What do you do when people say: “this is not the company I joined”?

This is something you hear quite often when you are taking a company through a transformation.  Leaders don’t always hear it because it sounds disloyal. It’s usually said privately and often before people start to think about leaving. 

It’s generally said by people who have been with the company a while and often have a strong sense of loyalty to the team they joined, even when they cans see that what is happening makes sense and is the right thing to do. 

Rule One of a successful transformation is to change a small number of big things and to leave everything else alone.  Change puts people into a threat state (even those who tell you they love change and thrive on it).  They mean what they say, but there’s an ancient part of their brain that tells them the opposite. 

In any transformation there will always be some people who genuinely don’t fit and both they and the company should go their separate ways for the good of both (make sure the leaving is decently managed).  It’s usually a fairly small number; letting it become a large number will endanger performance and undermine morale..

The ones who do a great job but are beginning to feel “maybe I’m not wanted here”, need to be tended carefully.  These are useful things to think about doing:

1. What you are doing with on-boarding new people. A lot of effort will be going into that. Can you adapt that process to re-onboard people who have been there a while.
2. Ask the longer-term employees to buddy with the incoming staff. Having to explain your company can embed a sense of pride.
3. Make sure the longer-term employees don’t feel side-lined. Celebrate them as well as the incomers.
4. Don’t assume that because some people have been with you for a while that they understand how the company works now.

This takes thought and some effort.  It may save you from losing some great people.