How New Managers Can Use Change Management Leadership Tools to Help Their Teams Adapt
Regardless of the industry, no business can afford to remain stagnant. Change must happen, and a structured change management plan is key to moving both individuals and the teams they work with from their existing state to a proposed state that’s rooted in strategy and vision. However, as you may have already discovered during your time in management, no matter the management skills you possess, deviating from a dominant culture to new processes isn’t always easy.
There are many possible barriers to implementing change, including employee resistance, communication breakdown and even the different personality types in the team. All of these factors can make it difficult to get your people onboard with the plans, resulting in new strategies that aren’t implemented well, time delays in reengineering processes, and the development of seemingly high quality procedures that fail to deliver results.
Leading Through Change
While any leader can struggle through change management, new leaders are especially vulnerable to making mistakes. By nature, you probably have quite a directive management style - a quality that contributed towards your promotion - and while this approach may be effective in overall team leadership, it may not be quite what’s needed for change management leadership; for helping your team to adapt.
According to Gartner, 50% of all change initiatives result in failure, while just one third are considered to be successful. As a manager, a significant role that you must play within the organisation is ‘leader of change’; it’s a big responsibility, but it’s critical in ensuring that your team adapts well, and that any change initiative is successful.
Change Management Leadership
Change management leadership means bringing together change management and leadership development into a single combined approach. Part of this approach will come from the practical skills you pick up as you continue to learn the ropes within your new role and complete more leadership online courses, but in the meantime there are a number of change management leadership tools that can be highly effective in helping you support your team through change:
- Employee Analysis Tools
Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger, Senior Partners at insights firm McKinsey, released a book titled ‘Beyond Performance 2.0’ which highlights some of the most vital research in change management leadership. They found that absolutely no change management programmes were successful amongst organisations that overlooked the needs of employees during periods of disruption. They also found that companies that took a people-centric approach to change were 4 times more likely to see the desired results.
Employee analysis is one of the most vital change management leadership tools that you can use, especially if you’ve been finding it challenging to connect with the many different personalities within your team, all of which require an individualistic approach.
- Training Tools
Training courses that are specifically dedicated to helping new managers adapt to their roles and create harmony between their leadership responsibilities and their change management responsibilities can be highly beneficial. However, don’t overlook the potential power of training for select members of your team, too. Training can be key to getting your people excited about change, and these individuals can act as influencers who spread this excitement throughout the organisation as a whole.
McKinsey reports that businesses are nearly 4 times more likely to succeed when they incorporate internal influencers in their change management programmes. People talk, and while we can’t always manage the conversation, we can try to manage the sentiment.
- Tracking Tools
Tracking tools act as tangible proof that change works, making them an essential on any list of potential change management leadership tools. However, one of the most important things that you can do as a leader of change is to remain consistent with your use of these tools. Referring back to the McKinsey research above, although change programmes are upwards of 7 times more likely to succeed when relevant metrics are tracked, less than one third of businesses actually track the metrics they say they do.
Your team will naturally be wary of change if they can’t connect this change with the end results. And end results can often take a significant amount of time to materialise. Tracking tools offer short-term successes and can motivate your team to stick to the new processes.
- Communications Tools
Among the many reasons why you were promoted to a management role, communication is likely to be one of them. You naturally excel at personal communication. However, if you’ve been involved heavily in a change programme’s story from the start, it’s important to remember that your team hasn’t. This can make your messages appear disjointed and disconnected. Your communication approach must be adapted in order to maintain a clear and transparent channel with your team. Taking part in difficult conversations exercises could help you to communicate more effectively when it comes to conveying key aspects of your change program.
Communications tools can help to boost real time, transparent communications between yourself and your team which can also smooth the transition. Such systems keep lines of communication open and up-to-date, allowing your team to stay present on any amendments to the programme, ask questions, and request support when needed.
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Jeroen Kraaijenbrink: How organizations can overcome the honesty gap
Senior leadership and boardroom teams invest heavily in commercial strategies to win market shares. Yet the most important and honest information driving strategy circulates in teams underneath, never making it to the table where decisions are made.Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, Executive Coach and Strategy Consultant at Kraaijenbrink Advisory, has spent years working on what he calls the honesty gap. We sat down with him to understand what the honesty gap actually is, where it lives in organizations, and why fixing it requires a leadership shift.How do you define the honesty gap?There's a narrow definition and a broad one. The broad one is: we have created organizations and systems where it's barely possible to be honest to yourself, about yourself, and honest to other people.Honesty isn't just lying. It's integrity, being authentically connected to other people and being aware of your own emotions and your own biases.The honesty gap, in a narrow sense, is the fact that truth and information don’t travel vertically upwards in a company. It's often hard to speak openly to your manager because it’s become rational not to. Many people have the experience: 'I've tried it once but then I was punished for it, or was ignored, so let it be, never mind.' That's the fascinating part: it's not good for people, it's not good for organizations and yet we somehow keep this system intact.Is it less about individual dishonesty and more about a collective culture?A lot of the most important information going through your company is between people and in conversations. You need to find a way to have an honest conversation, where the things that matter get on the meeting table, not just in the informal circuit. And I think that's pretty rare.A more systematic definition is that we're not using the collective intelligence of a company enough. We can radically improve it because we’ve made it rational to hide the truth and to keep things to yourself. A lot of it may not be intentional, but the very fact that someone is in a position above you automatically creates this tension: 'What do I show? What don't I show? Because my next performance appraisal is coming up.'Where does the honesty gap typically show up first, and who owns the problem?It starts with leaders. Solving it needs one leader at the top, the CEO at least, being open and reflective enough to admit that there is an honesty gap and that they are part of it. That's the self-reflection you need for any improvement and any change. Like in coaching: you need to be aware that there is stuff to improve. You don't need to be a perfect leader, but you need to be open enough to admit that there is an issue.You talk about the 'persona trap', what is that?You're stuck in a persona where you perform in a certain way within your company. You have a role, a position, a reputation, and that locks you into specific behaviors. The worse the match between who you are as a person and how you need to show up in your organization, the more inner conflict that’s created. Especially at the top, it’s a problem for many executives. They're supposed to be the people who know it all and be decisive. While if you're honest, you don't necessarily know everything, you’re uncertain and have anxieties.The inner core of the honesty gap is breaking the performance, breaking the acting you feel you must do. If you've put yourself in a role of being the strong, decisive, number-oriented leader, that's how you have to behave. But most people don't feel very comfortable in that kind of role because it's not who they are.Can you fix the honesty gap through individual coaching alone or does the system have to change?Part of it is a personal change, part of it is a system change. You can be on your own and be very authentic, but if the system doesn't change at all, you’ll struggle to break the honesty gap.What you need to do is work on the people, the culture, and the system. Ideally that has to include the top, because otherwise it stays at the level of the person being coached. If it's a team lead or a mid-manager, that person can partly create an island in the organization, a safe space for their team and their department. But still, the appraisal systems, objectives, and culture are company-wide. Why is this so hard to shift, even when leaders recognize the problem?We have normalized this idea that you have to be strategic in what you tell and what you show. You have to show up in a certain role at work. It's also the result of how we have separated work from life, which is a very unnatural thing. It's from the industrial age, because for any other species, work is life. But now there’s a split between work, with all the routines in companies, and then your private life. There's just one you, you're the same person at home as you are at work. The good news is that the honesty gap can be closed. While many companies have unintentionally created environments where people hesitate to speak openly, organizations prioritizing trust, authenticity, and psychological safety can unlock a competitive advantage. When employees feel safe to share concerns, ideas, and perspectives, collective intelligence grows, decision-making improves, and stronger relationships emerge across every level of the business.
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