Why your communication is not the most important part of change
Communications leader, change communication expert, international award winner, speaker and workshop facilitator, as well as author of two books on change and communication, Mel Loy shares her wisdom on the essential components for change success.
By Mel Loy
You’ve spent hours creating a change communication strategy to support a transformation program. There are town halls, webinars, emails, newsletters, even posters on the back of the toilet doors with carefully crafted messages.
But then the feedback starts to come in … and it isn’t good. People say they don’t understand the change, don’t like or want it, or simply do nothing.
The Project Manager or Sponsor cries: ‘But how don’t they know or understand this? We communicated!’
Or, even worse: ‘We need to communicate more to build awareness!’.
The cause of this outcome can be many things, but one of the main culprits I see is that clients consider communication to be the only lever they can pull in change (followed closely by training).
But the reality is, you can develop the most creative comms strategy in the history of comms strategies, but if the change is not backed by leadership, stakeholder engagement, or governance, your comms will be for nothing.
Part of our roles as strategic change communication practitioners is to help others understand change is more than comms and training – it’s part of a puzzle of five pieces that all need to be in place for change to happen. Here’s a breakdown.
Leadership
During change, leaders have a critical role to play. They need to:
Role model the changes we want to see
Make the change meaningful for their team members (ie, don’t just regurgitate the key messages they were given)
Identify and help remove roadblocks
Share feedback with the project team.
By not doing these things, and relying solely on group-wide communication, the ‘say-do gap’ emerges. This is where leaders say one thing, but then do another. It undermines trust in the change, and trust in the leaders.
Trust is at the core of driving change. When you’re asking people to take a leap into the unknown from their comfy status quo, they need to trust in their leaders to guide them there. No amount of intranet articles is going to achieve that!
Stakeholder Engagement
Often, communication gets confused with the stakeholder engagement. While we can provide advice and tools, it’s the responsibility of the project sponsor, project manager, and workstream leads to be engaging their stakeholders effectively from day one.
They need to identify who they are, prioritise them, and work out what they need them to know, feel and do. Then, they can put in place strategies to reach them effectively. It might be regular one-on-one meetings, email updates, committee meetings, or using a trusted intermediary (especially if you have a stakeholder who’s a little ‘spicy’ or hard to reach).
These stakeholders need to have confidence in the project team, and the best way to do that is for the project team members (who should be the subject matter experts) to build relationships with their stakeholders.
Governance
Change governance relates to two things:
How the change project is set up to ensure correct reviews and approvals, accountabilities, reporting, and so on.
The organisational governance actions that need to take place to enable the change, for example a change in a policy or procedure or even Code of Conduct.
An example of the latter: your organisation might be upgrading its technology stack, and employees will now be receiving more messages on their personal devices. This could mean a change in your IT Responsible Use Policy, Employee Agreement, or even how you collect and store employee information. Without the governance to support the change, the new system could be obsolete before you even switch it on.
Capability
Some changes, like new technology, will require hands-on training to build knowledge and confidence in using a new platform. Other changes – like new ways of working – could require coaching and mentoring to build the capability the organisation needs to enact the change.
Building the skills and knowledge to support a change is often the responsibility of a Learning & Development team, but it can also – in the case of technology – be provided by a vendor or other third party. Leaders may also have a role to play in building new capabilities with their teams.
Communication
Communication is still a critical puzzle piece in change management, and we need to ensure the communication effort aligns with the change impact. For example, while frontline team members may be highly impacted by a change, support team members may not. So, we make sure frontline team members receive more two-way, personalised communication than support team leaders.
Importantly, we don’t exist just to ‘raise awareness’. Too often, project teams fall into the trap of thinking their project is the most important thing happening in the organisation, forgetting there are plenty of other things happening too. Also, sometimes there’s not much to say … and communication for the sake of communication just contributes to the white noise and dilutes the messages.
So when you approach your next change project as a communication professional, work with the project team to make sure everyone is clear on the five elements of change management, and their roles and responsibilities. It’s also an opportunity to position yourself as a specialist and strategic advisor by coaching leader to build their own change management knowledge.