Weathering Disruptions with a Culture of Trust

Chris Hennesey (00:06):
I really encourage customers as they go through these periods of downturn to really amp up the level of communication and change management involved, especially through a digital transformation. Because a lot of people are worried about how their skills will need to evolve. And the more you can communicate the intent and the purpose of what you're doing, but also paint the picture of what the future may be, it really gets people excited about what the future is. And that could even be in a place where they are going to maybe pull back. I see a lot of companies where they want to maybe increase IT development capacity, but drive efficiencies in operations. So the operators get worried around what does the future of this mean for me? I think businesses need to balance all sides of what they're trying to do through this, but communicating and being open and direct with them, with plenty of lead time is a pattern I've seen work well with transforming customers.

Mark Schwartz (00:53):
I know I hear a lot about this frozen middle, you know, there's middle management and they just won't change no matter what we do. I hear that from CIOs a lot and some of it probably has to do with the kind of communication you were talking about, but how do you answer that? How do you think about that?

Jake Burns (01:18):
Well, I think there could be a frozen middle. There could be a frozen top and a frozen bottom. Right? You know, I've seen all of those, but I think to Chris's point, and I couldn't agree more over communication, right. And I think we focus on certain kinds of communication, not on others, right? Just like we kind of focus on certain kinds of trust and not others, right? So I think people having trust in their leaders is super important, but trust is more than leaders having the best intentions for their people, right? And that's the kind of trust that we usually think, do I trust that he's not going to fire me? But also there's the trust of competency.

(01:53):
Do I trust that this person can lead us? I trust that this person can keep the lights on, but do I trust that this person can take us through the other side of this transformation? Because it takes a very different kind of leader to successfully do that. Right? So having both of those kind of trust is important. And so when you're communicating, you communicate what career paths are going to look like for your team through this transformation. If their plan is to keep everyone, communicate that certainly, and also communicate why are we doing this transformation? Why do I want to keep every one of you that's here? I feel like we can re-skill you to do a job that's probably more interesting than what you're doing today.

(02:37):
Right? The classic example being somebody's racking and stacking servers, they don't know why they're doing it. They’re marking down the days until their vacation and so forth. And then they get to become a cloud engineer, which is closer to the business. They're actually building things. They have a much more fulfilling job and they have a career path that's leading somewhere, right? To having more value in the marketplace and more fulfilling job in general. So communicating those things and establishing that trust with your people, I think goes a long way.