Leading Change Without Losing People with Julie Gawle

Change doesn’t fail because people hate change. It fails because leaders skip the hard conversations, managers get left behind, and everyone else is expected to figure it out from a single email.

I’m joined by Julie Gawle, a senior change advisor and change communication advisor at Meaningful Change Consulting, to unpack what actually drives adoption during organizational change and digital transformation. Julie shares how a theater background led her into project management and then into the “people side” of change management, where emotions, uncertainty, and trust determine whether a strategy survives contact with the real world. We talk about why transformational change requires leadership alignment, how competing initiatives can create instant confusion, and what it means to lead from the mindset of an agent of change.

We also get practical about change communication: why “email is enough” is a myth, how to find the right cadence without overwhelming people, and why culture should shape your approach. Julie breaks down layered alignment (understanding without forced agreement), the bell curve of resistance, and how to leverage early adopters as change champions while focusing your energy on the influenceable middle. If you’ve ever struggled with stakeholder analysis, impact assessment, or getting managers ready to translate strategy into day-to-day reality, this conversation will sharpen your playbook.

Listen, share this with a leader who’s navigating change right now, and subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next. If the show helps you, leave a review and tell me: what’s the biggest communication mistake you see during change?

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Transcript

Welcome And The Communication Challenge

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Uncommon Communicator Podcast. I'm your host podcast where we bring enlightenment to the topic of communication. Are you ready to take ownership of your conversations? Are you ready to possess the skills to navigate and facilitate conversations to a mutual understanding? Then grab your growth mindset and let's go. Welcome to the Uncommon Communicator Podcast. It is my pleasure to have Julie Gall as my guest today. Julie, you are a senior change advisor and change communication advisor for meaningful change consulting. That's a lot of change. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here, James. I'm I'm excited about our conversation this morning.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Yeah, I had a lot of fun with that when I was writing that. I'm like, that is a lot of change. I feel a little fun little change. But there are there are uh, you know, one of your big things is change management. Um, and I think it's really important that you know, looking into it, like there are things like when we talk about change with in organizations and even individually, you know, those are the three top things that I found that came up first were stress, disengagement, performance decline. No company wants that. No person wants to go through that, right? But what really drove your desire to get into this whole change management business?

Julie’s Path From Theater

SPEAKER_01 1:17

So um when I was first starting my career, um I well, I have to kind of even go a little bit further than that. I have to go further back than that. So I um graduated college with a theater degree. And so I in all of my spare time, um, I was doing theater, you know, I was on the board and I performed and I directed. Um, and so work was never a career. Work was work, where I just kind of brought in a paycheck and and theater really was my passion and what I ended up doing. Um, you know, the majority that was where my brain was, you know, all the time, even if I was at work. I was thinking about, oh, I got to pick up this prop for the performance tonight, or we're gonna have a late rehearsal because we're people are they don't know their lines yet. Um, but I got to a point in my life where I was kind of tired of being broke all the time. So um I ended up getting uh a job at one of the big banks um in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I just recently moved from um that I spent, you know, almost 30 years in Charlotte. And um I really started out in project management because I was able to convince someone that project management and directing a play were actually very similar things. You're both kind of herding cats. Um you're trying to make sure, you know, the lights are ready, the sound is ready, the actors know their lines, the costumes are all ready. Um, and you know, just in corporate America, you got to make sure, you know, have we sent out communications, is training completed, you know, it it the concepts behind them are are really very similar. Um, but one of my first assignments um as a project manager was to um make sure that the testers were ready for user acceptance testing for UAT. And so I came up with a communications plan and I came up with a training plan. And um, you know, we executed on all of that. And at the at the end of the training, I got a comment from one of the testers, and I will never forget this. She said, you know, I was so nervous about this testing. I really didn't know what we were expected to do, but I just feel so much better after this hour with you. And that really struck me, you know, that filled my soul, that that felt really good to me. Um, and when I found out that there's this whole world that kind of sits right next to project management called change management, where you're literally dealing with people and it's a little more feeling forward maybe than project management was. And considering my theater background, I'm kind of a feeling forward kind of person. Um, and so that was really how I got into it. Um, and then, you know, the more that I learned about what is this profession of change management, you know, I similar to a lot of other people, I walked in thinking it's communications, it's training, and let's just make sure we know who's impacted it how, and we're gonna email them and we're gonna train them, and it's all gonna be great. Um, but that's that's really not enough these days. We gotta change management is much more than just communications and training.

SPEAKER_00 4:43

Yeah, that's an important story. Well, that's uh boy, that goes uh that's pretty cool. Uh because in reality, they are at different levels of management, right? And then, you know, when you were talking as well about uh taking theater and turning into project management, like one thing I'm learning as you move through different levels of leadership, all of those skills really do translate across their higher higher level. Like you're looking at say 50,000 foot uh uh feet level of these uh skills and they pull across so many different platforms, all the way down to the person you know running a shift at at Taco Bell to running, you know, leading teams, like their skills that would set people apart. So it's pretty cool. But the change management thing, I never

Why Transformations Confuse Everyone

SPEAKER_00 5:29

really saw them as kind of a separate uh path to go on. But uh that's why it's really important, you know. I I've got so many questions for you because when I think of like real you know, change, I I've got so many different scenarios of horrible change processes and really great ones. But when we all went through the pandemic, I think that was the biggest shift, I think, um, even I mean across the the world, change became um you know just such a shock, right? Like we were all going through this change and responding to it. And I think we're different because of how we came out of it. But with that, what I find is that there's um uh there's a lot more stresses that go along with it, right? We dealt with those stresses. We've got a little bit of trauma still from that change. But uh if you're not changing, then you're probably not growing either, right? When I look at like different formats, platforms for project management, um we're looking at some different platforms within my organization. And uh you look at some of them, and I'm like, they've been the same for a long time. Like it's uh they're not changing, they're not moving with the times. Like some are adding AI, and it's time to make those changes, and those are gonna be really, really difficult for uh for an organization. What what do you think is like I look at uh so there's four kinds of organizational change strategic, technological, adaptive, and transformative. You've spent a lot of time in the transformative world, is that right?

SPEAKER_01 6:58

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Um so meaningful change consulting, I feel like is a little bit different than kind of your average consulting firm. We really focus a lot on um supporting leaders through a transformation and really focusing more on the mindset that it takes to be a leader of change, be an agent of change, and uh making sure that your organization and your fellow leaders on the leadership team are all aligned. I think too often people who are experiencing change feel like it's it's disconnected, it's it's confusing, they're not sure what's the priority, um, maybe there hasn't been any kind of communication at all. And ultimately, you know, that those are some repercussions from the from the leadership level, you know, especially in today's world where employees are just being asked to kind of change right and left. And it can get really confusing about what is the priority, where am I supposed to look? You know, I I recently heard a story. Um, I didn't work in this organization. It's kind of a friend of a friend story, but I recently heard of a story um in an organization where there were two large technology deployments that were happening the same day. And nobody realized it until like a month out when communications were starting, and neither one of them were able to stop. So nobody knew where to look. You know, do I look to third base? Do I look to first base? Like what's happening? And in my mind, and um, you know, here at Meaningful Change, that's that's a failure at the leadership level. And so we spend um a lot of our consulting time um being strategic advisors at at the leadership table to help them lead through change more effectively. Um now, don't get me wrong, I I completely do you know technology projects and HR deployments and tech deployments and things like that. But that's really what makes meaningful change a little bit different is our focus at the leadership level, more so than just you know, executing on projects.

SPEAKER_00 9:28

Yeah, that's I when you talk about like managing that type of change like strategically, yeah. I mean, that's such a great point because you really do have to think about months and months out, right? Maybe even a year, but thinking strategically and then the overall, and I think that's that's just a great point in that transformational thing that requires a lot more time. Um, you know, I I thought it was, you know, you mentioned that you know, month out you plan communication. So there's a system for going through the change for each of the different groups, but but if there's multiple change, like that's really going to create um a lot a lot bigger problem because it wasn't uh thought out strategically. So I think that's I I love the transformational you know part of it. The other side of it though that really interests me is like the adaptive change. And this is where I wanted to dive in with you as well, too, is like adaptive change. I'm a continuous improvement person, like Kaizen. Like

Leading Change At The Leadership Table

SPEAKER_00 10:22

we are constantly looking at small incremental changes, 1%. Like that is the mindset that my organization uh we talk about all the time. The the question I have is on the adaptive changes. Do companies that like you, you're experiencing that kind of uncomfortable rub all the time of how do we make this better? Do they do better in a transformative change uh process? Or is it are they separate?

SPEAKER_01 10:48

You know, that's a really interesting question. And one that I haven't really um thought about in in those terms. So I think very often um we'll experience, you know, those those big bang changes where you know something very big is happening on, you know, day one on a Monday or something like that. But definitely more often I am seeing um those kind of that kind of incremental adaptive change. And I think that it's been an interesting journey for the change management profession as a whole, because we were so used to more of like a waterfall type of deployment where you know you know months in advance what's going to happen and you're planning your engagement and communications and training along that timeline for this, you know, one big bang. But with the um introduction of such incremental changes, it's been it's been a journey in our profession to figure out how do we shift our own mindset in order to think about change incrementally rather than transform it. Now you can have a transformation incrementally, don't get me wrong. The two are very closely linked. But um I definitely think that it's been a period of growth and development and change for the change management profession as we're thinking about some of that incremental um kind of kind of change. Um I think you know I can only speak for me and um you know some of the people that I have in my network. And it's it's been a journey. It's it's been a little bit challenging to kind of shift that mindset because, you know, for 20 plus years it was kind of big bang waterfall approach, and all of a sudden it's like, wait, how do I think about my job now? This is completely different. Um but I do also think that we as change managers, we have a responsibility for the for some education on the technology side because release notes are not always gonna cut it. Sometimes there needs to be a little more touchy-feely engagement that happens before some of the incremental or the introduction of an incremental um, you know, bundle of change. Um and sometimes release notes just doesn't cut it. And you don't always have a change manager on an incremental kind of project like that.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Well, and you mentioned like uh the the individual feeling, you know, how does this affect your job? There's a lot of fear that comes along with change for a lot of people. Like, is that do you do you approach that fear first? Like what's your approach in handling somebody who's really looking at their job either changing or going away?

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Yeah, I think that's a really important question. So that is definitely um where we focus at meaningful change at the leadership level and um at the the manager or supervisor level, you know. Um if there is if there is reason for people to be concerned about their jobs, perhaps we're talking about a restructure or a layoff or something like that. Um or I guess you're right, anybody can be afraid of any kind of change. It doesn't have to necessarily have any kind of impact on your job. Um, but you know, I think that it's becoming increasingly the word I'm looking for, I think required from employees that there be a recognition of the emotions that are involved in change. Um I think back in the day, especially, you know, 15, 20 years ago, when I was really cutting my teeth in the change management world, there was a mentality of comply or die. You know, you either get on board or you can find a new job, but this is the way that we're gonna do things. And I just think over the past probably decade,

Incremental Change And Release Notes

SPEAKER_01 15:09

that mentality just won't cut it from you know, an employee perspective. And that therefore has required leadership and managers especially to look at a change from an emotional lens and realize that there is fear, there is excitement that like we are feeling creatures, whether we all want to admit it or not. And I think it's important as a change manager that we're coaching leaders and we're coaching managers to not be afraid of those emotions and to recognize that they exist and to be able to kind of sit with them um and you know, support their teams through those emotions. And it's a skill.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

Yeah, completely a skill. And you know, you mentioned the um uh, you know, what something and die. How did you comply or die? Yeah, and that's right in line with what I mean, we call it legacy construction. It's probably legacy leadership, um, which is all uh defined along the same lines of command and control. So I'm in construction, you know, we uh are talking about all those things that you're talking about now that we weren't talking about before for a couple of reasons. Like one is you can't do the comply and die thing because you're gonna lose people for one, because companies are now embracing the fact that you have to engage differently. And so I think companies are, they're starting to, but it in getting rid of that kind of legacy type of leadership, um, it it does cause a different skill for us to relate to your point. It's it's absolutely a skill to be able to recognize that. But fear becomes really one of I think the biggest uh uh I think the biggest hurdles in change management. There was uh, and it seems lately like I've been interviewing people, you know, communication people for a while now, and they we always tend to lean towards the the change management side as part of like really needing to communicate. One story in particular, I believe it was Gary Ross, was sharing a story where they you know they had like a 3,000-member uh team. It only affected about 1800 of them. So they brought the 1800 in and had a chat with them, and then the 1200 they didn't do anything with. And so it it only mattered for the 1800. That's only the ones that were truly going to be affected. But the other ones, the feedback they started getting is like, hey, what's going on? Are we out of the loop? So that whole idea of change management isn't by department organizationally. People need to know what that communication is and they fill that story in to uh they fill the story and you're not telling them.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

Yeah, I think that's a really important story because I think even as change managers, sometimes we are a little too myopic about like we just have to don't worry about the people who are impacted, let them, you know, just continue on with their day and their lives, and there's no there's no impact here, there's nothing to see here. But you're right, more and more we're starting to hear that those who aren't impacted, you can potentially have a negative reaction because you think you're missing something, think they're missing something. So more often you're right. A lot of times um we've been just you know focused by business area and let's let's forget about the rest, they're just doing their thing, but that that it goes back to that, you know, demand. You just you can't operate that way anymore. Our employees demand a different perspective, you know, a different approach.

SPEAKER_00 18:44

Absolutely. When you look at uh like overall transformational changes, uh when you're sharing those things with um, you know, the or the organization as a whole, um, you're making sure you're communicating to everybody, right? You want to make sure that you're uh getting those communications out. Is there a point of uh well let me back up? Undercommunication, huge problem all the time. Always yeah. Is there potential for like overcommunication? Like, are we taking too long communicators? Do you do you find yourself finding the right formula for the right amount, or is there no such thing as as overcommunication?

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Um you know, that I think is a bit of a hotly contested point um in my experience and within my uh within my network, you know. I personally believe that there is something as too much communication because it can distract people from what they need to focus on right now. But I think that it is cultural and it needs to be organizational, organizationally based. Um you know, before I came to meaningful change consulting, I worked as um a change communications

Fear Emotions And Modern Leadership

SPEAKER_01 20:08

um leader for the HR team at an internet company. And it was a small company, but um the culture that they had developed there was one of openness and overcommunication. And and so in the pat in my past, I probably would have gone to the head of HR and said, we're talking about this way too much. This is distracting. Let's let's just rein this in for a little bit and wait closer to the time when we're gonna deploy. But culturally, that just wasn't gonna fly there. And so I think that it's really important to look at the culture of the organization that you're in and adjust accordingly, because you might not be able to get away with just in time communications. It needs to be all the time communications because that's what people demand.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

Well, and you bring culture is a great point. Like when you so you when you go in and you do an evaluation, you're looking at the culture of the company, but how much is change management not truly built in building culture? Because uh that that goes back to my idea of um the continuous improvement. Like with my organization, we're always talking about it. We've got some big changes uh potentially coming as we look at a different program or uh you know program management uh software. Uh but as we look at that, you know, how we're gonna roll those out, we're accustomed to those little changes. So there's just as an organization, we're prepared for it. But if you go into an organization that is not had change in a long time, not accustomed to change, like that's got to be almost a heavier uh handed, no, that's probably not the right word, heavier handed approach in changing culture first, right? Before you talk about change. How do you approach that?

SPEAKER_01 21:59

So I Um in my experience it's it's pretty much client based. Sometimes there sometimes the clients that we have had are like, this is the way that we operate, and you're gonna come in and operate within our culture, which that's to me is the kind of the best way to approach any kind of transformation. Um but there have been organizations that Meaningful Change Consulting has worked with where they weren't ready for change and we had to look more at culture and you know preparing the leadership team and the management team to to lead through a change. And you know, culture can start with at the leadership level. So I think it kind of depends upon the the client that you're looking at, but really understanding the current culture and developing change plans that um would would you know be in alignment with with that culture, I think is absolutely critical. And if there is no culture of change, then what needs to happen before you're introducing a type of change? You know, you just gotta kind of look at it. Um, I think too often people forget that you know return on the return on investment is is on the line here, you know, outcomes are aligned, business objectives are on the line. If you've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for say a new technology, but you're only spending five thousand dollars on preparing your people, how long are you willing to wait for that return on investment? Are you willing to pay for it now up front, or is it going to be longer term? And sometimes maybe it does need to be longer term because culturally people need to, you know, have a slower ramp to to new behaviors and new mindsets.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

Yeah. Uh have you gotten into situations where because I like how that we're talking about this at the higher level, um, you know, definitely from the that level where that change is coming from. If they're not all bought in uh at that level, I'm sure you had to have ran into where you have to create um buy-in basically. And you know, I I I I'm of the mind too, like there's things that I don't always agree with, but I'm gonna support the leadership. So we'll have a conversation about it. So it's like, how am I gonna have this discussion recently? It's like, I don't completely agree with this, but let's talk about it and let's let's talk about how I'm gonna support what we want to do. So we had a really great conversation, but I have an opportunity to do that with the leadership team. You you might be in a spot where there's people that are just you know, I mean, you know, because of your experience, they are not gonna help this change. Do you attack that head on, or how do you how do you approach like that? Because that's that's a complicated um it

Undercommunication Versus Too Much

SPEAKER_00 24:57

that's complicated based on whatever their position might be as well.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

It really is, it really is. And I think you're bringing up an important point. So um meaningful change, what you're really talking about is um achieving what we call layered alignment, which is that you have alignment and understanding of the change. And I notice I didn't say agreement, understanding of the change at all levels of the organization. And you you might not get buy-in at every level, but the idea is bringing light to the unspoken. I think too often, especially at the leadership level, you see head nods around the table, and then people leave the conference room, and either they're not cascading a change, they're not cascading information, they are talking negatively about a change behind somebody's back. Um, you know, they're potentially spreading rumors. And I don't mean people are doing this maliciously, they just they're not bought in. They had knotted at the table, they did not have the maybe culturally they didn't feel like they could speak up, whatever the case may be for why the concerns and the dissent was not brought up head on so that it could be managed and overcome through the the leadership at the leadership table to you know get people aligned. And just too often, you know, people are okay with things that go unsaid. And a meaningful change we're just like, nope, you gotta are you saying it? And if you said it, are you saying it out there too? Um or you're only saying it at this table. So um I think that you know, again, going back to the the scope that we are usually per um where we're kind of operating at meaningful change at that leadership level and and making sure that they're aligned. But let me sorry, I'm kind of rambling here, James. I'm sorry, but I also want to kind of touch on this idea of of resistors and people who are, you know, gonna get on board, you know. Let's say we're talking about the impacted audience. And I've always thought about um an impacted audience as a as a bell curve. You know, you're gonna have your 20% who are your early adopters, they are excited about what's happening, they're gonna be evangelizing the change, they're gonna be out there talking about it, they're really excited about it. Then you got your 20% on the other side who are just never gonna be happy. And sometimes you have to know when to cut your losses with those people. Um it's really that 80% or 60% that's right in the, I guess it's 10% on either side, 10% early adopters, 10%. So you're 80% in the middle, you know, those sometimes are the people that you really have to, you know, I like to to say we're focusing on because they're they're able to be influenced. Sometimes that 10% there there's just sometimes there's nothing you can do, and you have to just kind of manage through that. But yeah, you're I'm I'm targeting sometimes that 80% and then leveraging that 10% who are really out front. How can they be supporters? Um, and how can I have them out front? How can they be change champions? How do we identify them? You know, that's all kind of our our pre-work and analyzing as we come into an organization.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

That that's a great approach. I mean, in my mind, I'm thinking you got to handle that. This is part of I think any point of leadership is you're gonna spend 80% of your time, or I'm gonna go 90% of your time with 10% of the people, that's a wrong approach, right? And so I hadn't really thought about that until you tied this in the change because I I've got within my company some really good galvanizers. Like if I if I can get them going, they're gonna motivate people. And to your point, it's the 80% that is the ones that are gonna be impacted the most. And you're not gonna get everybody, you know that. So I like that. That's a really, really great approach. Uh, you do talk about creating conditions that drive meaningful adoption. I might be stealing that from LinkedIn. Um, what are what are some of those conditions that you're that you're putting into place to help bring about adoption of change?

SPEAKER_01 29:18

Yeah, so um I think that there are a couple of conditions. Number one, uh, we've talked a lot about, you know, preparing leaders to to lead through change. So I think that that one the major condition that um I would reference is just making sure that you have your leadership team aligned about what the change is going to look like and what it's going to mean for employees within the various business areas. So leadership alignment and engagement, I think, is one of them. Um the other one, which I believe is is

Layered Alignment And Handling Resistance

SPEAKER_01 29:56

a lot of times overlooked when we're thinking about change, is preparation of your managers. So it is well known across all industries that people want to hear about change from two people, their direct manager, supervisor, or the CEO. And so they want to hear it at the very top leadership level, and they want to hear it directly from managers. And so often, um, in my experience, we don't prepare those managers well. They don't have the preparation that's needed in order to introduce the change to their teams and be that conduit to say, okay, high level, this is what's changing, but this is what it's going to mean for us. You know, when you're talking about an organization that might have a hundred thousand people at it, you can't essentially from a project perspective, it's it's sometimes impossible to be able to break down your communications to say exactly, you are team A, let's say you are payroll, this is exactly how things are going to be different for you. You are controllers, this is exactly how things are going to be different for you. We depend a lot on managers to be able to make that kind of translation. And so too often I find that there isn't enough time and effort put at the leader at the manager level to allow them to feel supported and educated enough about the change so that they can go and do that translation from you know high-level strategy to this is what it's going to mean to us. And, you know, we put a lot on managers every day. It is it can be very challenging in periods of change for managers to feel like they are supported because they are also going through their own adoption journey as well. And so if they disagree with the change, had they had the opportunity to vocalize that concern so that they can move forward and say, you know, I might not love it. I mean, James, you said this earlier, I might not love it, but I'm gonna get on board. Um, managers too often are just not given the time and the space to be able to prepare themselves in that way personally before they go and talk to their teams.

SPEAKER_00 32:25

So it's kind of uh two two phase. One is you got to get the communication out there, but then also you're identifying some training of skills to make sure everybody at least we were given an opportunity to have the skill to be able to pass it on. Because I think you nailed it. Like if it just comes from the CEO and the and the managers don't support it, it's gonna disappear. If it only comes from the manager, like it does the CEO buy in on this, like there has to be that total alignment, right? Exactly. I've been involved in a couple of in my past organization of some really well done uh change uh things. One specifically was the quality program. Uh I just like how they rolled it out. Like they're they were reintroducing it, changing it to some degree, but we they started with some emails to all teams, you know, blast to all teams. And then uh this is coming up next week, and then there were some you know videos that they had from the CEO from the different levels of management talking about the different portions of it. And so the different videos kind of uh rolled it out. So it was really uh back to your point of like the waterfall schedule of it, but by the time we actually went to put it in place, and then we had the SOPs and the training on it, it in my mind it was so well like they had tried to do the quality program before, uh, and it just never really got off the ground. Total support from leadership, all the way down to the managers are now because we were adding tasks to people on job sites, right? This is we're adding work, and nobody wants to hear that. But seeing that it comes down and then the why behind it, all of those things I think really helped to bring about that adoption. Uh so watching that type of uh change really changes your mindset on how you view change. Like now it's like, hey, you're messing up there. Like that is when you see it work so well, you're like, this is messed up. Like you have got it, we there's a better way to do this.

SPEAKER_01 34:19

Yeah, you're exactly right. And I think that that really kind of goes back to um what we were talking about earlier. You know, employees just aren't gonna put up with it, you know, they're just not anymore, especially when things are done well. Um, anytime afterwards, it's things can kind of pale in comparison, you know. They just there's just an expectation that they're gonna have communications, you're gonna have training,

Conditions That Drive Real Adoption

SPEAKER_01 34:47

whatever the case may be. And don't forget the people who might not be impacted.

SPEAKER_00 34:53

Yeah, that's that we found that to be an important group. So also in LinkedIn, thank you, LinkedIn. Um, you talk about uh challenging common assumptions of communication. Uh, and that was such a broad statement. And I'm like, all right, I want to know what I want to know what you think are common or what not that you think that you know are common assumptions for communication. Like, how do you challenge those? Like what are you seeing with that?

SPEAKER_01 35:18

Yeah, so I think some of the um common conditions that we see is that email is enough. Tell them once and it's gonna be fine. Send them to some training, everything's gonna be great. And those three things are complete fallacy. Um you can't just rely on email if you really want to achieve the business outcome that you were expecting to achieve through the change that you just paid however much for, and you're gonna send one email that you're never gonna see that return on investment. Um, and email is important. Maybe your company is more of a text-based company, but however you're electronically communicating with your team, that's not that's just not enough. There has to be conversations. You have to hear about it from leadership, you've got to be able to hear it from your manager. There has to be conversations. It cannot just be centrally managed, you know, emails or even one video. That it's just it's not gonna cut it in this day and age. I think that the volume of communications is also um important because you have to find, we were just talking about this earlier, culturally, you have to find the right balance. One email on a Friday telling somebody that something's gonna happen on Monday, that's just you can't do that anymore, you know. Um, and another thing that um I think is important is you know, I've seen a lot of corporate communications professionals being asked to um lead to change communications, and you're really kind of talking about a little bit of a different piece because corporate communications is really um a lot about kind of um the corporate mentality and making sure that the organization's reputation is is is in focus when you're when you're communicating. And a lot of times with change communications, you're not gonna be able to send one enterprise message. You have to send multiple messages based upon how the impacts are different by your audience, which is why we do a stakeholder analysis and an impact assessment in our work. Who is impacted and how are they impacted? And so, you know, one broad enterprise-wide communication just not gonna cut it. And um, in my experience, it's been it can sometimes be challenging to work with a corporate communications team because they're it there's change communication is just a little bit of a different piece. Um, and you gotta think more about how do I need it to chunk up these messages so that it's appropriate for the different areas who are impacted. Because if you're saying A to people who are gonna experience B, or if you're saying A and B, does A know that A applies to them and does B know that B applies to them? You know, you gotta sometimes deal with multiple messages. I once did a um change communications or um a workday deployment. Workday is uh an HR tool that's actually pretty popular um across multiple industries these days. And um I think our go live communications, we had like 30 different versions. Like that's a lot to manage. You've got distribution lists to manage, you've got version control. Like that can be that can be intimidating. But the company that I was at, you know, we had 250,000 employees. And so sometimes you just have to deal with the the messiness that is a scary version control because you need to be able to tell people what this change means to them individually.

SPEAKER_00 39:28

Well, you so you bring up a great point, like especially in a large organization like that, change becomes harder, right? Like I I talk about the some of the bigger companies, uh, it's like steering the Titanic, right? Change is different. Like you need to be moving away from that iceberg way before you ever get close to that iceberg, but it also becomes some limiting factors. But I I gotta think like through really good communication, you can you and trust, right? You you're able to bring those kind of changes from senior leadership to the other senior

Why Email-Only Change Messaging Fails

SPEAKER_00 39:59

leadership, you know, down to where it goes. Yeah, because I almost feel like in some cases, you know, people almost kind of give up on it. It's like, well, it's never gonna work, right? Because we're too big. And that's that's a problem too, because then you stop changing, then you stop getting better, then you are gonna stop being effective in whatever it is that that you're doing. But uh yeah, so those you brought up a cut, but specifically on the um common assumptions. I like when you talk about how it's uh you know, like like one form is not enough, you know, and that's you you tagged on a couple of different things, and that's I think vitally important to to to note right now when we talk about communication, is that you know, I I I've I've coached a couple of people, it's like this can't be an email. I need to get a phone call. Okay. And so then they weren't phone call people, they were definitely keyboard warriors. And then, you know, maybe 20, 30 minutes later, I see an email. I'm like, what happened? Well, they didn't answer. I said, but I told you, like, in this case, you need to wait, like, there's steps. You need to wait and have that phone call. And sure enough, the response back from the email was not the what we were trying to communicate. And so there, you have to do it in the right steps, right? Increment at the right time. You know, there's so many people that like to do the one path or the other. You know, I know that we're working on uh defining our internal communications via Teams and then external being through emails. So we're not emailing each other. So we're just working on defining our communication as our organization, but even that requires communication because I don't always have my team's notifications on because I'm typically aware of emails and text, like those are best for me. So finding out how the organization responds, having the right notifications in place also requires like good communication in there and having multi uh things as well. Too, like I've said before, like if I haven't responded to an email in a week, there's zero chance at all I'm gonna respond to your email. Like I I am not the person like three weeks later, it's like, hey, just getting back to you. Uh I saw this email, it's gone, right? So that you'd better have followed up with a phone call or something if it was was important. So those are all really important

How To Reach Julie And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_00 42:10

factors. So well, so as we we begin to wrap up, uh one thing I'd like to do, uh I've got a couple of questions we'll end at the uh we'll end with, but uh, how can people get a hold of Julie? And uh go ahead and uh tell us how we can get a hold of you.

SPEAKER_01 42:23

Yeah, so um you can always find me um on LinkedIn uh under Julie Gall. That's probably the best way to um get in touch with me. Um you also can email me um at any point in time at Julie at meaningfulchangeconsulting.com. But you're probably gonna get me quicker on uh LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_00 42:45

Clear communication. I love that. Because I know like I I've had the other way too. It's like, hey, I message you on LinkedIn. Oh, did you? So so it's just you get as long as you're clear in in how people are looking for stuff. We'll go we'll we'll put those down in the show notes. People always say down. I don't know if my show notes are down or to the side. However that is, we will have uh your contact info uh and for meaningful change uh in there as well. So kind of last final two questions. We've been talking over 40 minutes. Uh you know how it is. Like if you talk for an hour, if you're lucky, if somebody walks away with one thing uh of our conversation, like what of today's conversation do you think is the most important thing for the uh uncommon communicator listeners?

SPEAKER_01 43:27

Yeah, so um I I would want people to um walk away with um, you know, especially those people who are in um a leadership or management or supervisor position to understand the importance, um, the important role that they play when um change is being introduced. And also I would encourage everybody to find their find their strength that if you disagree with the change, there might be a very good reason for it. And be brave and raise your hand and talk about it. There's no need to be aggressive about it, but if you have legitimate concerns about a change and what it's gonna mean to your team, be brave and speak up. Um and go and talk to either your manager or somebody who's involved with the change, get your questions answered so that you can um support your team uh in the change. And maybe there's an impact that somebody missed, you know, not through any faults. Sometimes in larger organizations it just happens, but you know, maybe you know something that the project team or the people who are leading this change effort just didn't know. So I would say be brave and and speak up for your teams.

SPEAKER_00 44:51

Be brave and speak up for your teams. I love that. That is the mission of the Uncommon Communicator. And I didn't even feed that to you. So I love that. We are in direct alignment with that. And then kind of last question is what does the world get wrong about Julie Gull?

SPEAKER_01 45:07

Oh my, about me. Geez, jeez. You were gonna ask about um change management. There's still that um theater person rolling around in there. Um there's definitely times where, and I know everybody um experiences this, where you just you have a day where you gotta just fake it till you make it. And I feel uncommonly lucky that I have a theater background that I can draw from on the days where I just have to fake it till I make it. So hopefully what uh people don't know about me is that I'm still very much interested in um the theater world and performing and directing and being out there. Um sometimes I get to do it in my own job. And hey, I would say that might be another thing for you know people to walk away with, take until you make it is a completely legitimate leadership perspective some days.

SPEAKER_00 46:11

Well, I I appreciate your authentic answer. I know that's not an easy uh question to ask. And uh, you know, we're all faking it, I'll tell you that right now. So that's that's the whole thing. And you know, it even to draw a point from what you just said is having the skill to be able to do that. Like you do have a theater background. You know, I work with an organ, you know, with a group of folks that were always working on our uh impromptu speaking, like that it's in in a lot of ways is faking it, but it's not, it's just a skill. And uh you just have that skill to be able to do that. I really appreciate your authenticity on that. Well, that is all we got for this week's episode of the Uncomic Communicator. Uh, I want to thank you again for uh joining and to all the listeners. See you bye. Congratulations. You made it all the way to the end. You're physically a one percenter. Thanks for tuning in the fifth episode of the Uncomic Communicator with me. You're hosting. Make sure you like and share this episode. Spread the message of communication for the world. Check out our website, the endcomic communicator, for more.