Are you building the boardwalk?
A boardwalk is a strange piece of construction if you think about it. It sits between the beach and the town behind it, existing purely to help people cross the in-between part, the part with no clear ground, without sinking into the sand.
That's a lot like what change management looks like. Years ago, I led a team through a reorg. From where I sat at the time, it was hard to see how that change was going to go inside of the organization.
There were so many questions and almost no answers. People wanted to know what their role would look like, and whether their project still mattered. I didn't have most of those answers either. It was a hard stretch as a leader.
The space between land and ocean
That's what a reorg feels like for the people living through it. The old structure is gone. The new one hasn't fully solidified yet. Everyone's walking across sand that shifts under their feet, and the job of a leader in that stretch is staying honest about that, rather than projecting a steadiness that isn't really there yet.
The job is to build the boardwalk. Give people something to stand on even while the landscape around them keeps moving. Start with what you know, then admit where the gaps still are. People can handle uncertainty. What erodes trust is pretending you have it all figured out when you don't.
Looking back, the moment that helped my team most was getting clear with them. I told them plainly that we didn't have the answers, and we weren't going to get the answers we wanted anytime soon. It would be our job to fill in the blanks ourselves. We might get some of it wrong, and we'd adjust as we went. The one thing that mattered was finding a way to keep moving forward.
For my team specifically, that meant blocking out the noise and continuing to do the work the way we always had with some small modifications, because in either structure, that work was still going to be needed. That was the boardwalk, something solid enough to keep people moving forward instead of stuck in the sand.
This Week's Challenge
Where in your own leadership have you been waiting for solid ground before acting, when what people really need is just a boardwalk to stand on today?
Here's to building something to stand on, even before you know exactly where the path leads,
Jena