Navigating Organizational Change: Communication Strategies for Leading a Growing Team
Your team is growing? another re-org? Don’t panic! Here’s a communication playbook to forge a smooth transition and a motivated, united team, using clear, varied and honest communication strategies.
One of my coachees, a promising engineering manager at Uber, stood on the brink of tripling his team’s size, transitioning from 11 to 30 members by taking charge of another team based in San Francisco. His current team is in New York, and he’s been grooming a manager under him. So the groomed manager will take over his previous responsibilities and the coachee will manage the 30 individuals through two managers, situated in two cities across two time zones.
Naturally, our last session focused on how to prepare for this change, particularly in terms of communication and interaction with the adjusted team. I’ve encountered similar scenarios multiple times. Drawing from my experiences — both as the incoming leader and as the team member — I’ve shared with him my best practices. Pleased to share with you here.
5, 6, 7, 8 how do we communicate — Initial Announcement
The first thing that usually happens in such a situation: a senior leader in the company makes an announcement, verbal — in a meeting, or written — on a slack channel or email — or both. They will explain a change is coming and hopefully will also explain why, and say how much they trust the incoming leader/manager.
In my 25 years of experience, that communication is usually long and text-heavy email that is hard to parse. Some of my experience can be attributed to spending the last 9 years of my career at Google where email is still heavily used (Slack didn’t make it into Google yet, and Google Chat hasn’t enjoyed Slack’s style success internally). The worst email I recall? A 2.5-page monster detailing 7 changes in one email. Unreadable and uninspiring.
Differentiate: Use Clear and Varied Communication
So, my advice for incoming leaders is to invest in communication. I’ll explain why and how.
Change takes time to absorb, and people consume information differently. Some want to read details, some want to hear explanations, and some prefer one-on-one clarity for questions.
Sure, you can shrug it off saying it’s their problem and as professional workers they should adapt to however you — their fearless leader — decided to share that information. However, lack of investment here — not meeting your audience where they are will result in cleanup efforts or damage control later on. In other words, skipping the initial investment will lead to working harder.
As the leader of a team going through change, you want your team to understand how their work is impacted, and more importantly why it was. And… you want them to be bought into the change, to understand why it’s good for them and for the company. Otherwise, and sorry for repeating this, you will have to work harder. Disbelief in the new mission or need for change will send your employees to fight the change, or ignore it.
Since a puppy recently joined my household, here’s the analogy I came up with:
Imagine a dog walker with 3 well-trained dogs who understand the walker’s instructions and move together as a synchronized pack. Now the walker adds 3 untrained dogs to the pack. Without investing time to train the new dogs, the walker will likely experience chaos — different paces, dogs pulling in various directions, and sudden pauses.
Similarly, leaders who don’t invest in communicating with new team members risk discord. Some employees may push in different directions or pause work altogether. This disunity will eventually force the leader to spend more time on damage control.
Clear communication upfront saves effort down the road.
Ok, hopefully it’s now clear why clear and thoughtful communication during organizational change is crucial. So here’s the approach I suggest:
Tell them, write them, and show them. In private and in groups.
As mentioned before, change takes time to absorb, and people consume information differently. That’s why I recommend a wide range of communication — verbal, written and visual aids, across private and group conversations. Also, repetition and persistency help the information sink in, and your audience might have thought of questions by the later time they hear/read/see it.
Exercise a wide range of communication and repetition, to ensure your message is internalized.
I usually start by crafting the most succinct and easy to understand explanation of what’s happening.
People skim text and doze off during prolonged monologues, so you want to be clear and to the point. That’s why I’m big on bullet points, bolding, and focusing on clean facts (compared with colorful and wordy story telling).
Now that I have it written, I can use it as the baseline for meeting my team and team members, and I have a draft email to send shortly after the announcement.
Visual Aid as a Game Changer
The next area I invest in is something most communications are lacking — visuals. What is easier for you to grasp: a few paragraphs explaining who’s leaving, who’s joining, and who will report into who? Or… a chart with people’s faces showing the new structure? Want bonus points? Give them a before and after — one page/slide with prior state (organization chart) compared with new state.
I found that to be such a game changer, both in terms of efficient ways to explain the change, as well as differentiating my leadership communication skills compared to my peers and managers.
Now that I have my visual, again I can repurpose it for team group meetings, my follow up email and even 1:1s to pull that off and make sure each person understands what is happening and why, and how their role changes based on that (if it does).
Tell them and show them, in private and in a group.
Communication Style: Embracing Honesty and Authenticity:
Change is a scary thing for many people, we are creatures of habit and usually like to keep things the way they are. This makes change an opportunity for you to build trust as a leader — be honest and authentic when guiding your team through this change.
I know it’s common to be positive, reply only to what you are certain of and keep everything else vague.
I suggest a modification to that.
Positives:
Keeping positive at all costs can come across as tone deaf and break trust in your (and others) leadership. However, there is always something in the glass half full, so spend time finding those positive implications of the change, and start with pointing out those.
Negatives and unknowns:
If there are clear negative implications for this change, it’s ok to admit them. Everyone knows those are negatives, so trying to hide that will just make you look silly, unaware or untruthful. Same about things you are not sure about. Be honest, just say “yeah, there is some uncertainty there” but add to that your commitment “I will try to drive to this positive outcome and I’ll communicate as it goes”. Everyone understands there are things out of your control, pretending you can control everything is futile and immature, and eventually will lead to mis-trust as well. You are bound to fail. Being honest will gain you trust, and role model what you want to see on the team — realistic expectations and communication.
Written Comms: Streamlined Email Communication:
When you email, make a conscious effort to produce the most succinct email you possibly can. I suggest the following content and order: summary (TL;DR); visual; as needed, words to explain.
Summary: you can easily leverage your draft communication and ask ChatGPT to produce a 2–3 sentence summary for you.
Visuals: insert the visual(s) you created.
Words: add more context, use bullets, bolding and spacing to make it easy to read.
Meetings: Who to meet when?
A common approach I’ve seen is for managers to try and separate the groups — meet the new group separately from the old group.
Start with everyone
My recommendation is to start by meeting them both together — this is your new team, you can’t go back in time, so you want to start fostering and cultivating the new setup. Meet them together, they should all hear the same exact thing from you — clear and transparent communication is key.
If you separate them they might think you are telling them one thing and something else to the other team. That won’t help your team cohesion and it won’t help create homogeneity.
Then: New team members
After the first group meeting, you’d want to meet the new team — focus on welcoming them, introducing yourself, your leadership style, your ideals etc — they will introduce themselves during their one on ones.
Then: Old team members
Then you meet the old team, explain what will change and what you plan to keep the same. Notice I used the word “plan”. You might need to make changes, so be careful not to make promises you might not be able to keep.
Lastly: Individual meetings
Then you meet folks for one on one conversations. Try to ask the new team members the same set of questions, something like: introducing themselves. What excites them about the company/team/work, what scares/worries them? What is a personal and professional goal they are aiming at that you might be able to help with? This is the time to pull up the visual and solicit questions you can answer in an intimate setting.
For team members you know, in your next one on one invest some time in discussing the change, see what scares/excites them. If you have time, it’s a good opportunity to update what you know about them “What is a personal and professional goal they are aiming at that you might be able to help with?”
Before going into these personal conversations, I also think about new opportunities created by this change, for that specific person, and share it with them. Common opportunities are to offer mentoring to other junior or less experienced engineers, become a leader or a subject matter expert. The opposite direction too, getting mentorship or learning from a new peer.
As leaders, we set the tone for our teams. These communication tips allow you to lead with clarity, build trust, and guide your team through growth and change.
I’ve seen these strategies yield high retention rates and employee satisfaction as my team grew from 0 to 90 employees. The recent waves of layoffs, and COVID-19 whirlwind before that upgraded adaptability to a required trait. Thoughtful guidance through transitions builds the foundation for continued motivation, innovation and growth. Your commitment to authentic communication will be the glue that holds teams together in times of uncertainty.
I love working through these challenges and love knowledge sharing, do reach out over linkedin or in the comments with any question or challenge you are facing.
