We all want our change efforts to succeed, but two-thirds of them fail…often including our own. Amid the many barriers to success is in how we communicate.
We need lots of the written-word and spoken-word communications during a change. Posters. Emails. The stuff we do with any other initiative. Lots of it.
But during change, all the king’s flyers and all the king’s speeches—while necessary—have only so much impact. Communicating using action is many times more powerful than words alone. Examples:
— The CIO facing an uphill battle when leading a change in how her team developed software. She used action to get her people to come with her; she handed her everyday work to her direct reports, took train-the-trainer lessons and became a trainer. People could see that none other than the highly compensated, very busy CIO was taking time out to train people. She could have SAID “this is important.” Instead, she DID “this is important.” Because, well, it was just that important. She used action to win her people over, and the cutover was highly successful.
— The financial services company rolling out a new core value: Continuous Learning. Afraid their people were too timid and unwilling to fail, these leaders went further than the usual communications about the new core value. Each quarter, a single member of management would get up on stage—alone—and they would share a failure from earlier in their career. They talked about how awful it felt. Then they’d talk about what they learned from it. How they would have never reached the heights of the organization without learning from their failures. They used the action of humbling themselves to make it OK to fail. It was another very successful change.
When we see communications as words alone, we’re missing out on a huge leverage point. Actions are many times more powerful than words alone, especially during a change.