feel uncertain about how to navigate your career? You are not alone. Organizational restructuring and management turnover are happening at rates not seen since the last recession, creating heightened uncertainty in the workplace. As companies seek to keep up with AI advancements, rising costs, and tightening capital markets, more pressure is being put on employees to deliver higher results without incurring incremental costs.

Three skills you need to master

If you are in a situation where your role is changing significantly, there are three skills you need to master to position yourself for success.

Clarifying Expectations

Leveraging Your Network

Securing Resources

Clarifying Expectations

Everyone must be on the same page regarding expectations when roles and responsibilities change at work. Sit down with your leader, and ensure you understand what they want you to accomplish. Getting clarity on desired outcomes and operating parameters can help you to understand what is important and the actions you are empowered to take to deliver against expectations.

If you are taking on an expanded role, understand if any tasks will be deprioritized or completely divested. As a rule, if you are currently working at capacity, you can only take on additional work if some of your previous work is removed.

When collaborating with clients, I frequently use a full teacup as a metaphor for capacity. If a teacup is full to the brim, and you add a tea bag, the cup will overflow and make a mess.

To make tea without creating a mess, leave some room for the teabag. By sitting down with your leader, discussing your current duties, and aligning with them on what tasks will be removed, you create the capacity to accomplish your goals without making a mess.

Leverage Your Network

The second skill you want to leverage is accessing your support network. Take a 360-degree look at those around you. Who might have skills, knowledge, or insights to help you navigate your new environment successfully?

Employees frequently struggle with change because they are unwilling to communicate to those around them that they need help. Part of the benefit of working within an organization is collaborating with people with a shared mission. Connect with others within your organization, share your challenges, and request assistance.

By casting a wide net and taking in feedback from multiple sources, you can gain clarity on the actions you need to take to thrive within your organization. You can also establish strategic partnerships that will allow you to exchange value with your co-workers for mutual benefit.

Secure Resources

The third skill you want to use is securing resources. You can do this by starting with the end in mind. Define the ideal end state, and craft a plan to take you from where you are today to where you want to be. Then devise a strategy for gaining what you need to accomplish your goals.

When change occurs, it is vital to determine resource needs. For example, if you were planning a road trip to the beach, you would take the time to decide how you would get there, along with what items you

would need to bring to have a safe trip. You would take time to plan the trip to ensure you have enough gas, drink, food, sunblock, and other niceties necessary to make it to your destination and enjoy yourself once you get there.

Similarly, pausing to determine what resources you will need to navigate organizational change will help you reduce stress and find success. A few resources you may need are

• more frequent meetings with your leader to align on priorities

• additional training so you can effectively take on new tasks

• extra budget so that you can deliver against raised expectations

• more autonomy to make decisions without having to talk with leadership

The better you can articulate what you need to succeed and advocate for those resources, the better positioned you will be for success.

Summary

One constant thing in business is change—your ability to flow like water when your organization changes will position you for success. One of the things that makes water so unique is its ability to take on the shape of whatever it is in. Employees who can metaphorize themselves to fit into whatever environment their organization puts them in position themselves for long and successful careers.

Peter Drunker once said, "One can not manage change. One can only be ahead of it." The best way to stay ahead of the changes in your organization is to clarify what your leadership expects from you, leverage your network, and get the resources you need to succeed. This will allow you to stay ahead of the curve and be prepared for what is coming next.

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Thank you for reading this blog

Dorian Cunion is an Executive Coach and Business Consultant with Your Path Coaching and Consulting. He is a former retail executive with over 20 years of experience in the retail industry. He is a Co-Active coach who focuses on helping professionals and small business owners overcome insecurities, knowledge gaps, and lack of direction. He does this by assisting clients to tap into their values, recognize their strengths, and develop actionable strategies for growth.

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How To Reduce Employee Resistance To Change Initiatives

Today’s work environment is constantly changing. Leaders of large and small companies are looking for ways to stay relevant as fears of an economic slowdown put greater pressure on maintaining revenue, while also mitigating the risk of inflation. Stakeholders are putting pressure on companies to deliver more value. Employees are looking for more pay, better benefits, and greater flexibility at work. Customers are looking for more customization, new services, faster delivery, and cheaper prices. Investors are looking for consistent returns, better governance, social responsibility, and improved sustainability. All these expectations are creating pressure on leaders to change how businesses operated. To maintain profitability, customer experience, employee morale, and investor satisfaction leaders must make bold and sometimes unpopular changes. As a leader you play a key role in helping employees understand why change is necessary, along with the risk of being stagnant in today’s highly volatile environment. The better you communicate why change is necessary and how it will benefit them, the more likely they will be to embrace the change.

People are resistant to change when it challenges their sense of self or their values, especially when that change is not their choice. Think about a time when a positive change happened at work. Your company gave you an additional holiday or a process changed that solved a problem you were experiencing. You accepted the change quickly, and it might have even energized you because you saw benefit from the change. Your identity and values were unchallenged, and the extra day off or process improvement aligned with your aspirational self. Now think of a time when a change happen that you resisted. You had to take on a new assignment that caused you to work more hours which cut into your personal time, or your company moved away from a work from home policy that you enjoyed. This created negative emotions, distracted you from your purpose and was perceived as being a threat to who you are, and who you want to be. When changes happen to us that we view as a threat to our values or identity we resist.  As a leader looking to help people process a big change, it is important to help employees reframe the change from being a threat, to being an opportunity. When they can see the benefits, and understand how the change aligns with their values, and supports who they want to be, they will be more likely to embrace the change.  

First, leaders must recognize that no matter how small you feel a change is, there is a chance that the change will feel significant to your employees.

The reason for this is related to the differences in your scope of responsibility. As the leader you have a different vantage point in the organization. Your focus is on the entirety of your organization, while your employees are focused on a smaller segment of the business, and potentially just their role. Since the size of their role and responsibility is smaller, any change has a bigger impact on their business. In addition, what may seem like a minor change from your vantage point, may require considerable time and effort to execute as it moves down an organization. For this reason, leaders need to be purposeful about the changes they make. Every time you make an unwanted change in your organization you erode employee comfort, trust and sense of power. This can impact morale and have negative impacts to productivity and engagement. In today’s environment change fatigue is a real risk. Change fatigue occurs when multiple minor changes add up and overwhelm an individual or group. For this reason, it is important to pay attention to both the size and frequency of change initiatives.

Second, leaders must frame the change as a win for employees.

As I stated earlier, processing change is all about perspective. If a change is seen as an opportunity to improve the employee work environment, they are more likely to accept it, even if the change requires a lot of work. In contrast, if changes are perceived by employees as threats to their values or wellbeing, you will meet resistance especially if the changes are viewed to be significant. The key to helping employees reframe the change is to give them perspective. The more you can help your employees to zoom out from their perspective and understand how the change will help them either now or in the future, the more likely they will see it as an opportunity for improvement vs a threat to their status quo.

=Zooming out sometimes requires employees to look beyond the pain of the moment and understand that greater pain that will come if change does not occur. A great analogy for this is the pain associated with road construction. As a driver, it can be painful to sit through the increased traffic created by road closures linked to highways expansions. In the moment, drivers may absolutely hate the impact of the road work and the pain associated with longer commutes. In hindsight, once the project is over, most drivers are extremely grateful to have the increase in lanes especially as they realize the additional traffic issues that would have come from not expanding the highway. When the business case for change is presented, leaders must help employees zoom out beyond the current moment and look at the benefits that will come over time.

Finally, involving your employees early in the change management process shows them that you respect and value their opinion and that you have their best interest in mind as you determine and roll out change initiatives.

By giving your employees visibility to strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in your business, you help them to understand the business case for change. This can help to motivate employees to support change because they better understand the potential benefits of acting, along with the risk of doing nothing. As you solicit their opinion on potential solutions, you will improve your decision making because you will be more knowledgeable of potential solutions, better understand the risk, drawbacks, and trade-offs of your current thinking. When you share change implementation plan with your employees and solicit feedback, they can help to identify unconsidered obstacles, and design solutions to improve adoption rates. By including employees in the process, you increase trust, which lowers the perceived risk of change initiatives because employees understand why the change is happening, that you thought through alternative solutions and landed on the change that was best for the organization’s future.

Change can be difficult because of the wiring of our brains. When people do the same things repeatedly, thought patterns establish that help to build the construct of who we are as individuals. When you make a change in an employee's work environment, you disrupt their thought patterns. When the ask is mundane, the impact is small, and does not impact an employee's sense of self. When the change is viewed as positive, people are willing participants because they believe the change will bring them closer to being the person they want to be. When employees view change as a threat, they resist because they are asked to move away from being the person they want to be. If you want to have greater success influencing change with your employees, acknowledge that change can impact employees’ perception of self, help them to zoom out and see the bigger picture, and collaborate with them on the identification, ideation, and execution of change initiatives.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching service for managers, executives and small business owner.

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If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771