Handling change project overwhelm

‍When a major transformation project lands on your desk, it’s often met with mixed feelings. You want to take the challenge on, but are balancing the high likelihood of months (years?!) of additional pressure and stress ahead for your People team; juggling business as usual with the challenge of creating a new reality. 

In this article, We Are Charlotte Founder & CEO Jess Trumble shares her experience assisting People leaders to navigate these periods of change successfully.

Question 1: What does it typically look like when you walk into a new change project?‍

The world of People & HR is really busy. There is always a lot on day-to-day, and a good Chief People Officer (CPO) is usually being pulled from pillar to post because the C-suite will really trust them and want their input on strategic and operational decision making.

Then something else comes along on top of it all, such as a restructure, acquisition or ambition to drive material change across the organisation. And so the CPO stares at their current workload and strategy and thinks: “I don't know how to see my way through the trees”. So they bring us in to help implement the change.

‍“You underestimate how good you get at something when you do it time and time again.”

Question 2: What’s the biggest thing you’ve learnt from running these types of projects?

You underestimate how good you get at something when you do it time and time again. We're always improving templates, processes and ways of communicating, plus all the little mechanisms that ensure a significant change is delivered well - balancing achieving the strategic objectives, while also ensuring that employee care and wellbeing remains front of mind.

But for People teams, they’re often at a different starting point – they may have done changes before, but perhaps not at scale, or maybe they just don’t have the headspace to pause and think about what good looks like from defining success to strong project management and implementing ways to be efficient and maintain high quality work. 

Change in the world of people is never simple. There is a lot to juggle, and you need all the processes in place to handle that properly - ensuring that you see the change through, and embed the new ways of working and expectations properly.

“Without support, they just grit their teeth and get through it, which often leads to team burn out.”

Question 3: What does it look like when change projects go badly?

This often happens when a CPO has to just grit their teeth and get through it, which commonly leads to team burn out. People teams care deeply and can be “heart-on-their-sleeves” people, so the emotional toll of these changes can be heavy. In this situation, they just grip on to get through it and hope they don’t make a mistake.

You would have seen examples of this in the news recently, like accidentally sending emails to people or lists of impacted people getting published before they should have. That's what we come in to solve for and avoid – a step removed to take the emotion out of it. We have the headspace and the focus to pay attention to the details, and we still deeply care about making sure that people are cared for in the process.

“Supporting leaders and equipping them to be great leaders of change.”

‍Question 4: How do you set up a successful change project?

To make these changes go really well, you need to do that upfront decision-making and planning. It needs to be scalable throughout the entirety of the project, creating a consistent experience so that from a sense of fairness, everyone's treated in a similar way. That's a really big one.

There needs to be a big uplift in supporting leaders and equipping them to be great leaders of change. It shouldn't be on the People team to be the leaders of the change. They are the enablers of the change, but you really need to be setting up your leaders for success on the other side.

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We hope you enjoyed this conversation. Want to hear more from the WRC team? Head to our Articles page where the crew will soon be covering topics such as: The leadership expectations gap and preparing for an M&A marathon.

‍Need a people and culture partner who gets it? Reach out to start a conversation of your own around how WRC can support your team with an upcoming project or ongoing support.