By J. Dean Spence
Have you ever had a job interview that you wish you could do over? It has happened to me. Have you ever come out of an interview and for the next couple of days, or longer, replay it over and over in your mind? I have. “I should have known they were going to ask that.” “I wish I had spent more time thinking about _______ before the interview.”
Recently, I had an interview for an exciting consultant position. I felt I was answering most of the questions pretty well until they asked me how I would communicate significant change to employees in the organization.
First of all, it’s a difficult question to answer without in depth knowledge of the organization’s culture, but I tried to answer that I would monitor the media for rumours about the change that might negatively affect employee morale and address those rumours swiftly. I said that employees should be told about the change by their direct supervisors, as opposed to members of the C-Suite because employees tend to trust supervisors more (but again in some organizational cultures the CEO may have a good rapport with employees). I also said I would use storytelling to remind employees about good times in the past, and try to convince them that the future will bring more good times.
I tried to say all of this, but I was so caught off guard by the question that I stumbled and rambled incoherently.
A few days after the interview, the employer called. They liked me but felt they would be “setting me up for failure by hiring [me].” I believe I could have handled the job. I was just unprepared for the interview. And ironically, the subject of change communication interests me and I have read up on the subject.
The best, and unfortunately the costliest in terms of time and money, way to communicate change is through two-way symmetrical communication structured like a tennis match. To start off, the organization serves the ball—i.e. it officially announces to employees the change that will occur. The employees return the serve—i.e. they listen to the announcement and officially state their concerns and suggestions. The organization hits the ball back over the net—i.e. senior leadership listens to the employees’ concerns and suggestions, revaluates, clarifies and possibly restates to employees its official position. The two sides keep “hitting the ball over the net” in this way until there is mutual understanding and growth on both sides—i.e. instead of beginning in love like a tennis match, ideally communicating change should end in love.
If I could do that interview over again I would share my tennis metaphor with them, and then I would talk about those other three tactics I mentioned above; especially the third.
Recently, I came across an article called “Beyond Forecasting: Creating Strategic Narratives” by Sarah Kaplan and Wanda Orlikowski. The authors argue that “by rethinking the past and present and reimagining the future, managers can construct strategic narratives that enable innovation.”
So, what’s the connection here between change communication and strategy?
Check out the Kaplan and Orlikowski article. I think that the tenor of their argument can be extended to change communication because it stands to reason that strategy is important when change is occurring or on the horizon. In fact, what Kaplan and Orlikowski are saying is similar to what I said above about storytelling and change communication. And when the authors talk about “constructing strategic narratives” by which they mean linking together “efforts to re-imagine future possibilities, rethink past routines and rediscover present concerns” it calls to mind my tennis metaphor.
One of the conclusions that Kaplan and Orlikowski come to in the article is that “for a narrative to guide strategic choices, it has to be coherent, plausible and acceptable to most key stakeholders within the company.
For the purpose of ending my blog here, we can easily replace “strategic choices” in the last quote with “change.”