Sara Sweat, MA – Founder & CEO
He walked into the room with the new org chart already in hand.
He’d been sitting in merger meetings for a month. Nearly every day, he’d worked with the leadership team to define the reporting lines and redundancies, identify the barriers, and finalize the timing. By the day of the announcement, he’d made peace with it. The new structure made sense to him. It was already, in his mind, the way things were.
Then, after 4 weeks of his own deliberation, he expected his team to get onboard in about ten minutes.
They watched him roll through the slides, name the two functions that were merging, and forecast the results this new process would create. And when he got to the part where he expected everyone to lean forward with excitement and see the whole beautiful shape of the future, they just sat there.
One person asked a clarifying question about reporting. Another person asked a clarifying question about titles. Nobody asked the real question, which was: what does this mean for me? They saved that one for the group text chain later.
He came out of the meeting frustrated and told me they weren’t seeing the upside. He was mad that his best people were being weirdly negative. And, told me he’d expected a lot more energy in the room while bemoaning their lack of vision.
His team was five minutes into this new reality and was already performing below expectations.
Or, were they?
A Founder’s Comfort Doesn’t Extend To The Team
Founders get very good, very fast, at making decisions with imperfect information. You have to. If you waited for full clarity before you moved, you’d still be writing your first business plan.
So you built a tolerance for ambiguity that most of your team will never have. You made a home in it. You can hold six unresolved variables in your head and still execute, still hire the right leader, and still talk to a customer with confidence. That’s a skill, and it’s part of why you’re in your seat.
But somewhere along the way, your tolerance for change became invisible to you. You stopped noticing that you were operating without full information. You’d spent so much time in the dark and stormy waters of the unknown, they felt like a swimming pool.
But, for your team, many of whom have never been through an organizational change, product relaunch, or go to market strategy shift – they’re looking at the clouds and waves and wondering if the life raft they’re on is going to sink.
They weren’t in all the planning sessions you were in. They didn’t hear the same logic for why things needed to change. They weren’t there for the three versions of the plan that got discarded before the fourth one finally held.
You don’t need the clarity anymore. You spent weeks acquiring it. But, your team does. And giving it to them is your job.
Situations and Problems
I was listening to Seth Godin on Diary of a CEO the other day, and he said something that resonates so much. He defined the difference between a problem and a situation.
A problem is something with a solution. Something that’s identified as a barrier, but can be fixed. A down sales quarter, a poor customer relationship, a leaky faucet. It’s an issue – but there’s a way to turn it around.
A situation…just is. It’s an immutable force – something that can’t be addressed and must be accepted. Like gravity. Gravity is a situation. When humans decided to go to the moon, we didn’t try to solve gravity so we could float up off the Earth. We accepted it’s existence, calculated the escape velocity, and built the rocket accordingly.
Big shifts in your company work the same way.
There are decisions you have made. Those are situations. The merger is happening. The new structure is the new structure. Your team can have feelings about it, and those feelings deserve room, but the decision isn’t up for debate. Trying to re-litigate a “situation” is a waste of everybody’s Tuesday.
Then there are the pieces that aren’t decided yet. Those are problems. Who leads the combined function? How will the two conflicting processes get reconciled? What happens to the roadmap in Q4? Those are open problems. They need input and collaboration and commitment to solve.
The founders who lose their teams in moments like this are the ones who blur the two. They present a situation like it’s up for negotiation, and their team wastes a week arguing about a decision that was made a month ago. Or, worse, they present a problem like it’s a situation, and their team quietly learns that their input is unwanted.
Before you communicate a shift, get honest with yourself. What’s a situation? What’s a problem? How can we create clarity about where everyone stands?
What to Say Before You Say Anything
You have to have more clarity than you need, so you can afford to give some away.
Before you walk into the room, you’ve got to create a version of the story that tells everyone else what they need to know. A few key points you’ll want to include.
Why does this even need to happen. This is the piece you’ll be tempted to skip, because you’ve been marinating in the why for weeks. But, don’t skip it. Start there. Your team has absolutely no context. If they don’t understand the need for the change, they’ll invent one, and it will be worse than the truth.
What is changing, and what is not. Be specific. Names. Roles. Reporting lines. Tools. Pay. Titles. If something is not changing, say so. Because in the absence of that information, everything feels like it might change. A team under ambiguity assumes the worst about the ambiguity, every time.
What’s decided, and what’s open. This is the situation-versus-problem line. Draw it clearly. “This part is decided. We are not reopening it.” “This part is open, and here’s what I’m going to need from you.”
Where we are in the process and what your role is now. People need to know if this is week one of a six-month change or week five of a six-week change. They need to know if their role is to execute, to advise, to raise red flags, or to hold steady. The more specific you can be, the better – just be prepared to tell them multiple times.
What resources you’re giving them to metabolize this. Maybe it’s one-on-ones next week. A written FAQ by Friday. Extended office hours. A follow-up meeting once they’ve had a weekend to sit with it. Whatever it is, name it. Change without a container becomes gossip. Gossip becomes the culture. And, that kind of culture is like a disease.
Processing Takes Time
Your team is going to need time. More time than you want them to take. Scale isn’t easy – that’s why so few companies do it successfully. But, giving a solid team a chance to get on board is something you’ll rarely regret.
Some of them will need to feel a little grief about what’s ending. Some of them will need to ask the same question three different ways to feel like they’ve been heard. Some of them will need to argue with you about a decision that is not going to change, and they’ll need to lose that argument, before they can commit.
Your job is to schedule the time for all of that. Block off the calendar for the one-on-ones. Overpopulate the team meeting cadence for the next four weeks. Sit through the awkward silences and let everyone work it through.
The leader I mentioned at the top of this article did exactly this once he saw what he’d done. He went back to every single person, one at a time, and asked what they were sitting with. He met with the whole team more often than felt necessary, because a team full of unspoken questions turns into a team full of hallway conversations and uncomfortable texts.
He didn’t change any of his decisions. Not one. He just had to go back and guide his team through them.
Not Everyone Is Going To Make The Leap
Change is hard. Even when it’s good and we want it – it’s still hard. As a leader, perhaps the greatest challenge of navigating change is allowing people to opt out of it.
As organizations grow and scale, not everyone is going to make the leap.
Maybe you’ve rescoped their role in a way that benefits the organization, but no longer leans into their strengths.
Maybe your new product launch opens the company up to a broader customer base, but asks them to develop skills they have no interest in learning.
Maybe you’re breaking up the team that was their favorite part of the job and they simply can’t imagine working there without it.
Hard as it may be to accept, they are allowed to opt out. To deselect themselves from this next leg of the journey and go do something else.
Your job is to create clarity about what’s changing, create opportunities from that change that benefit them, and help them acquire everything they’ll need to be successful. But, you can’t make them change.
You can’t force anyone to embrace your vision and love your plan – or even to accept it.
The Process
Your team does not need you to do this perfectly. They just need to know they are important enough for you to do it at all. To value their input, lean into what’s hard with them, and create the conditions that allow those who can make the leap – to make it well.
The founders who build companies that scale, make this into a process. They know their comfort with ambiguity is a gift to them and a hazard for everyone else. So, with every change they make, they build the time, the communication, and the support their teams will need to navigate it well.
They learn from each deployment – operationalizing and scheduling the buffer the organization needs to ingest and adapt. And, once they’re done, they celebrate. Not just the launching of something new – but the growth their teams achieved to get there.
These decisions are never easy to make on your own. If you want a thinking partner for your next big shift, let’s talk. We’ll build the process your organization needs to create the clarity and connection your change deserves.
Mindshift Advisors is an emotionally intelligent consulting firm. We leverage human psychology to help you unleash your greatest business results. Want to learn more? Book a free thirty minute call with our Founder.
