You’ve been carefully planning this change for a while now. You want to get this right so you’ve taken the time to consider all the nuances of what this important change will mean for your team. And yet, after all that work, this is how your team finds out? In passing. In a quick hallway conversation.

Lara Hogan, a leadership and management coach, first taught me to “never YOLO the communications plan”. Over the last few years I’ve understood this to be an important lesson.

Today’s organizations are all about adaptation. Adaptation implies change. As a leader of an engineering organization in a rapidly growing scale-up, I’ve been through and led my fair share of organizational change. This experience has reinforced what I learned from Lara. It has also taught me first-hand that communication is foundational. At Glia, our great employee experience, unique engineering culture, and reinvented approach to customer service all starts with open and clear communication.

But what does it mean to handle communications well? It all revolves around a simple phrase — “Makes sense!”

When things don’t make sense

How people understand and make sense of the organizations they work in has been studied as sensemaking. When things change around us, we engage in sensemaking to orient ourselves to the new situation. We try to understand what this change means to us and how we should act.

Now, sensemaking isn’t a bad thing. It’s a common aspect of our everyday lives and it’s a core part of most knowledge work. However, Teresa Amabile and others have shown how the frequent need to engage in sensemaking can affect one’s inner work life. Or more simply, how it can make us have a bad day at work. And we’re strong, of course, and we can survive a single bad day. But compounded over time, our performance takes a hit and we become disengaged.

When we don’t have all of the facts, our minds make up a version of the story based on our own perspective. “Sensemaking gears up most strongly in ambiguous, uncertain, or unexpected situations” (Amabile and Kramer). So a change in an organization can be met with:

• surprise (e.g. Wait, what!?),
• confusion (e.g. I don’t understand),
• feelings of injustice leading to anger (e.g. Hell no!), or
• cynicism and ultimately disengagement (e.g. Whatever).

But, when things make sense…

When organizational change makes sense, it’s because it’s expected. It’s something that we understand and perceive to be fair, so it takes away the surprise, confusion and injustice.

Seems simple enough, but how do we get there?

Timing is key. Otherwise information will leak and rumors will spread.

1. Cascade comms and execute quickly

Say you’re a senior engineering manager and your team is growing. It’s been growing steadily but recently it’s become clear that you are no longer able to support the team alone. So, you want Riley, a member of your team, to take ownership of a part of the team as a manager. To avoid surprises, you must cascade your communication.

• Phase 1: Meet with Riley one-on-one to discuss the change.
• Phase 2: Approach each team member one-on-one.
• Phase 3: Gather the whole team to discuss Riley’s move.
• Phase 4: Announce it at an organizational all-hands meeting.
• Phase 5: Send an org-wide email for the record.

Timing is key in this process. If you let too much time pass between any of the steps then information will leak and rumors will spread. The members of your team will hear about this plan from someone else, not you. Worse, they will receive only part of the information that you were planning to share for context, and the information may not be accurate. Any team members left out of the loop will feel surprised and wonder, “Why didn’t I know this was happening?”

See it in action.

You chat with Riley to discuss your plan. “Riley, I don’t have the time anymore to give everyone on the team the attention that they deserve because our team has grown. We’ve talked about your aspirations to become an engineering manager in the past and I think now would be a great opportunity to move in that direction. I would like you to take ownership of a part of the team as a manager. What do you think?” Riley replies: “The new position makes sense. Thanks for considering me as the person to fill the role.” Or she may bring up any questions or concerns that she may have.

Within the next three days of this conversation, you have a one-on-one with each team member. “Our team has grown so much that I don’t have the capacity to give everyone my full attention. I’m thinking of promoting Riley to help me with this. What do you think?”

And so on, so that by the end of the week everyone is on the same page.

2. Clarify a common goal

But, how do we really get everyone on board? During times of change, people can become defensive of their individual needs and it is easy for an us-vs-them mentality to develop. You want to avoid this in-fighting and get everyone to collaborate on finding the best collective solution instead. For this, your communication must be structured to emphasize a common goal.

Here I draw from Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle. The particular shape isn’t relevant for our purposes here, but the SCQA model that she developed helps us put the common goal front and center in our communications. What’s SCQA? Situation, Complication, Question, Answer. Here’s how it works for our scenario.

• Situation — Provide the relevant context. E.g. “Our team is growing.”
• Complication — Present the challenging aspect of the situation. E.g. “Our team has grown so much that I don’t have the capacity to give everyone my full attention.”
• Question — E.g. “What should we, as a team, do about this?”
• Answer — Present a solution. E.g. “I am thinking of having Riley take ownership of a part of the team as a manager. Riley has been with us for a long time and has been working for a while now towards taking on such a role. I’ve spoken with Riley, and she is interested in this position.”

This way of communicating the idea includes your team in solving a shared challenge. If you were to only say, “I’ve decided to promote Riley,” then it could lead to confusion and a sense of injustice. “I wasn’t aware there was even an open position, or why wasn’t I chosen?”

You’re taking the information and structuring it in a way that shows the bigger picture by giving context to the situation and showing how it affects the recipient and others. The simple question “what should we do about this?” allows your team to give their feedback while they consider your proposed solution.

3. Include & collaborate

Sensemaking [..] is often facilitated when managers provide their own view of the current situation, the task, their own intentions, cues that could signal a situational change, and a request for added input. (Weick and Sutcliffe)

The SCQA model is great but it lacks built-in feedback mechanisms. There’s another similar model that goes a step further: STICC. STICC is a communication tool used by organizations like hospitals, firefighters, and the military for stressful situations where mistakes can have grave consequences. However, the same principles can be applied in any organization.

Similar to SCQA in Minto’s Pyramid Principle, STICC starts with a situation, challenge, and a plan, but STICC finishes by sharing concerns and layering in calibration.

• Situation — Provide the relevant context.
• Task — Describe the challenging aspect of the situation.
• Intent — Present your proposed solution.
• Concerns — Share your concerns and things to look out for.
• Calibrate — Ask for input and feedback.

If you follow the STICC model, then it wouldn’t let you simply stop after explaining the situation and your proposed solution. It would force you to also share your concerns and to collect feedback from everyone who would be affected.

Back to Riley. For Concerns you could explain that this would be Riley’s first management position and so the entire team needs to support her with feedback and patience. For Calibrate you could ask every team member’s thoughts on this plan and what other ideas they have for accomplishing the bigger goal.

This becomes a framework for finding a solution that everyone happily contributes to. They contribute because they understand the situation; they feel heard, because they are heard; and they are invested in achieving this common goal with you.

4. Resolve uncertainty without premature commitment

This process frequently surfaces a particular conundrum. On the one hand, you want to include your team early, so you can consider their thoughts and perspectives. On the other hand, you want to avoid causing anxiety for your team by presenting half-baked plans and prompting more questions than answers.

This is particularly problematic because if you only go to your team once you have a well-formed and solidified plan, then your sunk costs will be too high to take feedback into account and revise the fundamentals of the plan. In this case, inclusion will only be illusionary. Often this makes the conundrum seem impossible to solve.

Don’t despair. There is a way out of this bind.

What causes this dreaded anxiety is uncertainty and ambiguity. Luckily there is a way to create clarity and reduce ambiguity without fleshing out the details of your plan. The way out is to clarify your principles and constraints for the solution without prescribing the solution. This is what Rumelt defines as a guiding policy.

The guiding policy channels action in certain directions without defining exactly what shall be done. [..] It reduces the complexity and ambiguity in the situation. (Rumelt)

Let’s go back to our example with Riley. Let’s say there are more people in the team who would be qualified for and interested in the new role. Let’s also say that you have some ideas for who would be the best for this opportunity, but you would also like to learn about your team’s perspective on the question and get their input. How could you bring this question to your team so that people wouldn’t start worrying about the future of the team or missing their chance of being selected?

As mentioned above, what you need is a guiding policy. What principles will guide the selection process? What constraints can you guarantee for the outcome?

In the given example you could clarify the qualifications required for the role. You could outline the decision process for the selection and who would be involved in the decision and how.

If you then approach your team to ask for their feedback, then they have no reason to worry. Yes, your team doesn’t know who will be selected for this new role. What they do know, however, is that they can trust the decision process because you addressed their fears by sharing the guiding policy. Ultimately the decision — whatever it is — is more likely to be accepted because the team already bought in to the decision making process.

Build trust and use it

Rands says that “rumors are a function of culture. […] in the absence of information, your team will make up the worst possible version of the truth, usually reflecting their worst fears.” (Lopp)

I suggest that if you consistently follow this process, then you don’t have to worry about rumors. You’ll be surprised how seamless even the scariest changes can be if you follow these steps. It takes preparation and consideration to do well, but the results are worth it. You’ll be able to regularly adapt your organization to the changing environment and remain calm throughout.

But take heed — it can be a considerable amount of work. Sometimes you may not be up to putting in all that work. Perhaps you have other, more important fires to deal with and you just need Riley to step in immediately. Perhaps your organization is in crisis mode responding to an unfolding situation and you don’t have the time to consider everybody’s thoughts and to cascade the communications. These things happen.

So my final advice: that’s OK.

Prioritize long-term success over short-term quality. (Larson)

I know the saying that originates from Julia Grace is to “never yolo the comms,” but I’m more lenient. I believe that if you do this process well most of the time, you will build up an incredible amount of trust with your team. Once that trust is established it forms the foundation for all your interactions. So on those rare occasions when you cannot be this thorough, your team trusts and supports you. Even if you skip a few steps.

This process has worked well for me over the years. If you have experience with a similar approach or a different one, then I’d like to learn from you. How has your approach been different? What has worked, what has not? Let me know!