“I can tell this is hard for you all to hear. I know it’s harder for some of you than others. It’s not my first choice, either. However, it makes enough sense, and it’s the direction we’re going now. We’ll take some time to work through how we feel about this. Then we need to figure out how to start making this change.”
Those weren’t exactly the words the Director of Engineering used to communicate the change in our team’s priorities, but they are close. It was certainly the message that those of us in the room heard when he told us about the abrupt shift in the direction we were about to make. This potentially disruptive change was one of my first experiences with communicating change effectively and humanely. Because of how the director held himself and the team during the ensuing conversation, what could have been an absolute mess turned into a surprisingly positive experience.
In the years since that meeting, I’ve seen other managers and people in positions of authority handle similarly tough conversations with varying degrees of success. Sometimes managers stick to their talking points but disconnect from their people. Other times, they make it clear they care about their team but are vague about what the change will require. And all too often, they pass on their anxieties about the situation directly to their people. None of these behaviors help changes to happen effectively and humanely. In my experience as a manager and working with managers, I’ve seen four practices as critical in communicating change. Mastering them will make you a more effective manager.
Work Through Your Anxieties First
As a manager, you have a substantial emotional impact on your people. It’s natural for our moods to “infect” the people we interact with. Power dynamics and status differences only reinforce this effect. When communicating change to people reporting to you, you can either be an anxiety amplifier or a dampener. If you are angry, frustrated, in denial, or otherwise agitated about a change when you talk to your people about it, you can expect they will be, too.
Before you can talk to your team about a change that doesn’t sit well with you, you need to sort through your issues with it. This is true whether or not you are the one who has decided the change will happen. If it’s a decision you struggled to make, you must come to terms with it well enough to talk clearly and calmly about it – even those parts that you still don’t feel great about.
One manager I worked with decided to fire an engineer on one of his teams. This manager was quite clear that the engineer needed to go. What he struggled with was how the remaining team members would see him and what the impact on them would be. Before talking to the team about it, he needed to understand what bothered him about the situation.
Working through your discomfort is even more critical if you didn’t make the decision. Part of your job as a manager is to support your boss. This involves understanding their choices, aligning with them, and cascading that alignment through your people. If managers can’t – or don’t – do this, organizations can’t coordinate larger-scale change across different departments and teams.
Whether or not the decision behind the change was yours, you need to be able to own it. If you’re having a strong, negative, emotional reaction to it, you’re not ready to talk to your people about it yet. Get curious about your reactions to the change. Why does it bother you? What concerns do you have? Once you get past your initial reaction, what do you think about it?
Working through these might involve hard conversations with your manager, discussions with a peer, journaling, meditation – whatever practices you have for dealing with challenging issues and calming down your nervous system. (Mine include talking with my coach and weeding the garden.) Once you can think straight about the change and what bothers you, you can start figuring out how to communicate it to the team.
Plan What You Need to Say – And How
Once you’ve identified your discomfort with the situation, plan how to talk about it with your people. What’s the message you want them to take away from the conversation? Think about your message as a headline. It’s not the whole story, but it encapsulates the critical information people need to know. When someone outside the team asks a team member what happened, what do you want them to say?
Knowing what you want to say is only part of an effective plan. You also need to consider how you want to say it. Your mood can either strengthen or undermine your message, so it’s worth considering what attitude you want to bring to the conversation. Your attitude is contagious, so if you contribute nervous energy or frustration, there’s a good chance you’ll pass those along.
Decide how to say things in a way that reinforces your message and your desired attitude. If you want to be calm, clear, and collected, then explaining things in long, rambling sentences isn’t likely to work. Instead, you might use short, precise statements delivered in a warm yet neutral tone of voice. The more uncomfortable you are with the topic, the more value there is in planning how you want to discuss it.
Prepare for Difficulties
You might think planning how to communicate a change to your team is good enough. As the saying goes, however, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” Your people are not the enemy, of course; they’re precisely the opposite. However, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get thrown off your “perfect” plan once you get into the conversation. You must also be emotionally prepared for whatever reactions – and your reactions to those reactions – may come up.
Imagine that you are the manager in the story from the opening section. You must inform a team you manage that they will be redeployed to a new initiative in a few weeks. You don’t like the decision, though you can see that it better aligns with the company’s new priorities. Still, you are proud of the team’s work in this area, and they could continue to add value here. At the same time, the new initiative is more likely to generate much-needed revenue.
You plan to bring a matter-of-fact yet supportive attitude to the conversation. You also know that you tend to overexplain things when you get nervous. To account for this, you work out how to explain the situation in just a few sentences. Then you plan to ask what they must do to finish their current work. Before having the conversation, think about what could happen and how you might instinctively respond. If the team pushes back against this news, will you try to appease them? Will you blame your boss? Will you brush aside their concerns and tell them to “Figure it out, okay?” Knowing how they – and you – are likely to react can help you know what to do when you get knocked off your plan.
Suppose you know the team may complain about being pulled off the work and that you would tend to blame your boss. In that case, you might be ready to ask, “Can you tell me about your concerns with moving on from this work?” Then you might paraphrase what they say and check with them that you understood. This reinforces the “matter-of-fact yet supportive” attitude you said you wanted to bring. You might follow that with, “I hear your concerns, and we’ll need to find ways together to work through them. I appreciate that the next few weeks will be difficult – and we will move on to the new initiative by the end of the month. Let’s list all the things we need to address before then.”
Stay Clear, Curious, and Connected
The goal of all of this groundwork – working through your anxieties, planning what and how you want to communicate, and preparing to recover when you’re thrown off-balance – is to be fully present in the conversation with your people. You want to be clear about the change and how it will affect them. You want to be curious about their reactions and responses to it. And you want your people to know you care about what happens to them. Doing all three helps you develop a shared understanding of the change. Managers who do this well are often described as authentic and trustworthy, even when their teams don’t like what’s happening.
An essential part of communicating change effectively is making space to work with whatever emotions arise. It’s often this part of the conversation that managers try to avoid. They know they can get caught up in the emotional turbulence of challenging conversations. Instead of staying curious and connected, they announce the change and try to ignore people’s reactions to it. This strategy is ultimately self-defeating. As Brené Brown points out in Dare to Lead, “Leaders must either invest a reasonable amount of time attending to fears and feelings, or squander an unreasonable amount of time trying to manage ineffective and unproductive behavior.”
Helping Humans Through Change
Communicating change effectively is more than just passing along information. It involves adding context and clarity. Being clear, curious, and connected as you do acknowledges and works with the human experience of change. When you do this, you avoid the twin traps of being rigid and distant or overly attentive yet vague. You also calm anxiety – yours and theirs – rather than amplifying it. All this helps your people to process what is happening. And as a manager, it allows you to use the authority of your role without losing your humanity.
