How to Get Company-Wide Support During a Pivot

Pivoting can be one of the most stressful times of the journey of a company. It requires humility, communication and strategy to get through. Otherwise, your company will find itself wandering through a wilderness without vision, purpose or mission.

The effects of pivoting are real, substantial and difficult to acknowledge. When someone doesn’t know how to run a company well, it may seem like the only way out.

Other times, there are serious problems with the product itself. In these cases, there is no amount of pivoting that will fix your situation. Only changes. You’ll have to deal with deep consequences while digging yourself out of a dangerous hole.

So, when is pivoting a good solution? When you give 110% and still don’t seeing results.

The struggle is in the timing.

When do you exactly pivot?

Plus, pivoting can become a huge problem if you don’t handle it well. Alternatively, a well-executed pivot could completely transform your business and life.

A lot of times, brands get reinvigorated into forming something new and unique.

Once you’ve convinced yourself of this process, you still need to convince your team. Unfortunately, you may find gaining their support to be one of the biggest obstacles yet.

This is because people are resistant to change in general. They may be averse to taking big risks and following on a course that could lead them to greater heights. It also tests their abilities to change courses and analyse the best path towards where they can go.

Make it clear

Therefore, getting your team on-board for you pivot is important. When you can get them motivated to take a different path, you need to be clean in your communication. Typically, a pivot is associated with poor management or strategic vision. This is made even more apparent when a company goes through a string of failures that everyone is aware of.

You need to make sure that you are clear in your communication and you offer the best knowledge that you can to your employees. This involved being humble and letting your ego be out the door, so that you can be transparent about your mistakes and talk about where you’re headed freely and openly.

Take their feedback

It's important to ask them about what they feel is the right course of action as well. It's always a good idea to get their insights first-hand because they are working so closely with the clients. Be it tech issues, or customer service, they have insights that you don’t. So it’s a good idea to talk to them about the transition and to prepare meetings that connect everyone towards the same goal.

When you have an open dialogue with your team about the transition, it's important to be supportive and listening to their concerns. Sometimes one or two of them will air out grievances that were long-standing and you need to let them finish their point with clarity and consistency. You need to listen to them without judgement and ensure that you have a clear path towards bringing them on-page with everything.

Ask them questions

Talk to them about the next steps and ask them if they have any questions. If they’re unable to ask any, it means that you haven’t done a great job communicating the message. It's important to talk to them and to ask them questions to fully gauge if they’ve gotten the right message. Essentially you are changing the way business is done, and it requires the right set of questions and answers to be able to fully understand what is needed from them.

Whether that’s layoffs or new hires, the team must be on-board with all that’s going to happen and ensure that everything runs smoothly. Line managers must also be asked questions to ensure that they’re all aware of what is going to happen.

Start with the leadership

When you’re trying to pivot to a new industry, product or customer demographic it's important to get the leadership of the company involved early. When you understand that information travels fast in an organization, then you need to start fast before the message goes out of control. This is also important for when you are trying to gain the benefit of doubt and talk to your employees directly instead of hearing it as gossip.

When you start with the leadership team first, you can get a better sense of how the troops will react to the news that they will be working on something completely new. This is also in-effect, the simplest way to get the message out there. You should let the managers talk transparently about the new transition and then shoot a video and a memo out to your employees about what you’re about to do.

Insight-focused approach

The most confusing part about a pivot is how to best communicate it to the team. You should start off with an insight-focused approach which talks about how a unique insight gave you the strategic overview to look out for newer opportunities.

Whether that’s the core offering or just a sales-tweak, its helpful to know about what insight made you go ahead with the new course of action. When you put yourself in the shoes of the employees, you can truly understand how an insight or two can change the way they think about it all.

Talking about your industry insights helps them be at ease and be on the lookout for more insights that can aid the company. If it’s a good opportunity to have, then they’ll stay on board, more so because you, the CEO, is an insightful person who has done all the research necessary to reach this conclusion. Otherwise, you’re not going to get a lot of support and may even see attrition across the board.

Conclusion

It's important to have team support when conducting a pivoting activity. You not only have a larger team size at the end of the change, but your team members are re-energized to go towards greener pastures.