Sven de Ridder:
I have been coaching teams and organisations through change for six years now, always fascinated by the dynamics that make a top team unbeatable one moment and bogged down the next. In business, as in sports, I see how crucial it is to get people on board and keep them involved. From my role as consultant at GroupMapping, I help organisations find answers to these issues. Would you like to know more? Feel free to send a message via LinkedIn!
In my work at GroupMapping, I help organisations bring strategy, projects and programmes to success. Lately, I've been hearing one particular phrase more often than ever: “We really need to bring our people into this.” That statement makes me both hopeful and alert.
Hopeful, because it shows that we realise that a project only succeeds when the people doing the work are behind it. Alert, because in practice, ‘taking along’ is still too often a euphemism for: “telling afterwards what the intention is”.”
In the fast-moving pace of everyday life, there is a temptation to see organising moments with people as an administrative hurdle and a huge investment. It is easier to schedule a short meeting, tell people what is going to change and put a tick under the heading ‘support created’.
But people are allergic to sham involvement. They can see right through a lack of sincerity. If you ask people to think along when the course has long been set, you do not create support, but cynicism.
Sincerity is the key word here. When you involve people because you ‘have to’, it becomes a play. When you involve them because you genuinely believe that their expertise is needed to complete the puzzle, it is an investment that pays for itself more than once.
So why does that sincerity produce better results? There are three obvious reasons:
At GroupMapping, we don't believe in endless talking sessions without direction. Sincere engagement is a craft. It is a process that requires you to clear the right hurdles step by step.
Sincere engagement does not mean that everyone decides on everything. That leads to indecision. Start with crystal-clear frameworks: what is fixed (budget, time, quality) and where is room for individual interpretation? Clear boundaries give people the security to use their knowledge and skills optimally precisely within that space.
Not everyone needs to be at every meeting. The trick is to hook people up at the moment when their expertise has the most impact. We often help organisations make this overview: who do we need to successfully put this piece of the puzzle together?
People want to know where they stand. Specifically, what will change in my work tomorrow? What will it take to keep this successful? By making change live and discussable, you take the discussion out of abstraction and make it tangible.
Engaging people genuinely demands perhaps the most from leadership: the courage to let go of control a little. You have to dare to listen to what is really going on, even if it is uncomfortable. And more excitingly, you have to act on what you receive.
Do you do this just for form? Then you will lose trust faster than you built it. But do you do it sincerely? Then you tap into an inexhaustible source of energy and knowledge.
A solution that is supported by the people who have to make it happen is the only one that really holds up.
