Great article Gregor. Totally agree with the people conscious approach. One of the most challenging part of navigating through changes that are made top-down without involving teams happens for middle-management. As an individual contributor if a change is happening in the organisation that affects you, and you have no control over it, the raise your thoughts but 100% commit is easier to do. But when you are in middle-management, and a change has been made without consulting you and your team, just accepting and commit doesn't work very well because it shows all you can do is to encourage your team to do the same and nothing more, and that results in the team feeling unheard by their manager, their manager having no control on matters either etc. I have seen it many times, that middle-management become the communicators of decisions made rather than facilitators of shared problem-solving and their lack of power to do anything about it is very damaging to them and their teams. Do you have any suggestions how they can navigate changes in a more productive manner?
Doing a major change is a tough challenge. Even if we feel with 100% certainty that the change is good for the organization, it's hard to convince people.
The article covered the approaches well. The only thing I would do differently, is the pace of the change. Sometimes it's indeed better to do it slowly, but sometimes it's like ripping off a band-aid. If it's transparent to people what the next steps are, and you are doing it slowly just to spare feelings, each additional change will only increase the animosity.
How to make and embrace changes
Great article Gregor. Totally agree with the people conscious approach. One of the most challenging part of navigating through changes that are made top-down without involving teams happens for middle-management. As an individual contributor if a change is happening in the organisation that affects you, and you have no control over it, the raise your thoughts but 100% commit is easier to do. But when you are in middle-management, and a change has been made without consulting you and your team, just accepting and commit doesn't work very well because it shows all you can do is to encourage your team to do the same and nothing more, and that results in the team feeling unheard by their manager, their manager having no control on matters either etc. I have seen it many times, that middle-management become the communicators of decisions made rather than facilitators of shared problem-solving and their lack of power to do anything about it is very damaging to them and their teams. Do you have any suggestions how they can navigate changes in a more productive manner?
Doing a major change is a tough challenge. Even if we feel with 100% certainty that the change is good for the organization, it's hard to convince people.
The article covered the approaches well. The only thing I would do differently, is the pace of the change. Sometimes it's indeed better to do it slowly, but sometimes it's like ripping off a band-aid. If it's transparent to people what the next steps are, and you are doing it slowly just to spare feelings, each additional change will only increase the animosity.