Adapting to Change and Upskilling Teams

A popular allegory in the business world describes four mice who live in a maze and look for cheese. Moving in pairs, the two groups happen upon a room full of cheese and settle into a comfortable routine of consumption. However, with the cheese in the room dwindling over time, the first group has anticipated the need to find a new supply of cheese and ventures out to find it. 

However, the second group has incorrectly assumed that the cheese in the room will stay plentiful, and one of them angrily remarks, “Who moved my cheese?” Locked into their routine and unwilling to change, the second group distresses over their situation. Faced with starvation, one of them makes the brave choice to break the cycle of complacency and begins a journey to find new cheese – this character succeeds in doing so and reflects upon the success and growth experienced from leaving the comfort zone. 

Just as the characters in Spencer Johnson’s _Who Moved My Cheese _learnt to adjust to inevitable change, finding greater rewards through their constant search for more cheese, your business teams can also upgrade and upskill themselves to stay relevant and fight fit in an era of change and disruption.

Grappling With Change

When the winds of change are blowing, the captain must be absolutely clear on where the ship is headed. To drive your change strategy as a team leader, you need to understand where you’re taking your team and possess the skills to succeed in doing so. How do you decide on what direction to take? The key lies in analysing the gap that exists between where your team currently stands and where you need them to be. With this, you can understand where the shortfalls are and develop a plan to bridge the gap.

For most people, change is difficult to embrace, and once you’ve established where your team needs to be, you need to follow that up by getting your team excited about the need for change. Each team member should arrive at a self-realisation on the importance of change. 

I highly recommend getting your team acquainted with Who Moved My Cheese, as well as the lessons that it illustrates, to get your team in the “change or die” mindset. You want them to see the importance of not simply maintaining the status quo, and that they will eventually fade away if they reject change. However, putting up a stale PowerPoint slideshow for your team to sit through is a poor way to bring the content to them. If you can convince them to read the original book, that would help greatly, but there are also YouTube videos where they’ve turned the story into little cartoons – this option actually works much better for people who do not have English as their first language. 

Once you and your team have reached a shared understanding regarding the need for change, you can run workshops to kick-start their journey towards it. While workshops operate against the backdrop of needing change and achieving the goals originally set for your team, Who Moved My Cheese works well as a catalyst to get them familiar with the mindset. 

As you introduce the lessons of the book, you can get people to identify themselves with the characters while you gain insights into their resistance and why they feel that way. You need to build towards it from the ground up, especially for a team that’s been together for a long time and operating the same way for just as long – it’s going to be difficult to steer them away or move them along from what they’ve done their whole life. 

If you’re trying to establish a team of world-beaters, can you invest enough time to make it happen, or would you have to guide them out of the system and rehire people with the right skills? I strongly feel that the answers don’t lie with the second option. It’s best if you give everybody the opportunity to change and make the move, and from a leadership position, establish a level of legacy on how you move things. 

While it’s true that these people have been doing the same thing for a long time, there’s a lot of knowledge and wisdom that they’ve cultivated over the years. You should leverage on their expertise to bring about change more effectively, rather than replacing them with fresh faces. The workshops are a key asset in beginning the change process, but they are not a cure-all – the process is a journey for both you and your team, and journeys take time.

The Power of One

As the leader, you also need to understand the need for change, otherwise you will not be able to communicate it effectively. Gaining this understanding means that you need to know where you stand now, where you eventually need to be. You can then outline the steps to get you there. Part of this journey will focus on identifying your strengths and weaknesses, as well as that of your team. 

At the leadership level, you have access to strategic knowledge to chart the journey for the long term, coupled with the responsibility of managing your employees and their needs. With these in mind, you then need to lay out the groundwork emphasising the importance of change and create a pathway to communicate it effectively. This pathway needs to contain more than directives from the top, but also a credible message to spur people to believe in change and embrace it. 

Without this, you’re going to see varied levels of acceptance in your team regarding the need for change. As illustrated in Who Moved My Cheese, some may express reluctance to change, while others may act as change agents who are prepared and enthusiastic to adapt to changes accordingly. 

You can make use of organisational change management skills to guide your people along the planned direction of change. Monitor and encourage their progress with workshops and skill assessments. The programmes that you put in place also need not be sequential, as you can run them at the same time. Within your team, there may be a group of people looking forward to the change – they make great candidates for skill assessments as they are likely to be more objective and respond positively to your plans for change.

Your change agents are highly likely to be people that others look up to. If you get them invested and actively involved in your strategy, you can have them relay your feedback on their peer groups’ attitudes toward change. Even if just one person embraces change, the attitude can gradually spread to an entire crowd. 

If you search “dancing man on hill” on YouTube, you’ll find a video of people sitting down on a hillside and chilling out at a music festival. Everyone’s being sedentary except for one lone figure dancing to the music in a weird fashion, but he’s not alone for long – he is joined by another person dancing like him, then two, three and several more. Eventually the entire crowd on the hillside can be seen shaking and moving around as if they have been possessed. The dancing man embodies the power of one to effect impactful change.

If you can identify the change agents in your team and get them on board with you, they can amplify your voice and convey your intentions to those who may not have the opportunity to hear you out. As leading figures in peer groups, the change agents can be earmarked to help champion your agenda and promote more open-minded attitudes to change.  

Conversely, while some people desire change, they will end up resisting either due to a lack of confidence or in reaction to being pushed too far out of their comfort zone. At that point, you might find yourself needing to make hard decisions. Even if some in your team have worked with you for a long time, you may begin to feel that you have overinvested in trying to make them embrace change. 

Their reluctance to modernise will then quickly become your problem. You might find yourself under pressure from above if you don’t cut the cord early enough and stop the issues from snowballing. It’s critical that you make a decision and understand early on what your options are. Then, reflect on which team members can make the journey towards change and which will need help to move on and achieve success elsewhere. 

In your position as a leader and a mentor, you owe it to yourself to ensure that even team members who are unable to adapt to change will continue to be successful. At the same time, you also need to realise that you can no longer offer them success in the current situation, and their failure will become yours if left unchecked. If you continue to allow them to fail, you will likely end up having to fire them, which impacts all parties negatively. 

Instead, help in their transition by letting them know that the current arrangement just isn’t going to work out, then give them some time to find new work opportunities elsewhere. Trigger-happy firing is not good leadership, it simply shows laziness and lack of concern on the leader’s part. When people are abruptly let go, it reflects badly on management or leadership, as they have failed to manage the situation with respect and dignity for the terminated staff. 

How do you reconfigure your team when change comes knocking on your door? Having spent seven years in New York, I returned to the Asia-Pacific region and took over the team here, as well as the one in Europe. In the organisational chart, my teams were situated in what I call the extremities of the business, dealing with work of a service and support nature. Very little effort was spent to understand the business needs in the region and how they could be successful. 

In multinational organisations, corporate headquarters have a tendency to prescribe one-size-fits-all solutions: what works for headquarters must by extension work in the rest of the world, even if it ends up being incompatible for certain business units. Realising this when I came back to the region, I began transforming my teams very early on and looked at how we could cut down time spent on the basic tasks I term low value-add activities. 

We also created shared service environments for jobs that allowed remote delivery of services, situating them in locations where it would cost less to have the same tasks performed. With costs reduced, the budget saved was reinvested in the customer-facing aspect of the work. I was not the first person in Asia to institute these changes – there were already progressive IT organisations trying some of these things, so I committed towards that direction at the regional level. 

That journey took immense amounts of time and effort – I could only succeed because I had established a strong team behind me that underwent upskilling and reinvestment into new areas, expanding their roles from being mere order-takers to respected individuals in the business who were consulted on matters of change. 

How do you optimise low value-add activities? Besides moving them to lower-cost locations and creating shared service environments, you can integrate automation, AI or machine learning into these operations. These emerging technologies are putting jobs with repetitive, low value-add skill sets at risk and are primed to replace humans in these roles as the future rolls in. 

As a manager or leader, the organisation relies on you to successfully deliver on its business targets; increasing work efficiency is a core aspect of boosting productivity. While automation and emerging technologies can make operations more efficient, implementing them is just the first step. Even as you take bites out of your operating costs, you should reinvest them to build higher-level skill sets for your team that are well-placed to resist replacement by AI and machine learning.

If you look at the cybersecurity space, there are massive amounts of data produced that need to be analysed to identify vulnerabilities. Many data breaches that occur are not acknowledged or realised until long after the breach. It is simply unfeasible to have individuals analyse everything while the data continues to grow to staggering levels. In such situations, automation can easily comb through the data and eliminate false positives to help security engineers prioritise areas that need fixing. 

Suppose you have security engineers mainly tasked to check logs in order to pinpoint issues, with this activity consuming much of their time. Such roles are at risk if you have a strategy to automate this task, and when you are on the verge of implementing automation, you should evaluate their position and willingness to change. If they wish to stagnate and continue looking at logs for the rest of their lives, then they should no longer belong on your team. However, if they wish to embrace change and manage the automation of their old tasks, then you will likely be able to accommodate them in your restructured team.

Training and Strategy

Before your team can undergo effective training and upskilling, they must first understand and accept the importance of change. You may have sent them for training, and they have undergone the curriculum, but that does not mean that they are automatically ready to embrace or leverage what they’ve learnt. If they are not fully invested in change, the training will not stick for long. On the other hand, training, retraining and upskilling your team is a continuous process. You want to keep them at the forefront of their expertise, instead of sending them for one course and concluding that they have learnt everything they needed to know. 

Moreover, training programmes should not be implemented like a one-size-fits-all solution. Different people have different areas of expertise and varying strengths and weaknesses, and you should build an individualised training plan to help them fulfil their potential and be successful. 

If you don’t upskill your team, you will not be able to deliver on your strategy. In this case, your strategy should encompass what’s in your industry, what’s happening within it, the key business goals that should be achieved and the disruptive technologies active in the business landscape. As a leader, you may possess skin-deep knowledge about these factors, but it would be unwise to deep-dive into research by yourself to devise your change strategy – you likely won’t have enough time for it. Instead, have your team conduct the research and advise you on formulating the next steps of your strategy. 

Continuous Learning, Continuous Change

While there are many tools that you can utilise to help your team navigate change, none of them will work if they don’t want to change. You may need them to rise to a certain level, but unless they want to do so, training them will not necessarily lead to them upskilling. 

There is also a risk of certain skills becoming obsolete over time. After we created a shared service environment for centralising certain operations, our team had system, network and storage administrators without any roles to perform. Unless they were upskilled to do something else, their primary roles had simply disappeared. When you restructure, consolidate or automate certain roles in the team, you should also have a plan ready for the members affected.

How can you best harness the knowledge held by people who have been with you for a long time? What do your team members want to do, and what are their career aspirations? As they travel on the journey of change and try to align the organisation’s needs with their own personal needs, they might find that their current workplace is no longer suitable for them. 

Whether you are a manager or a leader, you need to keep tabs on their motivations and know what’s making your team members tick. Something’s definitely wrong if they’re dragging themselves into the office every day. Excited workers are more productive and receptive to change, so you need to understand the importance of keeping morale up in the office and create conducive work environments to support your team.

Disruption is the order of the day in today’s business landscape. How do you plan to deliver on your change strategy and build paths for upskilling people? It’s a matter of continuous learning – if you’re drafting your strategy or revising it, consider the skill gaps that should be bridged and steer your team in that direction. 

“Sometimes, Hem, things change and they are never the same again. This looks like one of those times. That's life! Life moves on. And so should we.” – Spencer Johnson, Who Moved My Cheese?

1 Establish the Need for Change

This is the foundation of your strategy. After establishing the need for change, you also have to ensure that everyone on your team is on board with this mentality. They must also want to change, or they won’t fully benefit from upskilling programmes.

2 Perform Skill-Gap Analysis

Exactly how do you plan to guide your team through change? Run a skill-gap analysis between where your team currently stands and where you want them to be; thereafter, develop a strategy or a training programme to bridge the gap.

3 Personalise Training Programmes

Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Instead of creating a one-size-fits-all solution, create individualised training programmes and skill assessments to guide them towards their maximum potential.