At InterWest, we receive a lot of feedback from our clients that one of the most important services we provide is our leadership framework for managing change. Leadership is a much-needed commodity in the best of times, but over these past couple of extremely difficult years, it has been the key to weathering the storm.
But what does it mean to lead though this whirlwind of change? How do we navigate our teams through a constantly changing landscape of policies, legislation, and every changing risks? And more importantly, how do launch and execute new initiatives while our employees and their families are coping with constant change? I mean, how can we ask them to add new safety habits, for instance, to their workflows with all this chaos buzzing around? That’s a lot of change, right?
Here are a few key ingredients that many of our clients have found useful to cut through the noise and push their priorities forward.
Make It Important
Through word and action, the most effective leaders send a steady stream of ultra-clear signals that are in alignment with the larger mission. This means taking advantage of interactions in the hallway, short exchanges in email, phone conversations, or planned site visits or job site walk throughs. In many ways, leadership communication is like brushing your teeth. I mean, the act of brushing your teeth is trivial on its own. You can’t expect to brush your teeth one time and hope that it will do anything. You can’t brush your teeth once a quarter and expect results. Brushing your teeth is only effective if you do it consistently. Ironically, the same is true of leadership. We can’t only talk about the importance of safety in our quarterly meetings, for instance, and hope our teams will make it a priority.
While the pandemic has changed how we do business, perhaps permanently, what hasn’t changed is the need for leaders to communicate priorities consistently and effectively. We must find new and creative way to communicate our priorities to our people, every day.
We would love to sit down with you and guide you through some proven ways to improve your organizational communication and make your priorities important to your team, which of course is the key to making change last.
