This simple mistake is sabotaging your change initiatives - here’s how to stop it.
Photo by Sarah Killian on Unsplash
If you are on LinkedIn or subscribed to a business publication like HBR or Forbes you are seeing a constant stream of headlines around burnout, leadership and traversing back to work and work from home.
As I read many of these articles I notice the one thing missing in many of them is the deeper discussion on the impact of change volume.
I remember being in a strategy meeting a number of years ago, we were looking at all the projects we needed to implement and struggling with how to prioritize so many. The impact of seeing them on the wall was daunting, and the challenge - most of them were identified as a high priority. And it was true, they were.
Our team didn’t have the capacity to execute them all and deep down we knew it. The reality was that the priority levels were non-negotiable. After a long debate, we talked ourselves into a ‘can do’ attitude and the projects went into the plan for the upcoming year.
This is a common scenario in annual strategy and business planning sessions. But here’s the rub, knowing you’ve exceeded your capacity to execute doesn’t resolve it.
Deciding to do it anyway sets your team up for failure and potential burnout.
“Hope as a strategy” simply doesn’t work.
Change saturation in organizations is high. In fact, in the Prosci 2018 Best Practices in Change Management, survey results showed that 73% of organizations were approaching, at, or beyond their ability to keep pace with the volume of change in their business. As I discussed in my previous article, Covid has pushed us beyond this edge.
Organizations are spending time and money implementing change in their organization that leaders and employees are unable to achieve.
Let that sink in for a minute.
It’s wasteful and counterproductive to spend time and resources on initiatives our teams can’t achieve even though we want to, or even have to. There is no leader that would set out to do this intentionally.
I get it, there are times where demands on business push us to adapt. Instead of heaping those demands onto the existing pile, a more realistic approach is to pause or delay projects lower in priority.
Overcoming change saturation requires us to acknowledge it’s a problem and face it head on. I don’t know of any organization that doesn’t want to excel at achieving their goals and initiatives.
Two questions can start this dialogue on your team:
How can we measure the level of change saturation in our organization – not what we think it is but factual, data driven analysis.
How do we identify the behaviour(s) driving it and what can we do to overcome it? Again, not what we think it is (assumption) but measured feedback (collected data).
If you don’t have the change management expertise in your organization to do this, contract it out so that you are targeting the right data, analysis and strategy to right size the level of change in your organization. You will also come away with a benchmark for your change saturation rate that can be used in annual planning.
Resetting change volume requires discipline at the senior leader level. Overestimating capacity is a routine habit in some organizations, often creating burnout and disengagement at all levels. There needs to be push back at the top when this happens..
Annual planning would benefit from the “expert negotiator” approach Adam Grant describes in chapter 5 of his book Think Again, adopting the mindset of curiosity and finding common ground as a way of realistic project prioritization.
Reset requires listening to teams when they say there are too many initiatives to keep up with. Ignoring this feedback is detrimental and allows saturation to continue. Understand the impact of multiple change on your team and the signals of overload so you can address it.
Recognize the leader behaviours driving the habit of over stretching resources and shift present attitudes around change management by becoming more informed. Learning to recognize change elements and how to manage them properly is key in leading change effectively.
| Related Article: What is change leadership and how do you measure it in your business? |
Understanding the support people need to scale multiple changes helps right-size planning initiatives and achieve intended outcomes. It drives ROI.
Leaders who understand this know their team’s limits and protect their ability to remain productive and engaged. They enjoy a higher level of output as a result, driven by the support needed to excel vs. the mandate to produce beyond capacity.
Change initiatives managed well build trust and strength in a team, energize employees, and create engagement and job satisfaction. It also protects your team from burnout so if you are wondering where to start, look at change saturation, chances are your team is maxed out.
If you’d like to analyze the change saturation rate in your business, let’s talk about a strategy to analyze and overcome it.
Learn more about change leadership programs here.
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