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Whenever an organizational embarks on change the major objective is that employees are truly engaged with that change and that they are all facing the one direction, clearly understanding the new vision. However one of the biggest mistakes leaders make is by just telling employees what is going to change they think that they will immediately understand the reasons why and support the new direction – and this is rarely the case. All leaders, whether at team leader level or President of a company must understand the difference between information and truly engaging employees.

Change programs are confusing for everyone, from frontline employees to all levels of leaders and managers. To successfully transform organizations you need to ensure that everyone at all levels of the organization will understand what the change will mean for them personally and in the case of leaders and managers they also need to be able to demonstrate that to their team. It is only ever in the context of the direct impact on people that they say “Aha! now I get it.”

So how do we communicate change to employees so that all employees understand what it means for them? Let’s look at this example.

An organization wants to communicate the financial results to employees and the usual approach is to post the employee annual report on the intranet. But this time they need to do something different, they want employees to understand why the company needs to improve and what shareholders base their decisions on. So they decided to run free lunchtime information sessions for their employees on how to invest in the share market and held them for one hour each week for four weeks.

The topics progressed from understanding the share market, categories of companies listed etc till the final week they examined annual reports. So in this final session they were reviewing annual reports and came to the last one for the session and after reading through the data the question was asked of employees, so who would invest in this company, few put their hands up. And you guessed it, the company was their company and with a collective Aha! the employees finally got the message.

As in this instance, a large transformation program including HR, training and operational initiatives was developed to build on this.

Transformational leadership is all about taking employees with you on the journey of change. Involving people in the changes and linking those changes to how they do their work will make change management a much easier strategy to implement.

Learn more about leadership-styles. Stop by our site where you can find out all about leadership communication and change management.

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