The story your team need to understand
Keywords: change valence, organisational justice, leading change and change communication.
It can be easy, when you’ve just announced the change you’ve been planning for ages, to sit back and listen to your team’s reception to the news, and worry about what they think. Are they happy about what’s happening? Do they support the decisions you’ve made or the approach you’re taking?
And why wouldn’t we want the team to be happy? We often spend more time with our team at work than we do our families, and we care about their happiness and wellbeing. If the team are unhappy with the changes we’re suggesting it can feel like we’ve done something wrong.
So it can be tempting to try and persuade the team that it’s not that bad. This usually happens in one of two ways. Leaders either try to spin the change into something that can work for the team, worried that anyone saying anything negative about the change is going to spread to everyone else. Or they try to protect them by not telling them the whole truth.
I often hear people talk about their team like they feel the parental responsibility to protect them and look after their happiness, but you’re not their parent, you’re their leader. We absolutely should care about their wellbeing and happiness (care is one of the important components of trust) but as someone’s happiness is influenced by so much more in our lives than what we do at work, it’s not really ours to control. What we can control is making sure they have the information to fully understand the decisions we're making.
The research tells us that the earliest things people assess when they hear about a change are “change valence” and “organisational justice” (before they even think about the impact on them). Change valence is an assessment of whether the change makes sense or not – do they believe it’s needed, beneficial and worthwhile? Organisational justice is another way of understanding the fairness of any decisions.
So when your team are listening to your announcements of any change, this is the first place they start. Do I understand the change that’s happening? Does it make sense based on what I’ve been told before? Do I think it’s fair? Your team base their initial assessment of the change on these questions. Whether they are happy about it or not comes from the answer to these questions.
It’s not happiness we should be influencing, it’s understanding.
“Please all and you will please none.”