Turning Chaos Into Momentum

There are rumors of a reorg. People are anxious. Nobody wants to stick out their neck and decisions are stuck in endless meetings. Innovation has come to a grind and critical feedback replaced by head nods. Teams, more defensive, are playing hot potato with that thorny customer problem that has the CEO’s attention. When orgs go through change, the worst behaviors can be amplified, the best people burned out, and if not managed well, leaders can accidentally send the company into a tailspin.

Change is hard. Change under tight timelines, whether from hypergrowth or market turbulence, adds a layer of complexity that requires careful consideration. Fortunately, there are ways to turn this chaos into an opportunity for growth and higher performance. Let’s start by looking at some common pitfalls before reviewing a few strategies to ensure a smooth transition.

Why Leaders Stumble During Rapid Change

• Botched Communications: changes, especially those related to re-orgs need to be communicated methodically and in order (as pointed out in this In Depth conversation between Saumil Mehta and Brett Berson). A great plan poorly explained can torpedo years of goodwill, make people feel marginalized, and breed disillusionment.
• Increased Team Stress and Anxiety: As a leader, you'll find limited time for nuanced conversations, making it challenging to help folks find motivation in the new landscape. This is even worse for your teams as they have reduced visibility into the changes and less time to process leading to more stress and anxiety.
• Frequent change can also cause an org to become short-term focused and for its people to become less collaborative as they jostle for position if they feel insecure in their roles
• Not managed well, the pace of change can lead to confusion, perceived lack of direction, loss of trust, and eventually turnover.

On the bright side, change can accelerate momentum. It can:

1. Bring focus, clarity, and a renewed sense of purpose that unifies the team
2. Spur innovation as the need for quick solutions can lead to creative problem-solving
3. Reinvigorate the team by jolting folks out of stale processes, local optima, and learned helplessness
4. Create new opportunities for those who might have felt pigeonholed in their roles

Strategies for Navigating Rapid Change

Reduce unforced errors

1. Nail down a communication plan, line by line, hour by hour if you have to. Check in with leaders to gather feedback real-time and make adjustments as necessary (e.g. to preemptively address new questions in subsequent comms).
2. Make sure leaders can deliver the message authentically, with conviction and accuracy - if too nuanced, better to stick to the script than risk a fumble
3. As a manager of managers, ensure that the messaging is consistent across all groups and there is transparency on:

• What’s changing?
• Why is it changing?
• How is it going to affect me?
  
  It's important to minimize the time between the first two and the last question to minimize team anxiety.

Empower the Team

• Be humble, admit to parts that are less clear for you as a leader, and invite the team to be part of the solution vs. passive recipients.
• Gather feedback and make sure everyone is heard
• If changes are built on a foundation of trust and the team feels you genuinely have their interests at heart, things will typically go smoother

Bring Clarity

• During a growth phase, some may temporarily see reduced scope as responsibilities are split to relieve pressure and prepare for the next phase. It’s hard to let go of things but by ensuring everyone has a clear understanding of the new reality and knows how they fit into the picture, you can alleviate a lot of problems.
• This applies both at individual and at org levels.

Make the implicit explicit

• Use the opportunity to clarify charters and APIs between teams
• Create publicly accessible artifacts that map ownership and responsibilities. As a side effect, this also ensures operations run more smoothly after changes are rolled out and improves accountability.
• Create well-defined goals to provide direction and purpose amidst the chaos.
• As teams grapple with changes, people can become more risk averse and decision making can grind to a halt. Unfortunately, with rapid change, there's no time for prolonged deliberation. Empower team leads with decision-making authority, and trust them to act in the company’s best interest. Lean into frameworks like DACI if you don’t already have a good framework for decision making.

Maintain Well-being

• Change can be stressful. Offer resources like counseling, flexible work hours, and stress-relief activities. Most importantly, if you’re not grounded as a leader, it will be infinitely harder for you to support the team through uncertain times. Allow yourself the time and space to process the change before rushing to roll it out with the team.

While this is not a comprehensive list of considerations, it should provide a reasonable safety net to ensure the team can flourish after changes are rolled out.