Communicate the changes
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,” he
says. “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.
“They just communicate, ‘These are
some of the goals and objectives,’ and
they do it in a way that doesn’t include
data.”
Providing data to your employees helps
them understand the reasoning behind
the change and helps them buy in.
“The communication isn’t just verbal,”
Donges says. “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, employees will get
nervous and start to question their jobs
and the company, affecting your ability
to ultimately get changes implemented.
“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 have got to go to
this new place, you have to present it as
an opportunity or you have to present it
as a crisis.”
Lastly, explain big changes in person.
Rolling out major company initiatives
over the Web isn’t going to cut it. For
example, when one of Donges’ leaders
sent out a scathing e-mail to 20 people in
the company saying that the sales
department wasn’t doing its job, Donges
had to address that person and explain
that communicating via e-mail wasn’t
effective.
“I’m just amazed that we’ve evolved to
a new level of communication,” Donges
says. “Talk to [employees.] People get
fired and change initiatives are
announced and get rolled out over e-mail
overnight, and nobody’s communicated
anything to the people.”
