Communicating Through Transformation

For business leaders responsible for delivering a change project.

As a business leader responsible for change, you need to be visible and present in a way that you perhaps haven’t before. This free taster webinar will prepare explore the challenge of clearly and accurately communicating throughout a transformation project. It will look at some of the tools, methods and frameworks you can use to help you decide what, how and when to communicate, how to tailor you messaging to serve different stakeholder groups, and how to deal with negativity, employee stress or change fatigue.

Why is communicating through transformation different?

Communicating through change differs in significant ways from other types of business communication, both in its form and the breadth of its audience.

Marketing is trying to persuade your customers to buy. Much of internal comms is trying to persuade your employees to absorb new and important information.

Communicating through transformation requires you to persuade your employees, your peers, your own managers, and other internal and external stakeholders to accept change, potentially including changes to their habits and behaviours. It also requires them to digest, remember and act on new and important information.

Leaders need to be visible

As a leader, you need to be in constant dialogue with your project stakeholders, listening to their concerns and responding appropriately. You need to be able to adjust your project as new information about its efficacy comes in and as you see how stakeholders respond to it.

And you need to be more visible than perhaps you have been before, becoming a figurehead for the project and making yourself more available than usual. This can be quite uncomfortable for leaders not used to operating out in the open, so it’s important to learn how to manage your comms properly and to develop the skills required to remain engaged and able to steer your change project to a successful conclusion.

Leaders who understand the importance of clear communications, who are equipped with the right suite of tools and techniques, will have an advantage in the workplace. And businesses who ensure their leaders can communicate well through change will have an advantage in the marketplace.

Change is now constant and relentless

New technologies are forcing change where none was anticipated and in parts of the business unprepared for it. Even if you aren’t planning on changing, your software vendors, service providers, and your customers are.

You used to be able to rely on a relatively stable business environment, where most economic and political change happened slowly, even predictably. Now, businesses are finding their reality upended in a moment as political decisions abroad have huge impacts at home, or as extreme weather events, shipping crises, or pandemics cause chaos. High impact, low probability events are now business as usual and the companies that will survive are the ones able to turn on a dime and adapt to a world that might change again tomorrow.

It’s better to be prepared than have to scramble to catch up.