Effective Change Communications...Tip #1: Be clear on the "why" of the change.

Organizations today are undergoing constant change – or at least the successful ones are. To the people in the organization, it seems relentless, never ending and often disconnected. And my experience has shown me that it is a whole lot easier to be "the changer" than "the changee".

  Have you ever been in a plane and looked out the window at a rain cloud? If you look towards the ground, there is a great deal of structure to the rain storm; it is tightly clustered and organized. You are senior leadership at this 30,000 foot level – and this is how you view the changes going on in the organization.

Now imagine you’re on the ground and that rain storm is overhead. All you know is it’s constantly coming down and there is no end in sight. These are your employees in the organization – and this is how they view all the myriad changes going on all around them, all the time.

  Your job, as an effective leader and communicator in a time of change, is to make meaning for your employees of all these changes. William Bridges , author of Managing Transitions, has a simple, yet powerful, way of capturing the “why” of change: Describe (and justify) the intended change in a statement lasting no longer than one minute – without the use of jargon. “Sell the problem before you sell the solution.”

Can you clearly and succinctly describe your key change initiative(s) this way? If you can, you have given your employees a virtual “umbrella” under which all the changes make sense. And you are much more likely to get their buy-in and commitment to the change – not just their compliance.