What's Your Story?

Organizations going through significant change risk the imminent danger of people losing focus on the central mission, lacking a full appreciation for and understanding of the change, its impact on the company and, most important, their role in the transformational process.

That kind of result is understandable since organizational change often encompasses new ways of doing things, and the discarding of outmoded practices. People can easily become disoriented.

A clearly delineated story about your company, its purpose and where it’s going will help you focus your organization’s best talents on the things that matter most to drive meaningful results.

Organizational change typically results from a merger or acquisition, external shifts in the markets in which the company operates, or response to a new competitive threat. Similarly, it can come about when there is change in the top leadership, when a new CEO brings with him/her a new strategic direction.

Whenever internal or external forces impose abrupt transformation on an organization, it is critical that employees quickly gain a clear understanding of the change and get their bearings so that their talents, energies and thinking are focused on the right things. The alternative is a lot of wasted energy focused on mundane matters of little or no consequence to the company’s new mandate. Worse, companies’ most talented and valuable people can often become disillusioned and disconnected, focusing their energies instead on finding new employment elsewhere.

The best and quickest route to keep people on board, moving proactively toward the new challenges, is through the development and deployment of a narrative that tells the new story clearly and succinctly, and then making sure it’s used consistently across the organization.

The narrative is a distillation of the appropriate words and descriptors of the change: the rationale behind it; the external and/or internal forces that mandate the change; how the organization must adapt; where the change will likely take the company; and the facts that support the change in direction.

Narratives, executed effectively, enable managers at all levels to gain quick employee understanding of what exactly has to change in the company and their jobs. The narrative helps managers interpret the change for their own particular unit in terms of what people need to do differently, appropriate to where the company as a whole needs to go. To borrow a tired cliché, it gets everyone rowing in the same direction.

The narrative is reached through consensus of the company’s leadership and communications professionals. It provides them and all managers with consistent language to help them talk about the change and its impact on and importance to the entire organization, as well as the individual operational and functional units, and employees.

Individual employees, then, more readily connect their role and responsibility to the larger picture, able to draw a direct line of sight between what they do and where the organization now needs to go, and then how they need to change what they do to support that.

An apt metaphor for an organization going through such change is an aircraft carrier. There are hundreds of unique jobs on a typical carrier, all toward the common mission of delivering a navy’s forward strike capabilities.

The carrier’s mission changes often. There may be a new attack target, or the carrier might be directed to a new port. If an attack is called for, the carrier must get itself as near to the action as possible, as quickly as possible, then position itself into the wind to assure that the fighter jets achieve maximum lift for take-off. Just to do that demands precise execution by countless officers and sailors assigned to a range of jobs.

So when the carrier’s mission changes, everyone must take the new mission into account in how and what he or she must do, and when it must be done. The commander’s job is to delegate to his officers the task of making the mission’s story relevant to their respective crews so that each crew performs its tasks appropriately, precisely and in a coordinated manner.

As often as an aircraft carrier’s mission may change, it is not hyperbolic to compare its rate of change to that of a business organization. In this age, amidst the current economic turmoil and uncertainties, companies must remain nimble, able to tack and change course constantly.

So what’s your story? As your company’s mission changes to accommodate market fluctuations, a new acquisition, or a new strategic direction, that change will similarly impact what people do, how they do it, and when.

Your ability to tell a clear, coherent story will prove to be an invaluable tool, assuring that managers across operations and functions are well informed and plugged into the organization’s new direction. And well-informed managers, with a clear narrative at hand can make that new mission relevant and meaningful to their teams, helping them stay on course.