Navigating your team through organizational change is a demanding and transformative journey. It tests your leadership capabilities while offering personal growth and learning opportunities. In my experience, maintaining employee engagement through mergers, acquisitions, and restructuring has been one of the most significant challenges shaping my leadership journey.
Success during restructuring or significant organizational change requires meticulous planning, open communication, and empathy. Providing reassurance and direction strengthens the connection between leaders and their teams. Employees need clear direction and reassurance. These aspects of change management present considerable challenges and underscore the fundamental role of trust and team buy-in.
Steering through change is like a full-body workout for your leadership skills. This journey requires a delicate balance—aligning the organization’s objectives with the team’s needs and ambitions. It’s a dynamic challenge that requires identifying and utilizing your natural leadership strengths.
Employees look to leaders for guidance, clarity, and assurance during times of change. Successfully managing the psychological aspects of change management, such as building trust and securing buy-in, can be the most challenging yet impactful part of the process.
Positioning your team to achieve this requires being intentional about your goals and transformation strategy and your efforts to help leaders foster employee engagement and develop processes and skills to leverage their advantage systematically.
Organizational change versus transition
Change involves external processes like organizational restructuring or new initiatives. Transition, on the other hand, is an internal experience we undergo when faced with change. It means adapting our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to the new situation.
Transition can occur in response to various life events: starting school, accepting a new job, getting married, having a child, moving, or facing loss. Transition can generate confusion, uncertainty, and even fear. Change is inevitable. How we cope with it shapes us.
Related: 3 ways leaders can ‘talk’ to AI to spur organizational change
Change can be hard. People process it at different speeds and are likely to have a range of feelings about it: How necessary is it? How disruptive is it? How does it compare with past structures?
Respecting the past, focusing on the future, and communicating clearly and thoughtfully positions organizations to create agile, adaptable teams ready to thrive in an ever-evolving landscape.
Reach deeper than buzzwords
Venturing into the unknown is a collective effort. True transformation is about more than adjusting processes and systems—it requires genuinely connecting with the people fueling this work. Employees’ resilience and adaptability, yours included, drive the journey.
Complex corporate jargon and buzzwords may fail to power change efforts, hindering understanding and transparency. Clear and straightforward communication is critical. Break down corporate language, rephrase it, and ensure your team comprehends your message.
Establish comfortable spaces for open dialogue with your staff. Routine one-on-one sessions, town halls, and open forum meetings are opportunities to address your employees’ concerns as they surface and to provide updates as they evolve. Maintaining a consistent flow of communication can also help dismantle gossip and keep the journey on track.
Your early adopters and change agents position you to succeed; earning their confidence and support is one of your most important initiatives.
Become a mirror for the change
As a leader, you are a key culture creator. You set the tone when it comes to embracing and supporting the change. To truly excel in change management, become a change agent and mirror that for your team.
Commit to being a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all. Learning requires discipline and deep listening. Question. Reflect. Debrief. Find new ways to grow—even when it’s uncomfortable.
Demonstrate that you’re excited and fully invested. While change poses challenges, it also offers a vast landscape of growth potential, providing new opportunities to learn, develop, and shape the organization’s future.
Embracing challenges, upholding accountability, and refraining from assigning blame fosters a safe learning environment that bolsters employee engagement.
Prioritize simplicity in design
As the leader, you set the bar for implementing and maintaining processes. Center your employees’ voices and your customers’ needs—use these priorities to guide your design.
Recognize that excess management layers lead to imprecise decision-making, bureaucracy, and inefficiency. Break down these complexities and remove bottlenecks and redundancies.
Processes should streamline work, not create it. Building internal processes that streamline roles and responsibilities is critical. Scalable, understandable, and well-documented processes foster a culture of productivity. Simplification and clarification are necessary when defining responsibilities and designating work.
Analyze managers’ span of control (how many employees each manager oversees) with an eye toward small, scrappy teams. I spent half of my career at Amazon, where I first learned Jeff Bezos’s “two-pizza” rule: If it takes more than two pizzas to feed your team, that team is too big.
Employee engagement is key
Building flexible, resilient structures is the key to succeeding in a constantly changing environment. Focus on the process, and don’t build an organization around a person, which can create organizational dependencies and bottlenecks.
Foster an environment designed for innovation, a key driver of success, empowering your businesses to pivot and swiftly embrace emerging trends and technologies.
As the leader and change agent of the team and process, you usher your team through a significant transformation, which has tremendous growth potential for your staff—and for you.