Disruptive, rapidly changing, busy workplaces and overwhelm is now a reality for everyone. A reality that significantly impacts the success of strategy implementations.
We were recently working at a large organisation that was trying to simultaneously implement a number of strategic changes–acquiring new businesses, updating service models and introducing new products.
It was an absolute ‘washing machine’ of initiatives. People were mentally overwhelmed, got really burnt out and struggled to get anything done. Despite everyone’s best efforts, the strategy was not getting implemented.
Overwhelm activates survival mode
Fear-based motivation, or a burning platform, is a popular way many senior leaders try to motivate people to change. Then they design changes in a back room and put a plan in place to control the implementation.
But unfortunately, leaders activating fear and controlling people puts them into survival or ‘fight or flight’ mode. People feel they have to ‘put out fires’ and fix the burning problems with lots of tactical initiatives. They end up running around doing ‘busy work’ and get overwhelmed. That’s the ‘washing machine’ we just mentioned.
Only recently, Kotter’s neuroscience-based research** reinforced why 70% of strategies still fail - and highlighted the link between failed strategy implementation, overwhelm and burnout when people are in Survival Mode.
Kotter found that activating Thrive Mode–connecting people’s hearts, not just their heads–inspires them to engage in change. It’s this emotional connection that makes them want to be a part of the change journey.
How to prevent overwhelm from derailing your strategy
At Fire up, we’ve always embraced human-centred leadership and change, a global movement that puts people at the centre of change. It’s based on the powerful premise of empowerment: when your people are engaged in change they help to create, you’re more likely to achieve 3X the outcomes.
Let’s look at three factors we recommend to prevent the overwhelm that derails strategy. These factors will activate Thrive Mode, so your people positively embrace change for more successful outcomes.
1. Create the space for human-centred engagement and change
Freeing up your people's capacity, so they can be engaged in change is essential. The starting point is ensuring that over 60-70% of the change effort is focused on your strategic priorities. To achieve this, you need to develop a realistic, step-by-step plan that's clear on where you need to focus your effort and how to engage your people in the change journey.
2. Empower frontline teams to get involved in change
Your people want to be empowered to make change happen; it's the key to your success. And, with over 70%* of frontline employees enthusiastic about being engaged in changing their organisation, surely that's untapped potential you can't ignore?
Truly empowering and engaging people is a mindset shift for leaders who are used to either protecting their people from overload or using fear and control to implement change.
You need to uplift leaders so they are ready to take frontline teams on a journey, then co-design changes that push the whole organisation forward. If you get it right, the results will speak for themselves-common understanding and buy-in can improve by up to 60%, and change resistance could drop by more than 50%.
3. Recognise that your people need to connect changes impacting them to the big picture
If you want people to embrace change, they need to be able to connect the dots and make sense of how it affects their day-to-day work.
It's not something you can tackle with a one-and-done approach. Once you've connected up your strategy, your leaders can help keep everyone connected to the vision through storytelling and engaging them in collaboration forums and then providing feedback on how their input has created real impact.
Take a moment to reflect.
What are you seeing is your organisation ? Is employee overwhelm a major barrier to your change success? Have you got a plan to prevent overwhelm derailing your strategy implementation?
If you’d like to talk it through, feel free to get in touch with us.
*Gartner, 2019
**Harvard Business Review, 2021