David Grossman is Founder & CEO of The Grossman Group, an award-winning internal communications and leadership consulting firm.
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“How do I get employees engaged and motivated to actually help achieve our vision?”
People pose some version of this question regularly in my work advising leaders and communicators inside top companies.
One simple answer is this: Take them on a journey.
Often, communication leaders are great at informing teams by flooding them with emails, videos, social media, charts, newsletters, strategy wheels and meetings.
And yet truly great communication is marked by three key elements: involve, inform and inspire employees to drive them to act.
To achieve all three things, leaders need to bring employees along on an emotional journey with a discernable beginning, middle and end. That journey should take into account what employees have to overcome and spell out the three or four specific things they’ll need to do differently to bring about the change.
In a sense, this involves plotting out the company’s own action movie—complete with scene setting, emotional turning points and character-defining moments. It’s about helping leaders and communicators realize the power of marking the journey rather than leaving it to chance or hoping a dense strategy document wills it to life.
Another key is acknowledging the personal elements. The plot will have twists and turns. Some employees will face more challenges than others or moments of doubt and confusion when they need more clarity and support.
The Elements Of The Journey
Many companies we work with are in the midst of transforming, whether it’s through a strategic overhaul or simply a powerful shift in the way employees need to think and act to take the company forward.
Sometimes companies are mapping out a journey for a single moment in time, such as a carefully planned employee meeting that walks people through the present challenges and offers opportunities for engagement with the topic. Whenever you roll out important changes, they should never feel completely top-down with a line of “talking head” leaders reading scripts and little or no dialogue with employees.
The journey playbook can also take place over years, as you plot the steps you’ll take in years one, two and three.
To get started on this strategy journey, it’s helpful to take a deep dive into all the defining moments ahead for the organization along the change curve. These moments could start with an annual employee meeting when you announce the initiative, followed by events throughout the year to get the project launched, solidified and steered toward a successful completion or culminating moment.
For example, we recently worked with a major retailer to unveil a transformation at a carefully organized annual employee meeting and mapped out the journey in what we called three specific “acts” during the meeting.
• Act One should be about the “case for change.” In our meeting, we discussed what was going on in the industry and why the function needed to reorganize itself differently to win.
• Act Two should be about “the future.” Make sure to clearly define what success will look like and how the change will make the lives of employees and customers better. This addresses the critical “what’s in it for me?” question from employees. You can focus on inspiring employees, too, with engaging guest speakers, employee recognition or purposeful team-building activities.
• Act Three should be about activation, with more detail on what you expect of the team and how leaders plan to personally support the process and their employees. You can also spend time describing this full journey in a highly visual way: on a one-page, vividly designed “journey map.” At our meeting, we made sure the team could see the plot of the journey, the key milestones ahead and all of the supports in place with a single glance to help make the transformation meaningful for employees.
Making It Real For Employees And Teams
One of the biggest challenges of putting people on a journey is that it may often feel like a road they don’t want to take.
We’ve worked with companies who’ve had financially successful years when the commercial teams exceeded targets and expectations, and yet the company is still planning to announce a transformation.
Naturally, this can leave teams confused or even resentful. What more do you want from us? We’ve been working so hard: When is it just enough?
This is where it’s especially important to present the context—the case for change. For instance, a global food chain may have experienced a record-breaking year in sales, but a new competitor with a fresh concept is threatening to erode success. A healthcare system that doesn’t pay attention to customer surveys or complaints about the quality of care can lose its standing. A retailer that doesn’t follow online buying trends can miss out on essential momentum.
Employees should feel that the journey is not just a new corporate initiative but also something everyone owns. This helps combat one of the most common reasons I see strategies fail: Employees feel that the new strategy is “not my job.”
The Power Of Emotions
It’s important to emphasize that the most successful strategic journeys are typically emotional ones.
Employees should feel connected to the new vision or direction, understand their part in it and be personally motivated by what’s being asked of them. This is a very tall order, but it can be achieved when organizations take the time to think through the critical components.
For example, we’ve worked for many years with a healthcare organization that has organized annual strategy retreats. The meetings bring leaders together to celebrate the year’s wins, work through emerging challenges and help leaders get excited and prepared to roll out plans for the upcoming year with their teams. Each meeting has a theme that features guest speakers and role-playing and often includes perspectives from customers and key stakeholders.
Feedback about those meetings often comes down to this: They give leaders a reason to believe, even in the most challenging moments, and help them feel like they’re a part of something bigger—and something special. In my experience, people don’t resist change; they resist change they’re not a part of.
This is the true power of the journey, and why it’s so essential to any great communication strategy on transformation.
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