5 Common Mistakes Leaders Make In Managing Change

And Why To Avoid Them

There’s no doubt that the last year has presented whirlwind changes to all organizations across the globe, requiring leaders to stand up to unprecedented challenges in response to these changes.

As leaders seek to manage change and achieve organizational transformation that is responsive to an increasingly demanding market and environment, here are some common mistakes that should be avoided:

1. Reacting Without Planning — Planning as a critical step for project success is seemingly a basic tenet of the business. However, in a need to respond timely to change, planning is often overlooked and sidelined. Take for example many a company, faced with the realities of the pandemic, seeking to adjust to work from home scenarios without a clear plan on how to execute this successfully much to the frustration of employees caught in transition and to the worries of managers who were plagued by inefficiencies and setbacks. Where companies that struggled to make this change were primarily focused on ensuring operations continued as that was the main objective, companies that implemented almost seamless transitions during this period took time to plan the setting up of employees at home, establish revised guidelines for client engagement and supervision as well as put frameworks in place for continued collaboration. When planning for change, it is therefore not only important to ask, ‘what objectives are to be achieved?’ but also ‘what supporting mechanisms, people, policies, procedures and the like are needed?’
2. Failure to Properly Communicate Purpose — Clarity and understanding of purpose allows for the understanding of what is required of the team, as it gives shared direction that grants well-coordinated, focus efforts. Why is this change important? What is its reason, relevance and rationale? If these questions cannot be easily answered by those that are responsible for execution of the change process, the likeliness of success as an outcome will be diminished. Moreover, efforts will be redirected elsewhere if importance cannot be attached. As a best practice, purpose should be tied to the organization’s overarching vision and should be expressed in relation to benefits for the organization, departments and individuals involved. The ability to clearly identify purpose and benefits gives credence to the transformation and allows the leaders to forge the requisite support and bring people with them on the change journey.
3. Lack of Inclusion — Inclusion is important for gaining the commitment of your team to change projects. In numerous change projects, management determines and orchestrates the changes and divvies tasks according to area for execution. However, true inclusion is not the delegation of responsibilities once the change project has been composed. This ‘I know best’ authoritarian style where leadership imposes instead of involves does not bode well for positive organizational change. Rather, the opportunity should be created for stakeholders across the organization, who will interface with this change, to engage in the planning and development of the project. There are numerous benefits to listening to and the incorporation of ideas, suggestions and feedback from stakeholders into the change plan, including building trust in leadership and allowing for buy in from those jointly responsible for execution. Irrespective of the genius of the purpose and proposed changes, if the team does not buy in, transformation will not occur.
4. Emotion & Impact Avoidance — Both negative emotions and negative impacts are often inherent with change. Leaders must do their best to manage the effects of these within the organization. The challenge that exists for leaders is not however to eliminate these, as it is not usually possible to do so. Instead, leaders must do their best to manage these negatives. Reducing levels of uncertainty through regular communications updates is one way negative emotions may be managed. Outlets to express concerns to persons who are able to offer empathy and definitively address them should also be considered. There should be clarity on what negative impacts will be experienced and what support will be offered to ensure persons are able to cope and even thrive, having been impacted. For example, if redundancies are imminent due to technological transformation, is there a possibility to reskill interested team members for new opportunities within the organization? Perhaps external career coaches can be provided to assist with job search post redundancy? The reality is that managing both employees’ emotions and the impacts they may face during change is not an easy undertaking. Because of this, the inclination often is to avoid. However, when emotions and negative impacts are avoided, they do still exist and will continue to spread throughout the organization’s grapevine and hinder change efforts.
5. Performative Efforts — Performative leadership has been much highlighted in recent months where leaders voice support of movements or intentions without taking substantive and/or practical steps to display the support or intentions promised. This happens all too often in change and undermines the transformation. This may be seen in a company trying to overhaul its culture. Executives determine the ideal words that should embody the ethos of the company. A launch is had and there is much fanfare around these new company values. Yet these values are not adopted and modeled by senior management and no efforts are placed to substantiate what these values may look like in action. Another common occurrence is requesting feedback during the change process. The mistake unearthed here is that the feedback is often ignored, especially when it does not align to the initial views of the change leaders. Where the intentions may be initially there, the inability to translate promises into practice, comes across as performative, detracting from any trust and credibility that exists. When engaged in change, leaders need to ensure that there is alignment between words and actions, that behaviors and values expected are modeled and practicality is prioritized over performance.

As leaders continue to face dynamic change environments, care must be taken in their approaches to avoid these mistakes that may undermine the desired transformation. Planning, purpose, inclusion, emotional intelligence and practical steps should be taken into consideration to ensure that the organization and its people are positioned for success.

Have you noticed these mistakes being displayed during change initiatives? What other mistakes do you notice leaders making during change efforts? What are actions that leaders have taken during change that have been commendable and/or positively aided organizational transformation?