Managing change: 3 strategies to avoid a tech transformation tailspin

During a recent presentation at the ENGAGE CFO Strategy & Innovation Summit in Poland, AssuredPartners Aerospace CFO Kristine Lemanski, CPA, CGMA, shared how her team is facing three simultaneous technology transformations.

She also shared how experts estimate that two out of three technology transformations fail.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that those numbers won’t fly with leadership.

“We know we have to change. We know that change is necessary for growth, to stay competitive in business. We also know that our employees really don’t like it,” Lemanski said. “So what do we do?”

Lemanski is on a mission to take what she has successfully applied in her role and use it to help others succeed.

She also quoted another set of study findings: Companies that make the investment to deploy solid change management tactics are seven times more likely to succeed than companies that do not.

“In my opinion, effective leadership and change leadership are synonymous,” Lemanski said. “Effective leadership requires strong emotional intelligence, strong communication skills.”

What does Lemanski suggest that change management leaders communicate to their teams?

Reassure them

When the technology transformation features generative AI tools — as it increasingly does — the challenge for change managers only increases.

“I would say the overwhelming emotion in my experience and in some of my colleagues’ experience has to do with fear, particularly around generative AI,” Lemanski said. “‘Is gen AI going to take my job? Is this new system going to put me out of work? What if I can’t learn this software? What if I lose my job? How am I going to pay my bills? What if I can’t find another job?’

“I promise you, you have members of your team that are dealing with that level of anxiety every day, throughout the entire transformation. It is our job as leaders to get them through anxieties.”

Even if employees aren’t voicing concerns, leaders can voice reassurance about the role that generative AI will play — and how it will or will not affect team members’ roles.

“AI is a tool, not a replacement,” Lemanski said. “That message becomes so important as we go through all of our change.”

Reason with them

New technology continues to have an impact on employees, and that change can be difficult to deal with initially.

“We cannot stop this change from coming. That’s probably what our employees want. We can’t do that,” Lemanski said. “But we can lead, guide, coach, and mentor them through that change so that they can focus on what they’re gaining.”

One of Assured Partners’ three tech transformations is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation across all departments that will create one common system. That sounds great for the business, but it might not sound as great to individual teams accustomed to their current ERP.

“As we’re going through that, one of the things that goes away for us is the manual entering of journal entries, which is not a particularly value-added activity,” Lemanski said. “So I focus a lot on that: ‘Think what you can do with your time when you’re not keying in 15 journal entries a day.’

“We’re advocates. If I am not a positive change advocate for all three [tech transformations], my employees are probably not going to get onboard and be positive about it, either. It is very important that we advocate for this change and speak up for what we’re going to gain.”

Ready them

While keeping your team in the right frame of mind during tech transformations with words that resonate is important, actions always speak louder than words.

Encouragement during tech transformations is important, but so is giving teams the tools they need to succeed.

“I think we all start out with excellent intentions for being ready to train our staff,” Lemanski said. “Then as we go through the transformation, change fatigue is real. We’ve worked our way through and we’re still developing the system, and things may not have gone quite as we initially planned.

“We’re to the end, and we just want to get the thing live. We just want to move on.”

Moving on without fully training those responsible for tech implementation is a recipe for disaster. Making sure that doesn’t happen, Lemanski said, requires persistence.

“I’m not exactly shy, and so I am a ‘loud and often’ advocate for training,” she said. “Explain to leadership, explain to the technology team, that we need training.

“In that change fatigue and in that system design frustration, we’ve forgotten about the main tactic that’s going to make it successful, which is our people.”

— To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Bryan Strickland at Bryan.Strickland@aicpa-cima.com.