Aligning and keeping aligned Duck 5

Duck 5, Communication: Everyone impacted by the change must understand its importance.

Duck 5 is a tricky one, but it is essential. What you do not want is to put in place all the desired changes only to have no one actually do anything differently. All the effort, money and resources invested in making the change would be wasted! Yet most businesses report that up to 95% of their improvement projects fail, and the biggest cause of failure is the change being rejected by those impacted.

We repeat what we described in the How to Lead Change blog post:

“it is critical to get all the people NOT on the project team that are impacted by the change to be motivated to embrace the change and not to publicly resist it. This Duck 5 is about the need to align everyone that you want to do things differently than they are used to and therefore will be naturally resistant to what you want. To them you must communicate the importance of the change to:

• the organization and its mission,

• the people they work alongside within the organization, and

• their ability to master their job.

The description of the importance of the change is made to appeal to the general human motivations described in Session 9 on Motivating Others. It is also based upon what was discussed in Session 8 on Relationship Building: Duck 5 requires that the leader communicates the importance of the change and then receives feedback that the message was accurately received, understood and agreed upon. Creating a shared understanding of the importance of a change makes it much more difficult for an individual to fight the change in the open, or even covertly. If even only a small percentage of employees and stakeholders do not feel the change is important then it will be poorly implemented and the potential benefits of the change will be lost.”

The challenging parts of this alignment are:

• Figuring out all the different constituents (described below) that will be impacted (this includes beta testers, actual customers, investors, contractors, suppliers, and—if applicable—people following you on social media.

• Determining what aspects of the change will worry them or make them feel uncomfortable.

• Constructing descriptions of the importance of the change in specific terms for each constituency, which speaks to the importance of the change for them as described above.

• Getting accurate feedback that the importance of the change has been accepted.

• Composing and delivering updates on how the activities to implement the change are proceeding, specifically highlighting what has and has not changed including the importance of the expected impacts.

This can require quite a bit of communicating. Some startups figure they do this when they hire a PR firm, but they usually only handle communications to customers or outside constituencies, yet the internal ones are just as important.

In early stage startups, before actually getting customers (Stage 1), there are not too many people outside of the leadership team who are impacted. But as a startup builds capacity to actually deliver products or services to customers, the number of people and constituencies increases rapidly.

Aligning and keeping align Duck 5 can take up a large amount of time of a founder and the leadership team. The messaging about the importance of a change is only believable if it comes from somebody who is ultimately responsible for ensuring the promised impacts of the change will actually occur.

Realigning Duck 5

Consider: “Composing and delivering updates on how the activities to implement the change are proceeding, specifically highlighting what has and has not changed including the importance of the expected impacts” as constantly keeping Duck 5 aligned.

What are constituencies?

A constituency is a group of people that share the same benefits, interactions, and expectations associated with dealing with some organization. Constituencies exist inside and outside an organization. Here are examples:

• People that perform the same job are a constituency.

• People who work in the same department are a constituency.

• People that work in the same space or geography are a constituency.

• People with special benefits (like probationary workers, trainees, alumni)

• Each user or customer persona describes a different customer constituency

• Key decision-makers at suppliers are a constituency

• Suppliers who compete to supply a specific product or service form a separate constituency.

• Investors (or class of investor if different types of investors exist)

• Board of Directors

• Board of advisors

• If a change will impact the families of employees, then employee spouses are a constituency

Clearly, people can be part of several constituencies.

It is important to realize that any of these constituencies can derail the impact of an important change, particularly if not understanding the importance of the change results in covert resistance to its implementation.