Who will be impacted?

In the first stage of our transformation journey (steps 1 to 4), we used the analogy of building a bridge to represent your change journey and took it from initial concept through to a full understanding of the impact on the business, operations, systems and people.

But while your close team might be on board with your plan, how is everyone else going to react when they hear the news? It’s human nature for individuals to focus on how they will be affected personally. This creates an instant level of anxiety, which you need to manage.

To ease the situation, get ahead of the narrative early on and control the message. Most importantly, you need to manage people’s emotions. Things get very personal at this stage. Self-esteem starts to decline, and team performance dips as a result. The progress of your change might slow down as things become more complicated.

You start facing the transformation dilemma: how is it possible to achieve your goals while spending most of your time engaging people and just a fraction of it on executing the actual change? It’s tricky, but it’s this balance of effort that leads to successful transformations. How will you make it happen?