Have you ever had a great plan go awry because you didn’t communicate with a key group? A couple of years ago, I was working for a company that decided to reorganize several of the support functions within a bigger functional unit of the company into a shared service. It all looked good on paper and the mid-level executives were happy with the new organization chart they had created. The business case said that it would be more efficient in the long run and they could save money by meeting the business needs with fewer people. Sounds like a winning plan, right?
But in developing the new structure, they had not communicated effectively with the existing team. Although there had been some initial informal conversations to find out what each team member did, the team was not told what their new roles within the new organizational structure would be or even when the change would take effect. People began to get nervous.
As the weeks and months passed, the launch date for the new organization kept getting pushed back as the senior executive approval process dragged on. Although team members were asking for a status update on the changes, the only thing the mid-level executives would tell them was “trust us, this will all work out.” As the team kept asking for clarity, the mid-level executives stopped communicating completely. Rumors and speculation began to fill the space left by the team who was supposed to be leading the change.
Because they were left in the dark, the legacy team began to make contingency plans for themselves. Some got new jobs within the corporation. Some got jobs at other companies. And some remained in their old roles and were paralyzed by the fear of things to come, becoming less effective in those roles.
Could all this been avoided? Yes. With strategic and effective communication, key stakeholders (in this case, the current employees) could have been kept in the loop and been able to understand what was happening, why it was happening and what these changes meant to them. Linking communications with the key milestones in any change will ensure that you can communicate what each audience needs to know in a timely fashion so that those constituents don’t feel left out and begin taking actions that will decrease the value of the transformation you’re hoping to achieve.