Your practical Guide on How To destroy any change in your company

Imagine an ideal world where every company manages change perfectly. Employees understand what is changing and why. Everyone is involved, motivated, ready to take action and push for change. Yeah, I've never seen him either.

The truth is much harsher. WTW's 2023 survey shows that only 43% of employees think their companies manage change well. And only 25% believe that leaders are capable of doing that. In other words, change is all around us, but our ability to implement it is still disastrous.

We fail so often that we can safely say that we have almost perfected the art of sabotaging change. And that is worth putting on paper and bragging about. 😅

So here's my guide to the quickest way to ruin any change, made up of the most common and biggest mistakes we keep repeating. So, if you recognize yourself at some point, congratulations, you are a master of sabotaging change.

1. Keep everything behind closed doors

If the CEO and top management know what is changing, it means that everyone knows. Why waste time explaining to "mere mortals" ie. employees? People find out about your decisions anyway in the hallway, through gossip during a coffee break or when they are already run over by the bulldozer of change. Silence is also communication, but it creates chaos, dissatisfaction, fear and makes people leave.

2. Cultivate collective stupidity

Companies that value dialogue and involve employees in their implementation, frankly, change even succeeds. But what will that do to us? It's much easier when you send people a subtle message: it's not your job to think . So, make a bunch of rules and procedures that stifle any initiative and innovation. And if someone accidentally asks why , remind them that it's none of their business. That's how you successfully build a culture of obedient employees who don't ask awkward questions, just suddenly run off with their heads regardless.

3. Inflate the whole story to make it look serious

Transparency is overrated. People love a good show anyway, so organize a performance. Show colorful presentations, promise fog, measure everything that has nothing to do with the essence and hand out promotional mugs with the slogan of change. People will think that "something is being done", no one will know what to do, and your illusion of control will last until reality knocks on the door.

4. Play the fear card

Psychology says: people react much more strongly to loss than to gain. So use it. When you talk about change, emphasize everything that will disappear - benefits, stability, habits. Why mention new opportunities and development? Hope motivates and fear paralyzes. If you harbor a sense of insecurity long enough, you will get passivity and resistance, a perfect recipe for chaos.

5. Use nudging to poke them, not help them

Nudging is a psychological term for when you gently guide people towards certain behaviors and decisions, without coercion. Now, instead, you use it as a tool to keep them in a panic. Send an email with the subject line: "Want to know three ways digital transformation will destroy your life? Click here." You don't have to explain anything to them, it's enough to shake them a little and leave them without an answer. That is the right measure.

Bonus tip: do nothing

If all this is too much work for you, just don't do anything. It allows rumors to spread faster than official channels, to make people speculate and panic. After all, why should we as a company invest energy when the change "happens somehow by itself anyway"?

Managing change requires serious effort, commitment, empathy, transparency and dialogue. It's easier to stay in the zone of confused messages, bad timing and orders from above served with a dash of fear. Change will definitely happen, it just won't work. So, it's up to you whether you will use this text as a work guide, or treat it as a list of mistakes that you must not repeat.

How to improve the communication of changes

Want to learn more about change? See when the next date is for my MasterClass: communication of change and download the Cheat Sheet on this topic.

Communication of change

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