Recovering From Difficult Change: How to Empower Your Teams to Find Agency and Thrive
Article summary
After rolling out big, hard changes (like layoffs, re-orgs, or strategy changes), teams and employees often feel reactive, stuck, and struggle with finding a path forward. At this point, your organization will not automatically move out of this mode - and it’s critical for you to help them get out of it. Read more about why this is so important in The Case Against “Motivational Leadership”: What Your Teams Need From You After Difficult Changes.
You need to intentionally shift gears towards empowering your teams again and giving them guidance and autonomy back. Here’s how you do this:
Shift Gears in Your Operating Mode: Begin by changing your leadership mindset from control to empowerment. Clearly define goals, set measurable outcomes, and transition from managing change to creating an environment where employees can take agency.
Enlist Your Leadership Team as Partners: Involve your leadership team in shaping a high-empowerment culture. Refine goals collectively, enhance situational awareness, and provide tools for effective leadership. Encourage candid discussions and forums for middle managers to address shared concerns.
Show Up as an Empowering Leader: As a leader, convey expectations, goals, and trust in your team during times of change. Be a source of clarity and guide your team through transitions, recognizing progress and making space for concerns. Encourage open communication, and resist the urge to handle everything yourself.
3 steps to lead your teams back to high-empowerment mode
The following steps will help you move to high-empowerment mode after drastic changes, and create an environment where you help your employees and teams find agency again. Each step also includes practical examples for applying this to your teams.
1. Shift gears in your own operating mode
Like anything in leadership, it starts with you:
Adjust your mindset
Get real with yourself about what your role has been, and how it needs to change now. Acknowledge that your role needs to evolve from an operational mode of high control and deep involvement, (back) to being hands-off: From designing and managing a change, to creating a system and environment where your employees can respond to and process this change, and take agency again.
Define Your Goal(s)
A huge part of a high-empowerment culture is giving clear expectations and direction, then letting teams and leaders figure out how they’ll achieve those.
Identify your north star
You made these big changes that you rolled out for a reason. This reason is your north star, and will play a key role in your communication onward - after all, you likely haven’t achieved your north star yet, and will need your teams’ support in helping you get there. Your north star could be something like:
We want to become profitable
We want to remain in business
We want to deliver x project or achieve strategic goals
Set goals around measurable outcomes
Instead of using hard-to-measure and unspecific goals like “get people motivated”, "increase morale", "improve collaboration", or "get more people in office", set goals for your culture shift around observable results and behaviors:
We achieve our goals
Team members understand the changes and are moving towards the new operating mode - measured by: Usage of FAQ documents decreases over time
The percentage of undesired resignations remains steady
Each team has created 1 initiative to define how they want to work with the new
Employees’ confidence in leadership (measured through engagement scores) may dip for a few months, but recovers
Apply this with your teams:
Pick 3-4 observable behaviors that cover different areas to start with.
2. Enlist your leadership team as partners in creating a high-empowerment culture
An empowered organization needs leaders that are equipped with what they need to lead. After all, your leaders have the closest relationships with your employees, and know their teams and domains - and leading is what you’re paying them to do, so now is the time to let go and let them lead. Here’s how to give the tools to lead effectively to your leadership team:
Refine your goals with your leadership team, including people managers and technical leaders
Get feedback about your goals from managers and leaders in your organization: Are those goals feasible? What risks are they seeing? What would be helpful to add or change? This will help your managers optimize their thinking more about the organization, rather than just the impacts of their team.
Up your situational awareness
Regularly ask the leaders on your team
What they need now,
What they’re hearing from their teammates so far,
Bonus: Equip your leaders to speak to hard questions: Start FAQ documents or Q&A forums like Teams/Slack channels. Those are helpful tools, especially as new questions and answers come up. Encourage your leadership team and employees to add to those.
What risks they’re seeing, and don’t forget to check
How your leaders are doing (!)
Help leaders shift towards a first-team operating mode
Create places for them to exchange learnings and surface patterns: Your leaders are likely getting a lot of questions and have more specific concerns that come up as they’re supporting their teams. Create candid smaller forums for middle managers, allowing them to address shared concerns
Apply this with your teams:
Run manager roundtables across the organization, at first more frequently (e.g. weekly).
Hold weekly staff meetings to check in. Bonus tip: Encourage the leaders on your team to discuss their ideas and challenges without you present, and let you know about the outcomes; let them know that you’re still around to support them.
Have regular 1:1s with your direct reports. I recommend weekly 1:1s during times of high change, and no less frequent meetings than every two weeks.
3. Show up as an empowering leader for your organization
Your leaders have everything they need to support your teams and employees, so now it’s time for you to shift how you show up as a leader for your organization: To bring them along, you convey your expectations, goals, and your trust in your leaders and employees to achieve those, together.
At this stage, your employees are looking to you for signals about how you feel or think about a change. If you act flustered, annoyed, or sporadic, that will rub off on those around you and incite even more anxiety than your team may be feeling. Instead, show up with determination, positivity, adaptability, and transparency.
Here are a few suggestions on how to do this in an authentic and compassionate way:
Set a clear direction and expectations
Share the values you want everyone in your organization to embody and what they mean in practice. Outline the desired behaviors. This not only fosters a sense of ownership but also encourages autonomy within the team, allowing them to adapt and thrive in the face of change. You want your team to get comfortable in dealing with what’s new, taking on new elements of their role due to the change, while also being able to know what elements to push back on, or to no longer prioritize.
Give context: “You are here”
Help your teams make sense of what’s going on by embracing the mindset of a guide, in a quite literal sense: Similar to a hiking guide showing a map to a group of hikers and explaining the planned hike, your job is to help your team understand where they came from, where the organization is at, what’s next, and what it means for them. Being a source of clarity in uncertain times will help your team make sense of their current situation and align their efforts with the overarching goals. Plus: Your leaders can continue this contextualization by speaking with everyone individually about what it means for them, their daily work, and their career progression.
Recognize progress
Connect your teams’ work with the changes, and praise their accomplishments towards the new goals in public.
Make space for concerns
It’s important to be seen as a trusted partner, someone who can steward a team and individuals through blockers and difficulties. Encourage your teammates to be open and share their concerns and feedback. Even share (some of) your own ambivalences - after all, (almost) no change is purely good or bad, and pretending that everything is only great will not help your credibility. At the same time, don’t make it about you - center your employees’ needs and perspectives, and the business needs.
Show trust
Resist the temptation to continue taking care of everything yourself. Specifically, encourage everyone to bring up their questions, concerns, or suggestions with their managers and teams.
Apply this with your teams:
Send a weekly email to your larger leadership team where you talk about the changes, what you’re seeing and hearing, and what it means.
Bonus: Stay focused on your north star: During any phase of change, but especially in later stages, it’s easy for anyone involved to get demotivated; it’s often just a lot to handle, after all. When you’re feeling strained, or are getting a sense that your organization is, acknowledge it - and remind yourself, your leaders, and employees of how far you’ve come and where things are headed.
Run department meetings (all hands, town halls) every two to four weeks; I recommend running those at a higher frequency than you might normally during this transition period.
In times of significant change, empowering your team to find agency is not just about rallying them behind the new situation. It's about creating a supportive environment where individuals can navigate the transition in a way that aligns with their needs and aspirations. It’s also about knowing when and how to let go.
By acknowledging your role, fostering effective communication, supporting managers, and empowering everyone on your teams, you can guide your team towards not just surviving but thriving in the face of change - and support a culture where your teams are empowered and your business gets the innovation it needs.
