The 5 Roles in Change Management: How to guide
your Employees
through a Change Process

Changes are supported by the Employees

“You can show them the way, they have to go it themselves”. Changes are always supported and shaped by the people who are affected by them - i.e. employees and managers - and it is only with their acceptance and active participation that the change can be implemented and established in the long term.

Managers have to handle their employees’ full range of emotions: Fear, euphoria, excitement, uncertainty and perhaps even anger alternate.

Within the change process, it is important to manage these emotions via different roles and this is precisely one of the tasks of managers. Which roles are typically differentiated between and what is their task in the change process?

The 5 Key Roles of Managers in the Change Process - and why each of them is important

1. Ambassadors: Involve employees in the change process

   It is important for your employees to be aware of what will change for them and their work in the future. Whenever people are involved in a process, you cannot simply proceed according to the “plug-and-play principle”. Above all, it is crucial to clarify open questions from employees. These include the following aspects:

   • What does this change mean for them personally?
   • What specific added value do they gain from it?
   • Why should they support the change?
   • Why is the change necessary at all?

   Does your company have a change team? This usually consists of several so-called change agents, or “change ambassadors”. Their task is to plan and manage the process itself. They are able to provide well-founded and generally understandable answers to these fundamental questions - in the first step uniformly for the entire company.

   The direct manager is then responsible for communicating with their own employees. And this is exactly what employees need. They also want to know about the background to the change, be able to express their fears and feel that their fears are understood and taken seriously.

2. Trainers: Provide employees with the necessary qualifications

   Extensive changes logically entail new tasks, processes and responsibilities for employees. The trainer’s most important task is to support individual employees in building up new qualifications, both technical qualifications and soft skills. It’s about:

   • Providing the know-how and skills to accomplish the new or changed tasks, processes and responsibilities
   • Convincing employees that the change is important
   • Encouraging the desire to proactively support the change
   • Strengthening the willingness to anchor the changes in the long term - and preventing relapses into old patterns of behavior

   However, it’s not just your employees who need to be prepared for the challenges, your managers do too, so there are tailor-made training courses in which they learn the theoretical basics and practical rhetorical tools, among other things.

   When it comes to finding the appropriate training providers, you should make your choice carefully. It makes sense to plan a generous budget and, if in doubt, a little more time so that you really get something out of it in the end. Always keep in mind: “Buy cheap, buy twice”.

3. Mediators: Establish a connection between the change team and employees

   This role is an interface that ensures uncomplicated communication in two directions. It transmits information from the change team to the employees - and vice versa. Mediators ensure that communication problems and potential for conflict between the two groups are avoided, for example if tasks and responsibilities are not clearly distributed or there are disagreements about planned goals. In this way, mediators help to ensure that the change process runs as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

4. Pioneers: Endorse and support the change

   Employees usually notice intuitively whether their managers are open and loyal to the company and the planned changes. If this is the case, your employees will also be motivated and contribute their own ideas. However, if at any point they have the feeling that their manager does not support the change at all or half-heartedly or even talks badly about it, the change is usually not likely to be successful. This is why managers must always act as role models for their employees in the change process and lead by example. The first moon landing, for example, also required a courageous pioneer who dared to take the first step into unknown territory.

   

5. Arbiters: Identify and manage resistance

   Resistance occurs with almost all changes. Unfortunately, you cannot prevent it. It is important that your managers recognize this at an early stage and counteract it, because they know the employees best and can find out what the reasons for this resistance are.

   It is helpful to first accept the resistance. There are typical reasons why employees resist change. In many cases, they simply do not feel sufficiently informed, are involved too late or do not feel able to implement the change. This leads to them simply overlooking the positive aspects of the change.

   Only if managers get to the bottom of these reasons, can they minimize or, ideally, completely resolve them. Here, too, it is necessary for the managers themselves to be well prepared for the change.

How to succeed in the Change Process - without losing your Employees along the Way

Ideally, all roles in the change process should be covered by your managers - from ambassador to trainer to mediator. Both the employees and the managers must have the opportunity to build up the qualifications and soft skills to be able to fulfill the requirements placed on them both professionally and methodically. It is important to make “lifelong learning” possible.

This is probably
the biggest Mistake You can make in your Digital Transformation

With its many individual steps, a change process reminds of an emotional rollercoaster ride for your employees. And that makes them insecure. It is essential that employees have trust in their manager - this applies across all roles. To achieve this, you have to make the emotional security of employees a top priority.

Managers can achieve this by promoting personal development and strengthening employees’ self-confidence. Give them the time to try out new tasks and work processes and allow mistakes. But sometimes you also have to make clear announcements if there is no other way. This gives your employees stability in the phase in which they are confronted with so many new things. It always takes effort to turn your back on the old rut and take a new path. As mentioned above, you can’t do this for your employees - but you can give them a compass to guide them.