How To Lead Your Team During Change
How to lead your team during change. I share the 3 things that I did while working on enterprise wide projects – get personal, find their why, and help them see the benefit for them.
These are techniques that I had developed over the 30 years in my corporate experience of being involved, leading, running projects, enterprise wide projects, for national and international clients.
And there’s three things that I discovered: get personal, find their why, and highlight the benefit for them.
Get Personal
And the first one was to get personal.
And you could definitely see body language when we were in meetings, status meetings, steering committee meetings, any meeting.
You could get a vibe from the person by their body language, you could also see if their behavior was the opposite of what we expected.
So maybe they weren’t hitting deadlines, maybe they weren’t talkative. Whatever that meant for that person’s behavior was a sign to me they were not accepting that change or the change wasn’t coming easily.
And so, what I would do is connect with them personally. I’d walk over to their desk, walk over to their office or cubicle, have a brief conversation and then try to pull them away to that non-work area. Go down to the cafeteria, grab a coffee outside, go to lunch, walk around the building.
Anything away from their normal environment, and that seemed to put people at ease because there was nobody else around.
It broke that rhythm for them, and it showed that you cared and took that opportunity to come and talk to them.
If you can’t do that in person, then I would recommend that you have your next best stand and do that personally.
For me, the last resort would be a video type call or a phone call, that’s better than nothing.
But that in person, I’m telling you, it just really seems to really help get the answers that you need.
Their Why or Motivation
The second one is to find out their why or their motivation.
So you can reiterate what the why was for the organization doing the project or initiative or event.
Whatever that change event is, reiterate that. And then find out from them, or it might be rediscover from them, what their why is, what they want in that current role and why they’re there. Do they want more money? Do they want more time?
Are they looking for recognition and visibility? Are they looking for more responsibility because they want to grow or hone in on some certain skills? Or do they want some additional skills, that that’s the reason they’re on the project?
Benefit for Team Member
The third one is show how they will benefit by working on the project. Now, most folks in a company, if you’re non-IT, non-technical, don’t get an opportunity to work on a project.
The IT folks work on projects all the time, the other folks don’t. And that large enterprise project experience was fantastic.
I could see many people just get knowledge about the organization, how the organization ran, some business decisions that were being made for the specific applications, departments or streams.
In my case, it was financial applications, but we had ties into marketing, we had ties into HR, many groups in an organization.
So you could just see their eyes light up about how things were set up and built.
They also created and to have input into how things would be built for the future.
And a lot of times they liked that because it was looking at the business in a new way and really helping to design and figure out what they want. And this was one benefit that some of your team members might want.
So getting that extensive project experience, especially if they’re non-IT, they would also get exposure and visibility to other groups, other departments, other people and even visibility one or two steps up the chain for them.
They would understand the business.
Marketable Skills
Another benefit, I saw often, was they would get new skills. And a lot of times, those skills were marketable, and those skills would be marketable either internal to their company or external to the company.
And those skills could be a fresh way of thinking, an alternative method, a new software, an alternative approach. Any of those skills they’re learning, they would help them internally.
And then it would also help market them externally, and so that was always helpful.
So get personal, find their why and show how they will benefit.
Those are the three ways that I could do that after 20-plus years working corporate to help people accept that change and successfully implement projects, initiatives and other forms of change and disruption.
Actions:
- You or your team reach out to the individuals
- Discover the individual why
- Link how the change how it will be a win-win for the individual and the organization
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