Christine Andrukonis is Founder and Senior Partner for Notion Consulting, an NYC-area change management consultancy.
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Every new year offers a clean slate, creating an opportunity for leaders to do things differently and better in 2023. In helping executives drive their organizations through change, one area for improvement underscores unrealistic optimism. In surveying employers and employees for The Change Report 2022 (download required), my organization found there’s an undeniable disconnect: 59% of the C-suite gave their organization an A on how employees perceive the organization’s success with change in contrast to their employees’ overall grade of the organization, a B-minus.
To better align with their employees, leaders can focus on these three strategies in the new year:
1. Establish a cadence for dialogues with your teams.
Communicate frequently with your teams—the more often, the better. Less formal communication with teams is critical, especially when you’re leading an organization in the new year. If leaders stick to formal, polished PowerPoint presentations and guest speakers, that’s one-way communication without any room for dialogue. If everything seems perfect and buttoned up, you’ll lose people. However, when you get people around a table—live or virtual—at least monthly, with content and room for discussion about big-picture topics and a level of imperfection, that builds trust and connectivity among teams.
Whether it’s a senior leader with direct reports or someone who has all-hands or town hall meetings, conduct them on a monthly basis with less formality and more room for dialogue. Lower-level leaders with lower-level people should do this weekly. Schedule recurring, standing office-hours meetings on the calendar. Office hours should be 45 minutes to an hour; one-on-one meetings should be at least 30 minutes to an hour.
2. Ask important questions even when you don’t want to hear the answers.
Instead of “How’s this task coming along?” ask big-picture, strategic, overall engaging questions such as, “What could go wrong?” Don’t just ask about the things you want to hear. Ask about things you’re afraid of hearing, such as, “What do you hate or resist? What are the complaints?” It’s helpful to know the problems to pinpoint things that aren’t good, whether it’s strategy, a decision or something else specific. It's also important to ask, “What have you learned?” Essentially, what mistakes have you made in the past that may be applicable to this situation? How can we learn from what has gone wrong and use that now?
Give people a voice to speak out about their concerns and intently listen. Don’t respond to defend anything. Instead, acknowledge and thank them for their response. Set ground rules so they know there won’t be any repercussions. You can say something like, “I’m asking because I need input and productive discussion, not because I’m looking to crack down on negative people. We’re going to do this for 30 minutes to capture the takeaways, then we’ll address them and close the loop later.”
3. Start reverse-mentoring relationships.
Build reverse-mentoring relationships with frontline employees, whereby leaders ask them for input and advice—not for problem-solving. Match leaders with people in the trenches (it’s usually someone who’s not in their direct reporting chain and someone they’re not interacting with day-to-day) and clearly define the roles. The more junior person or more customer-facing person is the mentor and the leader is the mentee.
Set expectations from the start such as a three- to six-month relationship with a regular cadence of meetings in informal settings, held 30 minutes to an hour, monthly or quarterly. Ideally, they should meet over coffee at a table that doesn’t have people on different sides where one person feels like they’re on the receiving end of someone’s leadership. The environment should equalize them.
The leader, as the mentee, should be prepared with things they want to know and the mentor should feel empowered to give advice. For example, an executive launching a reorganization knows it will impact frontline people. The mentee can ask, “How does this feel for you? What is going on? What would you do if you were me? How would you do this differently if you were me? What am I not thinking about that I should be thinking about differently?” Also, ask the mentor how to be more successful: “How am I as a leader? What do I do well? What can I do better?”
Honor them as if it was a traditional mentor-mentee relationship. Thank them for their time to uplift the voices of people on the frontlines who often feel like recipients of big strategic things happening in the organization. This can help remove the rose-colored glasses of leaders driving organizational change.
By establishing a cadence for dialogues, asking specific questions, seeking honest answers and reversing mentoring relationships, leaders can build trust, transparency and connections that can endure well beyond the new year.
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