In a world where uncertainty and complexity is a constant reality, managing transformative change has become a new normal for a growing number of sales organizations. To make matters worse, companies aren’t experiencing just one change at a time – a survey from the Communications Executive Council tells us that companies have gone through an average of 3.5 substantial changes over the past 2 years. And that’s a lot, considering it takes employees an average of 24 months to recover from a single corporate change.
Whether it’s restructuring, senior leadership transitions or integrating a new sales force, employees are faced with changes that cause them to be constantly stressed out. Yet another data point to make you cringe: this change-fatigue-driven stress creates a 9-10% drag in employee performance.
And as we continue to consider our sales organizations’ ability to stay ahead of a complicated selling environment regardless of internal turmoil, this performance gap is a huge red flag when it comes to future growth.
But if your sales organization is about to stomach another transformative change, the outlook does not have to be so dismal. To get ahead of this downward spiral, we’ve seen progressive companies find successes in enabling the employee to be the “locus of control”.
Put another way, both known and unknown changes can cause less of a blow when we use tactical strategies to put our front-line staff in the driver’s seat.
While there’s no way around an ever-evolving sales organization, using an innovative approach to leadership can empower reps to collaborate with peers and act smarter and stronger when taking on a major corporate change.
Though it may seem vague or difficult to make reps the “Mobilizers” of internal change, enabling them to lean in to help drive the change isn’t an impossible dream.
If we think of transformative change as something more concrete – like rolling out a new CRM or building excitement for an upcoming training initiative – we can build our reps’ ability to adapt in the face of change using these four strategies:
1) Make Change an Emotional Journey: Because change adoption accelerates through various phases of commitment, use a Commercial Teaching Choreography to help your sales force shift from awareness of change to internalizing the change as an agile employee. The emotional journey encourages a high degree of self-discovery, which increases reps’ understanding and appreciation of the transformative change. Learn how ADP used a teaching choreography to appeal to emotional highs and lows before offering a new way forward.
2) Generate Demand to Build Momentum: Building bottom-up, viral “buzz” enables reps to generate organic acceptance for the change instead of mere leadership-driven compliance. ADP sparks initial curiosity for new changes and uses socially connected reps to continue building interest to boost the internalization of change. Here, ADP knocks down barriers to communication by opening doors to sharing new ways of thinking and working.
3) Use Peers to Enable Self-Discovery: While managers are necessary change agents when it comes to communicating the strategic goals of a given change, a manager-led approach is insufficient in driving rep support for change. See how Saudi Aramco uses peer speakers (p. 21) to publicly share their personal connection to corporate challenges and provide tangible examples for other employees to re-create.
4) Highlight Success Stories of Early Adopters: W.W. Grainger found that reps will naturally cluster into one of the following time-based segments when deciding whether to embrace change: Early adopters, Majority, Laggards and Naysayers. By gradually increasing the closeness of change-adoption through peer success, the Majority and Laggards will see their neighbors embrace change and realize immediate applicability for behavioral change.
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