How to Bring Tenured Employees Along with Change
One of the most challenging aspects of people management in a startup is bringing tenured employees along with big changes as the company evolves through growth or a pivot. This is especially challenging when the company is growing since new employees come in with new ideas, which can make tenured employees feel threatened and that the work they’ve done so far is inadequate.
Tenured employees who do not adapt to change are often very influential and drag down the team while being very unhappy themselves. Being more successful in bringing tenured employees along with change reduces thrash, lessens attrition, and keeps employees with context about the company and culture around to help the company thrive into the future.
The good news is that by consistently using these three strategies you can bring tenured employees along and reduce the associated thrash in your teams better than 90% of leaders out there:
Value Their Contributions
Focus on the Future Starting With “Why”
Have In-or-Out Conversations
I’ll explain each of these three strategies below.
Value Their Contributions
Tenured employees have invested time and energy into the company and they want to feel valued. Acknowledging their contributions and letting them know that their work has been essential to the company's success is the first step to helping them adapt to company changes.
Without taking care in bringing tenured employees along, change can feel like a devaluation of the work that’s already been done. When an employee has poured their time and effort into developing a system or product it can really sting when that system or product needs to be deprecated or overhauled — funnily enough this can be true even if the employee themself was the first to notice their work needs to be deprecated or overhauled. It can feel to the employee like the fact that what they’ve built needs to change means they did it wrong originally. This is exacerbated by new employees implying or outright saying things like “we need to fix this” or “this is broken” or even “this is totally fucked up.” Hearing things like this puts tenured employees into a defensive position and keeps them closed off from change.
The truth is, what tenured employees have built is not broken. It’s exactly what the company needed to get to the current level of success. Every decision that was made in the past got the company to the point where you were able to scale and bring in new employees. Or in the case of a pivot, every decision that was made helped you learn about what you eventually needed to pivot into. Every system that was built without future considerations in mind was because the people who built it didn’t know the future. Every feature that was not built for 10x scale was made that way to get the feature out to the market quickly. This is the mindset you need to adopt and help tenured employees adopt in order for them to feel truly valued and open them up to the necessary company changes.
When I joined Airbnb in 2014, the company had grown significantly since it started in 2008 and a lot of engineers complained about how our main Ruby on Rails codebase (we called this “Monorail”) had a lot of technical debt and was difficult to work in. A staff level engineer on my team told me that he had a different view. He said that Monorail is beautiful because it facilitates millions of people every year staying in bespoke accommodations and it’s printing money for the company. That point of view has always stuck with me. Without Monorail existing as it does, we wouldn’t be in this incredible point of success with the opportunity to have even more.
We know acknowledging past contributions is important since we do it in goodbye emails for employees who leave the company. What leaders don’t do enough of is acknowledging past contributions for employees who are being asked to adapt to and support company changes.
Focus on the Future Starting With “Why”
Once you’ve valued the past, you can then focus on what needs to change today to support the future. Making the distinction between past and future really clear is key to help tenured employees not feel defensive.
A simple format to do this is:
Talk about where we were
Talk about all the great work we did to get us from where we were to where we are now
Talk about where we need to go
Talk about what what we’ll need to do to get us there including changes we need to make
It’s important to spend time laying out the “why” of the changes being introduced. Make it clear why these changes are what the company and team needs in order to have a successful future. Remind people of the “why” every time you talk about the changes. This “why” may seem obvious to you as a leader since you’ve spent a month or more analyzing the new conditions/realities that require change in your team’s products or operating model. Employees on your team haven’t been part of this process. Even when they’ve been told the “why,” they need time to adjust to it. This is the adjustment time you received automatically when you were determining or collaborating on the new direction.
Where appropriate, you can pull in employees on your team to collaborate on elements of the change. Maybe the company pivot was set by the CEO with feedback from the executive team, though the details on how to pivot successfully can often have input or even be led by employees further down in the org chart. If the change being introduced is a new internal process to support a growing team, it can be helpful to state that this new process isn’t permanent, that it won’t be perfect, and that you’ll be iterating on it based on feedback on how well it’s working. When doing all this, make it clear which decisions are totally set for now so they don’t expect those set decisions to change.
Have In-or-Out Conversations
Using the two strategies above you can bring a lot more tenured employees along with change. Though in a large enough organization you’ll still likely find that a few employees are still very resistant to change. This resistance can be for many reasons including burn out, inability to make the mental shift from the past, genuine dislike of the new company mission or strategy after a pivot, or they simply prefer working at smaller companies than the size your company has grown to.
It's important to remember that not every tenured employee will be able to adapt to the specific changes the company is going through. Some employees may decide to leave the company on their own. And that’s ok! For employees who only really like working at small startups, the irony is that a big part of their job is to grow the company to become a place where they no longer want to work. No matter how much you preserve the culture of a company as it grows, when it becomes 5-10x the size it will not be the same place anymore.
When an employee is unwilling or unable to make the shift from the past and to focus on what the company needs from them now, they usually become very unhappy at work which is really bad for them and usually affects the rest of their team in a significant way.
Some employees who are unhappy about the company changes can get into a very negative headspace where they start complaining about everything — often in contradictory ways where one week they are complaining about one thing and the next week they are complaining about the opposite. This negative energy reverberates through the company stressing out other employees and slowing them down.
A common pattern I’ve seen on teams I’ve led and the teams of the executives I coach is that it can feel like a large proportion of the team is unhappy with a new direction, but when you get to actually analyzing the specifics you find it’s just one or two really loud and unhappy tenured employees.
When this happens it’s important to have a clear in-or-out conversation with each employee. In this conversation, make sure to value them and the work they’ve done, reiterate why and how the company has changed, and make it clear how their behaviors have been negatively affecting their performance and/or the team’s performance. Then make it clear that the company needs them to get onboard with the changes or it’s not the right mutual fit anymore. It’s also important to let them know that it’s totally ok if this isn’t the right fit anymore. Things change in companies, work, and life. Holding onto a past that is no longer there is not helping anyone.
I know from personal experience that these are hard conversations to have as a manager, but always results in eventual relief both from me and the employee. An employee being unhappy in their role and resisting inevitable change is one of the quickest ways for them to massively decrease their quality of life. Having these in-or-out conversations is the best thing you can do for an employee when they are in this situation.
For more information on how to have successful underperformance conversations, see this article.
Applying the Strategies Consistently
Using the three strategies of value their contributions, focus on the future starting with “why,” and have in-or-out conversations is something that needs to be done consistently to affect the most change.
Anytime you see a tenured employee get defensive about what they’ve built, think of ways you can value their work publicly and privately.
Whenever an employee is complaining about change, remind them of the “why” behind the change.
Always be on the lookout for when employees are beginning to get into a negative headspace so you can spend time with them before it gets to the point where an in-or-out conversation is necessary.
And when an employee is really unhappy with changes, help them face reality with an in-or-out conversation so they can either find a way to get motivated to adjust to the changes or find a place they’ll enjoy working at.
Insight and Action
What are the 1-3 biggest insights you got from this article?
What’s a change you’ve made recently that some team members are not adjusting to quickly enough? What can you use from this article to help bring them along?
Is there an employee on your team who it’s time to have an in-or-out conversation with?
How will you use the strategies of value their contributions, focus on the future starting with “why,” and have in-or-out conversations on the next big change you roll out?
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P.S. I help founders and technical leaders thrive while scaling their companies and teams through hypergrowth. I also coach successful individuals in their late 30’s and early 40’s who have reached a plateau and want to feel more alive again in work and life. If one of those sounds like you, send me an email at kevin@kevinricecoaching.com.