Your Change Journey starts with Vision and Leadership
This is a guest article written by Katrin Schilling, Organizational Change Management (OCM) Director at Takeda. She is an internal coach for Global Manufacturing & Supply and coaches program teams on OCM skills and mindset. Her goal is to build OCM capabilities to enable program teams to navigate and thrive in change and transformations. This article will be the first out of three and explores the importance of vision and leadership in driving organizational changes.
Have you made tomato soup without tomatoes or French fries without potatoes? Like the tomato is a key ingredient for tomato soup and potato for French fries, change also has some key ingredients: Vision and Leadership.
On Vision and Leadership
Change starts with seeing a glimpse of the future. Change starts with a clear vision. And change starts with you. You need to have a clear vision of the future state. You need to be able to rub over the proverbial crystal ball and imagine what will be different in x time. That is your vision. It is your guiding light in a transformation.
Knowing where you want to be is, however, not sufficient. You need the second ingredient: Leadership. Leadership is the ability to take the guiding light, the vision, and translate that into daily business operations. In other words, leadership is about inspiring, motivating and guiding individuals and teams through change.
Why do Vision and Leadership matter? Co-creating the vision for the change is crucial for engagement along the entire change journey. A clear and concise vision is the cornerstone to avoid corrections, frustrations and escalations later in the transformation process. Having everybody on the same wavelength right from the start, will accelerate the change in the long run and avoids misunderstandings and potential resistances during the change.
In concrete terms, you need to co-create and communicate three points:
- a change vision
- the change goals
- benefits of your change
These three points together will be your common understanding regarding vision, goals, and benefits. All three will work in synergy and will foster support and commitment across the organization, ensuring that everyone is working towards the same objectives.
Vision and leadership questions
Put differently, answer questions like:
- Why is the change needed?
- Why right now?
- What will the future look like?
- What must change?
- What will not change?
- How do we get there?
- What are the benefits of changing?
- What happens if we don’t change?
In practical terms, this means that a diverse cross-functional project team should be put into place to brainstorm on exactly those questions and create the vision. Your Leadership Team (LT) should support you, and at least 1 LT member must be part of the brainstorming team. Having a cross-functional team, not necessarily based on seniority or hierarchy, is paramount for representing diverse perspectives throughout the organization.
When people in your organization understand the vision and the why behind a change, they are more likely to be engaged and supportive. If you have an internal communication team, work with them to detail foundational messages that clearly convey the goals and benefits of the change. This is your change vision. Since your LT was engaged when creating the change vision, it should be easy for them to help you carry the messages forward, to be positive towards the change, to understand exactly why this change is needed. In essence, vision and leadership work together to be a change multiplier.
30-3-30-3 as a change intervention
One example of a useful tool from behavioral science is the ‘30-3-30-3’ intervention. This is an excellent choice to up-and downscale your change narrative to different audiences and contexts. That way you ensure you have different versions, varying in length and detail, of your overall change narrative. Remember, different stakeholder groups have different needs, so you need to approach and engage them based on their needs.
You could start with a 30 minute version of your vision (change narrative) for town halls with lots of details, especially for complex transformations. The 3 minute version is a slimmed down version without all the details and suited for presentation for leadership teams for example. And on top, you have a 30 second version with just the most important information for watercooler discussions or elevator pitches. Ideally, you even bring it down to a slogan, or one-liner that fits even in 3 seconds. Remember, simplicity is the joker in your sleeve here.
To summarize some best-practices when navigating through change. Start your change journey with the three steps of vision and leadership in mind:
- Co-create the change vision for the future together. Don’t assume your team knows everything. Use the collective intelligence around you.
- Diversity trumps everything else. Ensure you have a diverse cross-functional team with at least one member of the Leadership Team on-board, engaged and part of your co-creation team.
- Don’t disband your co-creation team after the change vision has been created. Engage and utilize them as change multipliers. They will make ripples and waves in their ecosystems where you alone (and your project team) won’t even come near.
Change is something you do together. Be Stronger together!
We hope you found this guest article by Katrin Schilling on the importance of vision and leadership in your change journey useful. If you’re looking for a behavioral business partner to drive organizational change, we’re happy to schedule a call. Want to learn more about the application of brain and behavioral insights in management, HR, growth and innovation? Read our blog or view our YouTube channel!
About Neurofied
Neurofied is a behavioral science company specialized in training, consulting, and change management. We help organizations drive evidence-based and human-centric change with insights and interventions from behavioral psychology and neuroscience. Consider us your behavioral business partner who helps you build behavioral change capabilities internally.
Since 2018, we have trained thousands of professionals and worked with over 100 management, HR, growth, and innovation teams of organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Deloitte, Novo Nordisk, ABN AMRO, and the Dutch government. We are also frequent speakers at universities and conferences.
Our mission is to democratize the value of behavioral science for teams and organizations. If you see any opportunities to collaborate, please contact us here.
