Several years ago, an executive expressed disappointment that an exciting global change initiative had somehow backfired across his company. His new concern was the now surprising negative atmosphere in the organisation. He still believed the changes were necessary but in hindsight expressed, “I just think there could have been a better way to go about it.”

I had been watching this from a distance for a while and was not terribly surprised. From the outside looking in, it seemed as if there was a small pool of people sitting in an ivory tower firing off “business decisions” without much awareness or sensitivity to how those decisions would affect the people on the ground.

I think it is easy to sometimes get so excited about the changes we want to make that we fail to implement our changes well, especially at a human level.

We forget that companies are made up of people. People have emotions. They get hurt. They become afraid. It is normal human behaviour to begin to circle the wagons to protect oneself. Suddenly those people who didn’t seem to matter as much as the latest change management initiative or the bottom-line start to feel unheard, misunderstood, uncared for, demotivated, or worse. When we lose sight that every business is actually a people business, it is only a matter of time before the atmosphere sours.

Of course, the ideal state would be to envisage change and then take the time to think through how to implement the change at an emotional level. But this is often not the case.

The second best option would be to get started and realise mid-stream that our implementation may have lacked sufficient human understanding. This at least affords us a chance to tweak our implementation plan without affecting culture.

But, when we fail to realise that our implementation lacks human understanding early enough, it can become like a dam breaking. Frankly, it is hard to rebuild a dam once it’s broken and water is pouring through at full throttle!

The sad thing is that I hear this story frequently. A company’s leadership decides to go “in a new direction,” but implements the change with a less-than-adequate appreciation of emotional intelligence and how the people in the company will feel about and respond to the change. In the real world where businesses involve people, change management is never only about the “what” we want to change. “How” we implement the change matters as much, if not more, than the change itself.

What changes are you trying to implement?

Have you given as much consideration to the human factor as you have to the change itself?