Massimo Acquaviva, 2R Capital Investment: How to Manage a Team Through Change
- Danielle Trigg
- Apr 1
- 3 min read
Massimo Acquaviva, 2R Capital InvestmentĀ Management Limited co-founder and co-CEO, is an experienced business leader with a particular interest in talent acquisition and retention. This article will look at change management and how great business leaders remain calm in the face of uncertainty, helping teams to negotiate change and recognise the benefits and opportunities.
Managing teams can be challenging even at the best of times. When a lot of change is happening, it becomes even harder. When a person does not know what is going to happen, they cannot mentally prepare themselves or plan to adapt or learn. For many people, fear of the unknown is often much worse than change itself.
To counter this, leadership teams need to communicate to the workforce when change is coming, giving staff a clear overview of what is happening as early as possible. They must give team members ample time to reflect, providing them with opportunities to ask questions and gain a better grasp of what business changes may mean for them personally. Communicating what is happening in advance of change provides employees with time to mentally prepare and start working out what change will mean for them personally and what they will need to do to adapt.
Leadership teams can communicate changes with team members via a range of different conduits, including team meetings, memos, emails and one-to-one meetings with individual team members. The latter mode of communication can be particularly beneficial, particularly where leaders encourage team members to ask questions, answering those questions as honesty as possible. Communication styles can be adapted to meet the individual needs of different team members, delivering information in the most appropriate format for them. To manage change effectively, leaders must communicate clearly, openly and regularly.
In terms of managing change, it is important to never lose sight of the āwhyā. Humans are not computers that process information in a neutral way. Rather, people are emotional creatures, and even the most rationally minded have an instinctive emotional reaction to change. Humans have an instinctive need to know why something is happening, particularly where this involves fundamental changes to everyday life. It is for this reason that the āwhyā is even more important than the āwhatā, placing the onus on business leaders to explain the reasons behind the change to ensure everyone is on the same page.
One great way of conveying the why and tapping into positive emotions is to give the team a story they can get behind about why the change is happening. Although facts and figures may satisfy their logical side, their emotional side needs a vision of what the future might look like that goes beyond numbers.
Business leaders should pay special attention to the behaviour of team members to identify those who may be particularly fearful or resistant to change. To ensure they are getting their positive, optimistic vision of the future across to staff, leaders need to be aware of potential roadblocks, assuaging team membersā doubts about what is happening to ensure a smooth transition. Regular updates are integral to putting the team at ease, even during periods when not much is happening.
For change to be successful and accepted within the business, leadership and people managers must approach teams with the same language and messaging. It is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that everyone is aligned around a particular message, only to discover later on that members of the leadership team have conveyed the message in a different way, leading to confusion and mixed messaging. It is crucial that leaders maintains a consistent tone, adopting the same language to address the change and spreading positivity to encourage alignment.
