“Things aren’t the same around here anymore.  It’s not the organization it used to be.”  

If you’re leading your organization through a critical change, you’ve likely heard some iteration of this lament.  Employees can push hard against change, particularly transitions that seem to cut at their core ideas of what the organization stands for.  They begin to question whether the organization is still the right place for them.  This doubt and hesitation can slow the speed of change – just at the time that you need to accelerate it.

What could be driving this resistance?  And what can you do about it?

It could be that employees are having a bit of a work identity crisis — a questioning of whether one still belongs or has a place in the organization.  After all, organizations are social constructs where roles, relationships, and responsibilities can define us.  Stories and shared memories signal what matters in the organization.  When organizational guideposts and signals begin to shift, employees can feel more than a bit lost.

In these cases, employees need to be re-membered.  That’s not a typo.  Re-membering is prompting employees to choose to renew their membership in and commitment to the organization, its mission, and its values.  It’s connecting old stories to new opportunities and thereby helping employees reconnect with the organization.  Suddaby, Foster, and Trank¹ wrote about the power of re-membering as a persuasion tactic in organizations.

Here’s an example: 

A large, global chemical manufacturer transitioned its catalysts business unit into a wholly owned subsidiary in advance of a complete divestiture.  Not surprisingly, announcement of the carve-out was met with employee concern.  Leaders looked to a particular period of the enterprise’s history, prior to numerous mergers and corporate restructures, when catalysts operations were the core business of the company.  By using stories of the past and drawing on the business unit’s enduring capability in chemical engineering, leaders were able to show employees that operating independently was an opportunity to reconnect to the unit’s original key differentiator while being responsive to current customer demands.

How can you incorporate re-membering into your overall leader messaging during transformation?

• Name the organization’s enduring identity. Consider the organization’s stories and rituals along with its operational capabilities and strengths to uncover that enduring organizational identity with which employees connect.

• Frame the connection between that identity and the current change journey. Weave relevant elements of the organization’s stories and traditions into how and why the current change is the right one.  Acknowledge what is changing – business priorities, strategies, and tactics – as well as what isn’t – the organization’s core mission and values.
• Claim the new future that employees can create together by inviting them to embrace new ways of working while still honoring the substance of what the organization is all about. Re-work – but don’t abandon – traditions and rituals to align to where the organization is going.

Of course, re-membering isn’t appropriate for every change.  Truly revolutionary transformation may call for uprooting the organization’s collective identity and employees’ association with obsolete traditions.  But in the right context and when done well, re-membering can be a powerful tool for leveraging employees’ connections to the past to demonstrate why the current change makes sense.

Always learning,
Dr. Melanie

¹Suddaby, R., Foster, W, and Trank, C. Q. (2014) Organizational re-membering: Rhetorical history as identity work. In M. Pratt, M. Schultz, B. Ashforth, and D. Ravisi (Eds.) Oxford Handbook of Organizational Identity, 297-316