Timing and starting together is important for successful change
In teamwork there are often one or more members with ideas of making a significant change. Sometimes most or all of the team might be up for it and the change still fails to take. Why?
I’ve led teams through significant integrations of newly acquired businesses. The most challenging was two competing, similarly sized businesses came together as one.
The change involved (re)forming teams to focus on systems relevant to both brands (eventually to come under a single brand) and also modernizing of the development and operations practices of each team.
We didn’t leap straight into change and restructuring. We spent a significant amount of time observing and talking with the teams to understand their own improvement aspirations.
One interesting observation was that there often was one or more people within each team agitating for change who were struggling to get the buy-in from their peers on these changes.
Even more interesting was that there were often others in the team who in 1:1 chats with myself and other leaders would admit they were also interested in the suggested change. But for various reasons they might not be ready for it.
Sometimes they had their own change they felt was the priority. Sometimes they had a commitment they wanted to address first. Sometimes there were priorities their managers had indicated. Sometimes there wasn’t a warning the idea was going to be raised and they wanted time to process rather than make a significant decision in the moment.
All of these can be looked at as timing challenges.
We approached the change of the organisation by communicating a vision of how we intended to work, what we would focus on, and our best guess at how we would be organised.
For how we organised we applied some Domain Driven Design principles to identify areas for teams to be responsible for the outcomes of the product. It wasn’t perfect and we were upfront about this.
But unlike restructures at other organisations I have worked at, we didn’t change all the teams in a big bang. Instead, we used concepts from dynamic reteaming by Heidi Helfland. We actually did our first reteaming prior to the book being published but certainly improved our process with more ideas from the book so I can recommend this as a great resource.
We would work on a pitch for a given domain and then recruit for it internally. The pitch had more detail on what the domain was responsible for, why it would be an interesting area to work in, and what roles and skillsets would be needed to be successful. Anyone was eligible to apply for open roles we identified.
People would self-select into these opportunities which really helped with the engagement and acceptance of the big change.
We would support the onboarding of each new domain team with a week-long onboarding boot camp which covered team identity, going deeper into responsibilities, and education on new practices, and ways of working we’d be using.
The remarkable thing we noticed was the changes that were hard in an existing team where the timing issues I mentioned earlier were at play seemed to be much easier for a new group of people who were all starting together.
There are of course many other reasons why change doesn’t take - for instance often change is not approached proactively or intentionally. One of the most common areas of coaching I have provided over the years is the level of proactive communication that is required to support a change.
It’s common to find people only raising issues that require a change reactively as the issue comes up. Experience has taught me this can be the hardest point in time to persuade others.
Clearly, dissolving and reconstituting teams is an impractical way to approach most change. But knowing that timing can be an issue can help us in a variety of ways.
Firstly if there is a reason to be changing or forming teams it can be a useful time to consider what other changes or new practices might be worth instilling in the new team. The opportunity to onboard and embed new thinking is often not taken advantage of. A week-long boot camp may seem like overkill but if the difference is twice the engagement and productivity over the long term, it’s an investment you would be mad not to make.
It can be also useful to use the knowledge of timing people’s readiness for change with the use of other events. It could be returning from break, after a big initiative, planning for intentional down-tools time. It’s about creating the opportunity for people to start together.
Have you noticed that timing can be a factor in successful change? What examples can you share? Share your experiences in the comments.
> It’s common to find people only raising issues that require a change reactively as the issue comes up.
So true!
Thanks for sharing. I have a blunt question: while people were aligned under the same vision or self organized through reteaming, what happened to some priority that wasn't included or supported, but strongly felt by one or very few individuals? I suppose they understood their ultimate role as a leader or some chose to leave.
Part of the work was getting into each area of the organisation and working with experienced people in those areas to understand what they thought was important.
We'd capture that in various ways, trying to relate activities to problems, needs, capabilities and outcomes. This often identified important work that we'd otherwise be unaware of.
We might not have been able to prioritise everything at once but recognising and acknowledging needs and helping make timely and clear prioritisation decisions goes a long way.
Still trust takes time to build and certainly people left before trust was established. And sometimes we made missteps where trust was lost. Most important is you are open to learning and improving. You don't start with perfect knowledge.