7.4 The Role of Local Leadership in Change

Local leadership — line leaders and middle management — is the layer change must pass through to reach the people doing the work. CM3 is blunt about what happens when it does not: failing to engage this key group fully with the change vision can create an inert and highly absorbent blockage to change.

That phrase is worth sitting with. An unengaged middle management layer does not usually oppose a change openly. It absorbs it — messages go in and nothing comes out, questions are met with "I'll find out", and the change quietly stops at that level while every status report shows it cascading successfully.

How to engage local leaders

CM3's advice:

• Involve line leaders early
• Help them understand the need for change by giving privileged access to the thinking that has led to the change
• Invite their help in making proposed changes practical. Show willingness to respond to their concerns and critiques
• Communicate copiously with this key layer

Privileged access to the thinking is the phrase to notice. It is not simply telling line leaders earlier; it is letting them see the reasoning, the options considered and the trade-offs made. That does two things: it equips them to answer the questions their teams will ask, and it treats them as participants rather than a distribution channel — which is what determines whether they engage.

Inviting their help in making changes practical is the co-design principle applied to this layer. Line leaders know things about operational reality that no design team does, and asking them makes the change better as well as making them owners of it.

Why communicating copiously with this layer matters

Communicating copiously with line leaders enables them to ensure great communication to their own people. CM3 explains the mechanism with a striking statistic: words themselves make up only around 7 per cent of the message, so it is the tone of voice, body language and ultimately the actions leaders take that send a much stronger signal about the type of behaviour that will be rewarded.

The consequence: "When a leader says that the change is important but is then unable to answer any questions about it, you can almost hear the change momentum grinding to a halt."

A line leader who has not been briefed properly cannot fake it. Their uncertainty shows in the 93 per cent of the message they do not control, and their team reads it accurately. This is why under-briefing middle management is so much more damaging than it appears — you have not merely failed to inform them, you have equipped them to broadcast doubt.

Hiatt and Creasey: the two sources

The ability of middle management to communicate credibly and directly to their people is critical. Hiatt and Creasey (2012) make the point that people faced with organisational change need to hear about it from two quite distinct sources, each carrying different content:

This is one of the most examinable and most practically useful items in the syllabus, because the two sources are so often used the wrong way round. A CEO who tries to reassure individuals about their personal futures lacks the credibility to do it — they do not know the individual's circumstances. A line manager who explains market strategy is stepping outside what their team looks to them for.

The practical rule for a change communications plan: strategic 'why' messages come from the top; personal 'what does this mean for me' messages come from the immediate supervisor. Both are required. A change with only executive communication leaves everyone knowing the strategy and nobody knowing what happens to their job; a change with only local communication leaves people managing personal impact without any sense of why it is worth it.

Schein's primary embedding mechanisms

People look at the way their leaders react to a situation to decide how they themselves will behave, so leadership levers can be swift and powerful when applied in the right way consistently.

Edgar Schein (2016) uses the concept of primary embedding mechanisms that leaders use to send non-verbal messages about beliefs, values and assumptions to their team. These include:

• How they spend their time
• How they react to problems
• How they allocate resources
• How they reward or penalise team members

All four are behavioural rather than verbal, and all four are constantly observed. A leader who says quality matters and then reacts to a quality problem by asking about the schedule has communicated their real priority far more powerfully than any statement could.

For a change manager, these mechanisms are both a diagnostic and an intervention. As a diagnostic, they tell you what leaders actually believe regardless of what they say — watch where their time goes. As an intervention, they are the concrete asks that make role modelling real: attend this session personally, respond to the first failure by asking what we learned, protect this resource, recognise the team that adopted first.