Status quo is not an option today – here’s how to avoid transformation missteps

Editor’s note: Veteran entrepreneur and investor Donald Thompson writes a weekly column about management and leadership as well as diversity and other important issues for WRAL TechWire. His columns are published on Wednesdays.

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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Global unrest, the COVID-19 pandemic, a looming recession, and evolving social expectations mean that leaders today are navigating uncertain times like never before. To meet demands, we have to rise to the challenge and embrace transformation. We have to keep our organizations limber in order to be future-ready.

The status quo is not an option. Continuous change is the only way forward. Yet missteps and miscalculations in transforming your culture can have devastating consequences, including the inability to hire and retain talent, inevitable legal risk and reputation damage.

Donald Thompson

Being a successful leader today means you have to know how to manage multicultural, multi-generational teams while being agile, resourceful and trustworthy. This is a topic I’ll dive into tomorrow, Thursday, July 21, in an industry briefing about transformation. If you’re reading this column, consider it a personal invitation to join me.

The briefing – The Leader’s Guide to Business Results in the Age of Uncertainty – is fully virtual, from 12-12:30 p.m. ET, so you can easily listen in while you eat lunch. As a thank you for registering, I’ll also send you a free digital copy of my team’s new book, The Inclusive Language Handbook: A Guide to Better Communication and Transformational Leadership.

In the meantime, here are my top tips for leading transformation.

Create unity of direction

Whether you’re working toward digital transformation, cultural change or strategic alignment, there are certain critical elements you have to pay attention to. One is team unity relative to these goals. Often, a business leader or board of directors will have a clear vision and direction where they want to take the business, but they haven’t really refined that direction and sat down with all the key stakeholders who are going to have to communicate that vision to the rest of the organization so it can be implemented.

One big point of breakage in digital transformation, for instance, is when you start talking about necessary tech updates with someone who doesn’t quite understand how that technology will impact them personally. What’s in it for them, right? How will this affect their day-to-day work?

Let’s say you’re going to roll out a new time clock system within your organization. Your employees have been tracking their time the same way for months, years or even decades, and then you drop in a brand-new system without explaining the positive impact this new software will have on their daily life. You just expect people to comply, and so of course, it doesn’t work. This is how great software gets purchased then sits on the shelf to die: business leaders get excited about the potential, but don’t do the work to figure out a clear and unified communication plan.

Develop a clear communication plan

Before you even think about engaging in digital transformation, implementing new software, cultural realignment, or diversity, equity, inclusion, you have to pause and think about the full, top-to-bottom communication plan that will help every employee understand what’s in it for them.

Moving too fast is a huge and common pitfall. With any transformation, it’s important that you take the time to write a comprehensive education plan, and then create the follow-up tutorials that stretch across the full landscape of your business, so every person in the organization knows why you’re doing it, how it impacts them, and that they will be given the appropriate tools and education to be successful.

Say it again

It’s a natural leadership tendency to think that, when we say something important – especially if we say it with enthusiasm and eloquence – people will hear it and understand exactly what we mean. It just doesn’t work that way.

As any marketer will tell you, people need to hear something seven or more times before they really understand and remember it. Most people also know it takes nearly a full month of doing something every single day to make it a habit. But as leaders, our egos tell us that if we say something one good time, people will get it.

Repeat your message in clear, concise language over and over again, at all different levels of the organization and in all different ways. Whether in your corporate newsletter, your CEO’s monthly update, your weekly team meetings, your public website, your Slack channel, your intranet home page, or wherever else your employees turn for regular company updates, meet them where they are and repeat your message about the value of this transformation and how it will make their jobs easier or more fun.

Today and in the future, transformation is not optional. The organizations that can stay agile and embrace change always come out ahead. And those that can’t – or won’t – are left by the wayside. But, knowing how to lead through change is not something leaders spend enough time learning.

My overarching piece of advice for transformation is that you should not underestimate the volume and quality of communication you must do to create change and shift behavior. It’s up to you as a leader to make clear, customized and repeated communication a critical element in anything you roll out.

About the Author

Donald Thompson is co-founder and CEO of The Diversity Movement which offers an employee-experience product suite that personalizes diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) through data, technology, and expert-curated content. Their microlearning platform, Microvideos by The Diversity Movement, was recently named one of Fast Company’s “2022 World Changing Ideas.” With two decades of experience growing and leading firms, Donald is a thought leader on goal achievement, influencing company culture and driving exponential growth. An entrepreneur, public speaker, author, podcaster, Certified Diversity Executive (CDE) and executive coach, Donald also serves as a board member for several organizations in marketing, healthcare, banking, technology and sports. His autobiography, Underestimated: A CEO’s Unlikely Path to Success, is available for pre-order now. Connect with or follow him on Linkedin to learn more.