Leading Teams through Change (and How to make it Stick)
By Mitch Stephenson
The Stepping Stone, January 2025
This article is based on topics discussed at the 2024 SOA ImpACT Conference Virtual Session “Feeling Beyond the Data; Leading People Through Change Initiatives.”
As a leader of people and as a people manager, I have led teams through change. It is not easy. It does not always stick. Teams, companies, and individuals sometimes do not want to change.
If a team is successful in implementing a change initiative, it is rewarding for both the leader and the team members. You all gain confidence that you can affect meaningful changes in an organization. It is something you all take with you and can apply for years into the future.
There are actions you can take as a leader to be inclusive, bring others along on the change journey, and to implement practices to make change stick. I have outlined selected actions below.
Motivate team and project members by uniting behind a common mission.
I worked for a boss once who leaned into this philosophy, especially as it relates to the discipline of role clarity. He had his direct reports clearly articulate their teams’ overall responsibility in a concise sentence or two. Then he asked us to outline three-to-five strategic objectives on which our teams expected to work year in and year out. Last, he had us describe the short-term tactical priorities on which we aimed to execute to support the strategic objectives. These short-term priorities became our objectives for the next year.
This simple action of writing down a strategic vision in the form of team responsibility, supported by ongoing strategic objectives and tactical priorities, has the following benefits:
- It helps with prioritization.
- It helps with role clarity, especially for the team in relation to other functions.
- It helps in saying both “yes” and “no” as new work arises.
When members of a team or a change project align behind a common purpose and vision and have the discipline of staying true to the priorities that support that vision, it unites and motivates team members across diverse backgrounds.
Chunk up milestones and celebrate successes.
It helps to maintain long-term milestones segmented into shorter-term milestones with success metrics. Consistent with the premise that what is measured is managed, when teams have short- and medium-term milestones and metrics, they always have something to drive to. Those shorter-term milestones can help teams demonstrate their success in achieving consistent on-time completion of project deliverables.
It is important to celebrate successes along the way. I have found this is both the easiest and one of the most underutilized activities that teams can do to boost morale and ensure adequate and ongoing engagement from contributing team members. This is true for efforts both large and small. As technical professionals, we often forget to slow down and appreciate our accomplishments, and that can result in people feeling under-appreciated, burned out, or disengaged with a body of work.
It is important to recognize key contributors, highlight the measurable outcomes, and look back to articulate the cumulative work completed to date. Team building events like happy hours and strategic, quarterly pull-ups—whether in-person or virtual—are effective forums to do this. Team building events can also help teams to recalibrate, celebrate their accomplishments, and talk about the future in a productive, engaging way.
All these strategies help with engagement and creating momentum in a changing and long-term project environment.
Embrace your change champions and give your change resisters time to work through their reservations.
People’s inclination to embrace change tends to follow a normal distribution curve. Most people fall in the middle of the curve. This means they need nudging and encouragement but will go along with the change initiative in a timely fashion. There are always those who are averse to changes—usually a smaller percentage—that will be among the last to adapt and are often the least willing. Then, there are early adapters who are excited, enthusiastic, and will advocate for change to anyone who will listen. These last are your change champions.
As a leader of a team or project undergoing change, you should give the change champions the opportunity to demonstrate their enthusiasm in front of the team and stakeholders. It is also beneficial to give them the opportunity to lead parts of the project. These individuals are often especially productive in explaining the “why” behind the change. They can advocate for change when you are not in the room. They tell the change story for you, which is important.
On the other side of the change curve are those who are resistant to change. Accept that there will usually be team members who will demonstrate this characteristic. It is important to let them articulate their concerns. Let them air this out, if needed, in front of the larger team. Listen. It is also helpful to talk about the process of going through change, including getting to the acceptance stage. Often, they need to accept that the change is happening, and it can be a powerful technique to coach them on strategies to accept the change.
Those less enthusiastic about change will often see change champions as overly enthusiastic and unrealistic. It is your role to moderate the enthusiasm that change champions bring with the reality that change is often difficult and hard to embrace. Presenting change in this balanced way—both necessary and difficult—can be an effective strategy to influence all team members in the change journey.
Communicate clearly, consistently and transparently over time.
It is prudent to provide regular, recurring updates, even when there is nothing new to report. This way the team and stakeholders know they will always hear from you. They will understand that they can ask questions, even if there has not been a significant update since the time you addressed them last.
It is important to highlight good news when you can. It is equally important not to sugar coat unwelcome news. People do not like spin and can sense it from a mile off. If you cannot fully communicate something that people may not want to hear because it is not ready, is confidential, or affects only a subset of individuals, it is best to allude to it in a way that is appropriate for the audience.
I worked for a boss once who said for something to really sink in, people need to hear it seven ways, seven separate times. This is known as the seven-by-seven rule. My own way of describing this is a “drip campaign.” This means I will say the same thing consistently over time but build on it with more details as they become available. When I do this, it significantly limits any surprise factor as a project matures. This is true both for good and for unwelcome news associated with the work.
In my experience, it is much better to say something, and to say that something consistently, rather than to say nothing for a long time and then everything all at once.
Document the changes and sustain them via people, process and technology.
For a change initiative to truly stick, it needs to impact an organization’s people, process and technology.
From a people perspective, change initiatives often result in new assignments. It is important to update the team organizational chart with new assignments and responsibilities, so the updates become official. If the team keeps written priorities at the individual team member level, which they should, it is important to update those to denote the new owners.
From a process standpoint, it is important to document the new processes in a formal format, like job aids, guidelines, or templates. The team may need these documents to evidence an update in controls, for an Internal Audit engagement, and certainly from a cross-training standpoint to eliminate key person dependency. A good test of the quality of process documentation is to transition a process to a new team member and give him or her the opportunity to use, and enhance, the process documentation. This ensures another person can repeat the process and that it is well documented.
From a technological standpoint, any automation which enables the new process will help to make it stick. Using a technology forum that stores updated process documentation makes it more official. For example, teams can use SharePoint to store their new org chart, assignments, and process documents and publish them, so they are available to the rest of the enterprise.
Technology updates can include simple change enablers like a link to a team email address so stakeholders can contact team members with questions, and links to other relevant content. Even better, setting up an automated step-by-step process representing the change takes away the thought process and manual steps otherwise needed to sustain the change.
Bringing it all together.
It is difficult to enact change. It is even more difficult to make it stick. Implementing the strategies and tactics above will increase your influence as a leader both in enacting, and sustaining, meaningful change. The ability to do so will set you apart from your peers over the long term.
Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the editors, or the respective authors’ employers.
Mitchell Stephenson, FSA, MAAA, is head of model governance at Fannie Mae. He can be reached at mbstep684@gmail.com or via LinkedIn.