Communicate
changes
Bill Donges
CEO, Lane Co.
When you want to change something in
your organization, you first have to let people know what’s going on.
“First and foremost, you have to communicate what you’re planning, what this new
change initiative is, and you have to be very
straightforward,” says Bill Donges, CEO of
Lane Co. in the October issue. “I watch people all the time. You get rhetoric, and the
words don’t match up exactly in the people’s minds with what’s going on.”
One of the biggest mistakes that Donges
sees is leaders who do not communicate
the new vision.
“They just communicate, ‘These are some
of the goals and objectives,’ and they do it in
a way that doesn’t include data,” he says.
Providing data to your employees helps
them understand the reasoning behind the
change and helps them buy-in.
“The communication isn’t just verbal,”
says Bill Donges, CEO of Lane Co., in the
October issue. “It’s also data and performance information about productivity or customer satisfaction or financial performance.
… It’s not just happy talk. It’s not just having
picnics and wearing buttons and having a
lot of pep rallies.”
If you don’t provide the reasoning behind
the changes, then employees will get nervous and start to question their jobs and the
company.
“People are wanting to hear the truth,”
Donges says. “And they want to know, to
the extent that you can share with them,
what the problem is — we lost a major
client, our quality numbers dropped, our
productivity dropped. A lot of times, managers or leaders hedge. They don’t really tell
them the truth, and you have to face the
truth.”
Even if you’re honest with people, they
still may not understand or see the benefit
of the change, so you also have to show
them why they should change.
“They’re very skeptical when you start
proposing these changes because most of
them have been through change initiatives
and might or might not feel positive about
where you’re going,” Donges says. “If you
feel you got to go to this new place, you
have to present it as an opportunity or you
have to present it as a crisis.”
