Leadership Roundtable: Openness to Change with Amy Susott

Here are Amy’s tips for leaders to successfully guide their team through change:

1) Be Clear: The first and most important step to navigating change is to clearly define the problem we’re facing or the vision we’re working towards and craft all communication around sharing what what your team most needs to hear. 

2) Understand Pain Points + Communicate the Why: We need to take time to express empathy, knowing that change is hard, uncomfortable, and emotional. Sharing the “why” behind the changes will inspire our team to move past their discomfort into the unknown of what’s to come.

3) Be Flexible: Different approaches will work for different teams, and Amy reminds us to be flexible, creatively adapting our plan to our unique team and what will work best for their needs. 

4) Anticipate Resistance: It’s easy to love change…until it impacts me, and there will definitely be roadblocks along the way. Amy gives a great tip to “proceed with pilots” and test ideas and changes in two week intervals, pausing if necessary to regroup before continuing.

5) Persevere: Pausing helps us keep up our stamina, but building safety nets also helps us persevere when implementing change gets tricky. Safety nets can prevent the customer and end user from being impacted by the change, which may drive us to quickly abandon the new way before it gets a chance to get rolling.

6) Celebrate the Little Wins: Recognizing good work and celebrating our successes – no matter how small – is critically important to continuing momentum and positive energy on our path to innovating and implementing change. Plus, it makes the process much more rewarding along the way!