I disappeared from this blog for most of the month of January.  No, I wasn’t on vacation.  I was working with several colleagues on a large change communication project.  Our client is in the middle of transforming their compensation structure. Our job was to lead 800 managers (20 at a time) through a 4-hour workshop. The workshop covered the purpose for the transition and the specifics of how the new compensation program would work. The overall objective of the workshop was to equip managers with information that they would need to communicate the change to their employees.  Of course, before that could happen, the managers themselves needed to understand, accept and support the change personally.  

Because the response to our workshops was overwhelmingly positive, I decided to take time to reflect on what worked.  Over the next few posts, I’ll explore what we learned from this rollout and the lessons that it illustrates for all change communicators.

Topic #1:  Senior Leader Support

For this organization, the rollout of the new compensation system has been a multi-year process.  The internal HR/Comp/OD team worked closely with each division’s top leader and his/her direct reports on every aspect of the transition.  This was not simply a process of getting surface-level “buy-in.”  The division leaders personally made critical decisions at each point of the transition.  

The involvement of the senior leaders ended up being incredibly powerful when it came time to introduce the new system to managers and employees.  We ran most of the workshops with managers in intact teams.  Each team heard from their division’s most senior leader at the start (and sometimes also the end) of the class. The next-level leaders who had been involved in the decision-making participated in the sessions along with managers who were hearing the details for the first time.    

In every session that we ran, it quickly became evident that the involvement of senior leaders at every stage (decision making, planning, and communication) was the most powerful factor in getting front-line and mid-level manager support for the change.  You could visibly see resistance levels being reduced at three points in the workshop:

1. When senior leaders invited and answered questions
2. When leaders who were involved in the process talked about their personal experience with the details, especially tough decisions they made along the way
3. When leaders acknowledged that the transition would be difficult for employees and simultaneously emphasized that it was the right thing to do in the long run

What struck me about each class was the fact that it was leader involvement throughout the workshop that was particularly powerful.  The cases where a leader kicked off a session with a few words and then left were not nearly as effective as the times where a) the division head participated in the whole sessions or b) the division head kicked off the session and one or more of his/her direct reports who worked on the details of the transition stayed and participated in the session.

Where we saw buy-in really start to happen is through dialogue in the classroom. In many cases, I as the facilitator would explain how the overall process of mapping jobs worked.  When managers had questions, the most powerful and effective answers came from people in the room who had been involved in the mapping for the departments represented in that room.  

I don’t think this implies that a senior leader kickoff isn’t important.  Rather, this experience showed that a 5-10 minute kickoff isn’t enough to get manager buy-in and support.

Lessons: Hearing from the most senior leader that he/she supports a change is necessary but not sufficient for getting a group to support a change. Two-way dialogue with leaders about the details and tough decisions is where buy-in really happens.