Your Marketers Are Your Change Management Leaders

Type “change management” into a search engine, and you’ll find dozens of articles citing a high failure rate for organizational change initiatives. In the 1980s, leaders excitedly embraced change management as a discipline. By the mid-1990s, practitioners were scaring people with stories of failed initiatives and the career damage they can cause.

And this failure narrative lives on decades later. Due to the perception that the majority of change management initiatives fail, I asked several hundred participants in a change management webinar, “Within your company, what is the biggest barrier to successful change management?”

The overwhelming response was: “After the meeting ends, the debate begins.”

What I believe this really means is that leaders do not adequately address the hidden resistance. Leaders announce that a change is coming, but don’t address the fears that cause people to resist. Employees want (and deserve) to know what the change will require of them, how their current jobs will be altered and if their paths forward in the organization will be affected. When information is scarce, confusing or inconsistent, office politics and a culture of “no” halt progress. Employees may openly question why the change is even necessary.

Often, it’s not clear who’s really leading the change. If IT introduces new technology, then IT may be responsible for getting people to adopt it. Some companies perceive change as a systems design job, so they give charge to the project management office (PMO). Still other organizations view resistance to change as predominantly a psychological or training challenge, and they look to human resources for direction. And some companies use dedicated internal change leadership groups or outside consultants who can apply formal change management methodologies.

Rarely are change management initiatives guided by the professionals best positioned to make them effective: marketers.

To be sure, change management can be technically challenging, psychologically messy and call for a system-thinking approach. Traditional leaders may think of marketing as heavy-handed selling that evokes mistrust and resistance. But that isn’t what good marketers do.

Good marketers give purpose to the work and convey messages for the betterment of people. Good marketers listen and communicate the right message to the right audience — and do it using a variety of channels over a period of time. They understand that change takes time, which is why they are uniquely positioned to help ensure change management is successful.

Today, marketing alone touches every corner of the business, making a cohesive, living whole out of a company. Marketers listen to leaders and managers, employees and candidates, customers and the public at large. They craft messages to communicate not just a company’s offers, but its values and culture. Then they measure data to understand how people respond to these communications. Iterative, dynamic marketing conversations unite business, products, brand and people.

In other words, good marketers make change happen.

I’ve found that change management initiatives succeed when they follow the familiar cycle of marketing and sales: Raise awareness. Identify pain points. Share information that helps recipients of the communication make decisions. Take them on a journey. Overcome objections.

Change is not a temporary disruption that an organization gets over. Healthy businesses change continuously. As they grow, develop new products and enter new marketplaces, organizations reimagine and reinvent who they are. Marketers discern those shifting identities and shape conversations that allow them to blossom.

So, next time you have to implement a change management initiative, tap into your internal experts — your marketing team — to help run a successful mission-driven program that will change hearts and minds.