The smart and sensible guide to cascading your change vision to frontline staff

When you are setting your Inspirational Change Vision the way I teach in my Leading Successful Change program, you’ll often be setting it with a Board, Executive Team, Senior Leadership Team or Project Team. You might be lucky enough to have some frontline staff (such as Power Users or Change Champions) in the Future State Workshop but in all likelihood, you’ll probably mostly be workshopping with the most senior people involved in the change or the dedicated project team working on the change. 

It might not be appropriate, relevant or useful to share your exact strategy or Inspirational Change Vision with frontline teams. It will likely be too long, too detailed, perhaps include some sensitive information, business benefits, and Return on Investment outcomes, and also be too early in the piece to communicate such a message.

So how do you translate your change vision and strategy and filter it to grassroots staff, knowing the message will need to change?

Here’s my smart and sensible guide to cascading your change vision to frontline staff:

1. Do point to the original trigger for the change

Organisational changes are triggered for many reasons and usually they’re pretty good ones. Amongst others, this might include:

- New regulatory requirements

- An issue or problem that’s occurred, such as waning customer satisfaction or changing customer needs

- A strategic plan or vision set at an organisational, department or team level

- A Board-mandated or or Board-endorsed review

- Poor financial performance or risk

- New competitors 

You don’t need to go into DETAIL about the original reason that motivated the need for the change, but you can absolutely include a one-liner helping to explain the background and context of the change such as: “As part of our 5-year strategic vision” or “In light of the new compliance regulations from the state government”. Most people will be aware of the trigger already, and linking it to something familiar and critical helps build the need for change (sometimes known as the “burning platform”).

2. Translate the vision into key messages

When I created an Inspirational Change Vision with a Board, they were concerned it would be shared in its raw state to all employees. But it was over a page long and way too detailed to send out in that state! Instead, I used key elements of the Change Vision to form the high-level key messages for the change, narrative sentences, phrases and paragraphs that could be used in the announcement communications and continue being threaded through all future communications, training, and messaging to leaders, staff, and customers.

3. Use the vision to draw out the change benefits

I’m a firm believer in creating real Change Benefits that are vastly different from the business benefits usually outlined in the project’s business case. Those benefits usually focus on the operational, financial or productivity Return on Investment that the project aims to achieve. Change benefits on the other hand are how we get an improvement in the experience of people - whether that’s team, customers, clients, or community. Using the Neuro-Linguistic Programming practice of “chunking up”, these are the benefits that everyone can get behind and onboard with, and you can draw out 3-5 from the Inspirational Change Vision and use these as benefits anchors throughout your messaging and change materials.

4. Co-create at the team level

One of the premises of the way I lead and teach change is the Engagement Formula. This is where the leader-led, top-down group Change Vision meets the grassroots, bottom-up individual Personal Vision. I love to say that “the magic happens in the middle”! This might include running impact assessment meetings and providing team- and individual- vision setting or gap analysis tools which can be super powerful for teams on the ground to understand how the change will affect them specifically.

I’ll be teaching you how to run Future State Workshops with Benefits Mapping and Vision Setting in my upcoming Leading Successful Change Live course being held in Sydney on 10-11 March. The online version of my Leading Successful Change program is 6 weekly modules, but when you come to LSC Live in-person you can get all the practical and hands-on know-how for leading change delivery end-to-end with confidence in just 2 days. 

With the February Special Offer, you’ll also get my bonus Career Confidence Pack valued at $195, complete with Change CV Template, Personal Brand Blueprint and Starting Out in Change eBook, along with a personalised signed copy of my global best-selling book “Pioneer Your Career Change”.

>> Register for LSC Live tonight here before the special offer closes at 8.00pm AEDT Tuesday 24 February

Lata xx