How small is too small for change management?
Have you ever heard a leader say that their business is too small for strategy? I haven’t. Which is why I’m so surprised when leaders of small and even mid-sized organizations say that they’re too small for change management.
The Association of Change Management Professionals defines change management as “the practice of applying a structured approach to the transition of an organization from a current state to a future state to achieve expected benefits.”
A bit dry, but essentially, change management means designing a strategy to navigate change so that your org and your people move from the status quo to the future state successfully.
So when leaders say “we’re too small for change management,” what I hear is “we’re too small to be strategic.”
But if that doesn’t apply to other areas of your business, then why should it apply to change?
The smallest team I've worked with to design a change strategy was a team of three
The founder wanted to make a change and also wanted to make sure that they centered their two employees in the process.
At first, they considered just doing the thing. As in, they knew what they wanted to do, they were going to tell their team, and then the thing would be done.
Or would it?
By taking a few steps back, clarifying the founder's actual desired outcome, and designing a strategy that would reach that outcome, we ended up creating a completely different pathway than the founder had originally intended — a strategy that worked better for everyone (and saved the founder a bunch of money and nurtured a culture of trust, care, and open communication).
So when leaders ask themselves Is my organization too small for change management? I do my best to show them that that’s not the right question. It's not Is my organization too small? It's how can I scale my strategy?
It’s not the size of the organization that matters. It’s about aligning the scale of the strategy to the scale of the challenge so that you end up with the best outcome.
So the same concept applies for the size of a change itself
For decades, change management has been presented as a complicated, expensive process reserved for large enterprises and organization-wide transformations.
But organizations of all sizes navigate change every single day, and even small changes have big impacts on your people. When leaders try to choose between “doing change management” or not doing it at all, it creates a pendulum effect. Leaders end up either over-engineering change (micromanagement, red tape, intricate plans that lead to burnout before implementation, etc.) or letting it descend into chaos (no clear purpose or decision-making process, no communication strategy, siloed and disconnected tweaks and updates, etc.).
The trick is to scale the strategy, not choose no strategy at all
Navigating change of all sizes in a strategic way helps people do their jobs better, increases trust, strengthens your culture, and utilizes resources in the best way possible so that you can redirect time, money, and energy where they matter most: your mission.
Any change and organizations of any size can benefit from a structured approach. The key is to have a strategy that works for your specific organization, that is tailored for your org size, and that you can scale up and down based on the size of a change.
To scale a strategy, start by exploring three questions: What — Why — Who
The more complex the answers, the more complex the strategy should be.
Here’s an example:
A few years ago, I was working with the leadership team of a 35-person company as they underwent a rebrand. There were so many elements; project management on the technical side, PR, customer relations, managing the employees through change, and more. There was all of the planning, planting the seeds before the rebrand was official, getting feedback throughout the process, and getting stakeholders involved in and on board with the concept.
From the initial spark of an idea to just the launch day itself, it was about a year-long process. I partnered with the design agency and the leadership team to make sure we had an interconnected strategy from concept to launch.
Shortly after launch day, the leadership team decided that they wanted to make the Director level of their organization more robust. They wanted to promote four people and create a management philosophy at the organization to help align these Directors around a shared philosophy of how to do their work.
Because it felt like a smaller project to them in comparison with the rebrand, the pendulum began to swing. They "did change management" for the rebrand, but they were going to choose not to "do change management" for the promotion and philosophy project.
What!?
They were like, we'll just promote folks, pull them together in a workshop to figure out the management philosophy, announce it to the company, make little business cards for the Directors, and they will be the best managers ever. We don’t need to “do change management.”
That’s not a strategy. That's a checklist.
A checklist is not going to create or manage change. It’s not a structured approach to the transition of an organization from its current state to a future state.
When I pointed this out, they were like, ugh, you just made us do change management for the rebrand; now we have to do all of that all over again?
I said, no, we'll scale the strategy, but the scale of the strategy has to match the scale of the challenge. Don't minimize the challenge just to avoid investing resources in a strategy.
Skip that investment now, and you’ll pay for it later.
How to define your change strategy, build it into how your organization operates, and scale it as needed every time
Here are a few questions we asked to get started:
What’s happening? We’re promoting a few people to Director.
Why? Because the company is growing.
But why are they getting promoted? Because we want a layer between the leadership team and employees.
Ah, that sounds a little more complex. Why do you want a layer between the leadership team and employees? We want to encourage and allow the leadership team to get out of the weeds. We want to give a new group of people the autonomy to make decisions and lead so that the leadership team can direct attention and energy elsewhere.
So you essentially want to change how your organization functions? If we say yes, does that means it's going to be a huge, expensive project?
Not necessarily :) But another question: Who’s impacted by all of this? The Directors getting promoted. And? The employees who won't have the access they had before. And? The leadership team is going to have to defer to the Directors rather than getting in the weeds.
So, everyone. Yes, but mostly just internal folks.
So there is still project management, as well as managing the employees through change. We should have two-way communication and feedback throughout the process, but it's not going to be the year-long and public-facing process that the rebrand was. How does that sound so far? It sounds good, Caitlin, you beautiful, kind, genius.
I ended up designing a three-month change strategy that utilized what the organization had already built for the rebrand project, so employees were familiar with the process already. The leadership team and Directors created the management philosophy together in a facilitated workshop so that they were aligned from the start, had more trust in each others' decision-making going forward, and had an action plan they could use to hit the ground running.
The other employees learned that the changes were rooted in their shared purpose to grow the company and scale their impact. They learned that their buy-in enabled the leadership team to devote more energy to high-level strategy and experimentation with new initiatives that more employees could get to play a part in down the line. They felt like participants in the organization's strategy rather than passive recipients of an announcement that some of their coworkers had received a promotion.
Choosing a checklist rather than a strategy is choosing to not be strategic – but scaling strategy is a choice that so many leaders don't consider
Start by exploring what, why, and who. If the answers are truly simple, you know the challenge is less complex and that your strategy can match.
The size of the organization doesn't determine whether you "do change management" or not. Neither does the size of a change.
Scale the strategy, don’t choose no strategy at all.
