All Ears: The Importance of Listening in Organization Change
The Smart Manager magazine’s copy editor asked me last autumn to write an article for them about “how leaders can stop blaming resistance to change and view it as a positive resource”. Jeffrey and I have several academic articles on that, so I am familiar with the topic and it was fun to write. They just published it in their January-February 2020 issue. I liked the clever “meme” they used with the article too – it gets the whole message across visually.
Here are three quotes from the article they featured with bits of their “meme” artwork — so you’ll get the picture:
- Organizations need to constantly evolve to meet new challenges, but there is one key component that gets lost in the upheaval—listening. Without an open culture which encourages and responds to feedback — in all its positive and negative forms — a company-wide transformation will fail before it has even begun.
- The primary role of leadership in organizational change is to facilitate employee engagement at every level, across all departments and units that will be directly or indirectly touched by the change.
- Dialogue and discussion are the tools of good leadership to formulate and prepare for a change, and to see the change through to a successful conclusion.
Management communication is especially important when making an organization change. I’ve seen many failures – and more than a few bad moods and resistant behaviors – when a change process marches forward without proper dialogue and genuine listening. You, dear subscriber, can see the article HERE and scroll through the pages of the document using the gray down arrow in the band at the bottom of the page.
