The emotional toll of leading structural change

More than ever now, it seems like change is inevitable. Leaders are at the forefront, tasked with guiding their organizations through transitions and trying to cope with implementing the ever growing list of projects needed to meet shareholder, customer, board, and regulator needs.

In my experience many leaders treat the implementation of significant change as another actions on their to-do list, completely underestimating the personal impact it can have, and leaving them burnt out at the end of implementation. Over and above the tight deadlines, and the unreasonable workload, leading change carries an emotional toll which is often not considered during the planning and implementation of change.

This blog aims to identify some of the challenges and identify mitigating actions to ensure leaders and managers are prepared to lead change.

Sensemaking AND Sensegiving

If the change is one which has been imposed upon you – because of a merger, or other change imposed by government or a regulator, or a leader a layer or two above you – you have the unenviable task of sensemaking and sensegiving at the same time. This means that you are trying to make sense of this change and what it means for you at the same time as trying to give clarity to your team and help them understand what’s happening.

It always seems funny to me that we expect leaders to be these super humans who can calmly deliver messages telling their team about some potentially significant changes without batting an eyelid, irrelevant of the impact on themselves. And (depending on the change) it’s not realistic to expect that they can tell their team a message calmly until they have had some time to process and understand what it means for them.

It's easy to change things - on paper

When you are designing what’s going to happen, it’s super easy.  You or someone in your team gets a whiteboard or a big piece of paper or a powerpoint slide (particularly if consultants are involved), and you draw a picture about what it’s going to be like in the future. You might take out a line here or add one in here – you can basically do whatever you like.

Implementing it is harder. That box that you moved off to the side because you didn’t know what to do with is representative of people who now aren’t clear what they are here for. And the other one that you deleted/rubbed out is representative of people who likely have to reapply for their own job. And sometimes you forget to even include their box on the page because it’s not the main one you were worried about.

All your decisions have consequences, and you will have to deal with them at some point during the process – putting it off doesn’t help anyone.

Talking to your people kindly about change is hard

I once worked with a leader who called me and boasted that he’d told one of his team that he’d be made redundant in 6 minutes while the poor team member was on holiday in India. I suspect you wouldn’t be reading this if that’s you. So let’s say you care about your team and want to treat them with respect…..

Telling someone their job is changing, they need to apply for a job if they want to stay, or they are getting made redundant is a really difficult conversation to have. So imagine how hard your week is going to be if you are doing that for 20 people in your team. Or you are telling your team one week and then supporting them to tell their team the week after.

One of the biggest mistakes I see from leaders is that they try to have these conversations in and amongst their day job. They already have 7hrs of meetings booked and try and squeeze in the conversations around it. Not only do they spend the couple of weeks before worrying about the conversation, but during the week itself they are exhausted because of the emotional toll of what they have had to do.

Oh and you remember that box you drew a line through – you need to now go and talk to those people individually and tell them the decision you made and why. I have seen a leader get so stressed about having the hard conversations he chickened out of having it. Everyone else knew what was changing, but he didn’t want to tell the team about the decision he made and they ended up hearing about it from someone else.

It doesn’t matter how right the decision is – most people find it hard.

The hard conversations are those you aren't ready for

Often when there’s a structural change there are some conversations that we know are going to be harder than others – because of the impact, or the individual – these are the conversations we spend time preparing for. And then of course those are the conversations that go really well – the individual understands what and why and if they aren’t happy they are clear on what to do.

In my experience the hardest conversations are the ones that you have assumed will be easy. I remember one example where we had prepared so hard for the conversation with 5 senior people. 4 of them were not successful in landing a role in the future structure – but the one remaining, we had found an opportunity for. We thought – isn’t this great news, we’ll just have a quick conversation to let them know. Well it turned out they weren’t interested and super annoyed we had dared to offer them a different position.

It's lonely at the top

If you are changing the structure of your organisation, who are you talking to about it? Often changes, particularly structural changes, are confidential or commercially sensitive and your peers (or colleagues in HR) are either impacted too or have limited capacity to talk. It can be a super stressful and lonely time for leaders.

Setting yourself up for success

Below are 5 things you can do to set yourself up for success leading a structural change.

1.  Give leaders time to process
Make sure you allow for some time in the cascade process to give each layer of leadership time to process their own change.

2.  Double check your design to understand impacts

Make all the changes you want on paper – but make sure you’ve compared that to the org chart and you are clear what the consequences are for all your people. Systems and processes you can often fix with quick wins – but people impacts are harder to remediate.

3.  Protect your time

Make sure you have clear space in your calendar the weeks that you are communicating change so if you need more time with your team (or for yourself) you can take it.

4.  Be consistent
Use the same structure for each conversation even if you think it’s going to be an easy conversation – it helps you make sure you aren’t assuming how the conversation is going to go!

5. Line up some support
Make sure you have someone you can talk to when it gets hard. Use your change manager, HR partner, life partner, friend, coach. Better to have an idea on who you would talk to and not need it than to not think about it and then not have anyone.

Leading structural change is hard. But there’s help available if you want it!

For more information on how we can support structural change you can find details  here or you can contact us by email.