It’s time for a better approach to change management in marketing

Marketing teams make changes all the time. But to make big changes in marketing, like using your tech stack more effectively, decreasing your time to market or improving campaign outcomes, a concerted effort to communicate and deliver change is necessary. 

In a presentation at the Fall MarTech Conference, Melissa Reeve discussed the “middle-out” strategy, a way to drive successful change in marketing.

As humans, we sometimes make decisions without considering the full implications of our choices. For example, Reeve says, many marketing organizations roll out marketing technology without a change management mindset in mind. This leads to low adoption and utilization rates. 

In smaller organizations, change management is often done ad hoc or not at all. Change management initiatives involve planning how the change will be rolled out, communicated and who will be impacted. There might even be new skills required. 

Exploring common change management frameworks

A hallmark of change management is that it also actively manages those who are against the change.

All change management frameworks show a series of steps for organizations to follow. These help organizations manage change effectively.

Harvard professor John Kotter’s Leading Change is one of the most popular frameworks. It outlines eight steps to help organizations pilot programs, consolidate their early wins and start building momentum for change. 

The ADKAR method focuses on helping people understand the need for change. It helps people understand what (i.e., what changes are occurring) and how the change will impact them personally.

The McKinsey 7S system has been around since the 1970s. It helps organizations think through the various areas of the organization impacted and help them work toward alignment. It’s helpful in scaling organizations, for example, if you’re going from 50 to 500 people.

Kurt Lewin has a very simple three-step process for understanding and  implementing organizational change. It requires organizations to unfreeze their current way of doing things. Then they  communicate and practice changes, then refreeze the new way of working, to codify it and implement that new way of change.

But according to the Harvard Business Review, only 12% of change initiatives meet or exceed expectations. McKinsey and Company says only one in eight change initiatives yields lasting results.

Reeve explains why failed change is such a problem for marketing organizations in the clip below:

Reeve says the questions for you to consider include:

• How do you treat change in your organization?
• Do you have a change management frameworks? 
• Do you roll out change in a systematic manner, thinking holistically? 
• Or, do you rely on good intention and good luck to implement and communicate your change? 

Dig deeper: 3 strategies to navigate change as digital privacy evolves

A different approach to change management

The frameworks we examined earlier, such as the ADKAR framework or CADR, are typically labeled as “bottom up” or “top down.” Reeve says top-down change initiatives tend to be over-simplistic. They lack the nuance they need to truly address some of the challenges that the people who are doing the work are facing.

Bottom-up change initiatives lack perspective tying change to business outcomes. Fundamentally, big organizational changes require the insights and the experience found in the middle of the hierarchy.

It turns out, Reeve says, the most successful transformations harness the collective wisdom of middle managers and teams. These middle managers have enough exposure to the leaders to understand the broader goals of the organization. They have enough of the knowledge of the operations to correctly identify key areas of improvement. 

But middle managers are also far enough removed from day-to-day operations not to be limited by how things have always been done.

4 requirements for a middle-out change strategy

Executive buy-in

Senior leadership support is critical to the success of the middle out strategy. Executive support underscores the importance of the change and provides critical visibility. Without that senior leadership support, Reeve said, middle managers may not have the authority or the resources they need in order to make meaningful change. 

Selection

The next step in the strategy is what Reeve says she likes to call selection. That is, identifying and selecting proven performers who demonstrate a strong commitment to the initiative.

“These are the people who are leaning in,” she said. “They possess the necessary skills and attributes to bridge that gap between strategy and execution. They typically have a track record of consistently delivering results, and a proven ability to thrive in ambiguous environments. They have ingenuity, creativity, they can think outside the box, and they have strong communication and collaboration skills, obviously, so necessary when implementing change.”

Stretch

The third component is called stretch.

“Stretch is encouraging people to cultivate and present audacious ideas that can fundamentally alter the operational dynamics of the organizations and help propel it towards those greater successes,” Reeve said. “To do this, leaders need to recognize and validate the concerns raised by these middle managers. Oftentimes, they’re dismissed, but they might produce valuable insights into potential obstacles and challenges.”

Support

The fourth component of the middle-out strategy is support. “Middle managers play a crucial role in implementing change within an organization and must be provided with adequate support in terms of focus and authority to act,” she said. “These managers must have the necessary financial, human and technology resources to implement the change.”

Organizations can help middle managers by clearly explaining the change vision and goals. They should also offer training and professional development. 

A case study in middle-out change management

T-Mobile wanted to move from a highly complex website to one that truly prioritized customer needs. Leadership sponsored a dedicated cross-functional team to revamp the experience. Reeve said leadership gave a very simple charter: Do what’s needed to rock the world.

“The team was focused. They were empowered. There were no constraints placed on them. The team had to narrow down that great vision into three goals. It decided to enable effortless discovery, sales and service.”

They needed the website to be simple and straightforward, and they needed to radically reconsider the T-Mobile brand as the “uncarrier.” 

Highly satisfied users of the website increased from 10% to 50%. The ease of use jumped from 22% to 57%. And the shopping experience improved by 50%.

5 practices to improve your change management outcome

After discussing disadvantages of top-down and bottom-up strategies and the components of the middle-out strategy, Reeve reviewed six practices that can support change initiatives in your organization. 

According to Harvard research, there is a direct correlation between the number of these 6 practices you implement and your success rate.

1. Invest in the change. In the Harvard study, nearly all failed change initiatives were underfunded or financed through cost-cutting measures. That alone isn’t going to cut it.

2. Don’t view change as a project to be completed. Think of it like healthy eating. You have to continue to do it to see the benefits. 

3. Create a sense of joint accountability. No one should be able to point to a person and say, “That change is her job, not mine.”

4. Manage the amount of change. The research done by Harvard indicated that changing more than two primary routines simultaneously increased the odds of failure dramatically.

5. Support bold ambitions. Use those bold ambitions to bold visions to unify, to motivate. And as part of that, manage your naysayers.

Dig deeper: 4 common pitfalls in failed agile marketing transformations (and how to avoid them)

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