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If an organization is structured like a rainforest ecosystem, it will have already built in internal resilience to withstand unexpected events, such as the board of directors firing the CEO or other executives.
That’s exactly what happened at my previous company: The board of a medical clinic company asked me to step in as interim CEO to prevent a mass exodus of doctors and nurses. My job was to rebuild trust between management and staff to allow the ecosystem to thrive.
Because physicians and nurses have high hiring potential, the uncertainty of losing executives all at once did little to deter them.As a Senior Director responsible for supporting and managing the HR department for over 50 clinics, I was in an ideal position to help, as the challenge at hand was talent retention.
I showed everyone how important they are to the clinic and the community they serve. In return, I asked my executives to take a step back while I rebuilt these relationships. Throughout this nine-month process, I was made painfully aware of our interdependence. Ecosystems are built on teams that rely on each other, and this is a powerful analogy for effective change management. After all, there are no silos in the rainforest.
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Who are you? The sea or the forest?
At my current company, we recently introduced the idea of an ecosystem in a video presentation at an all-hands meeting about how our departments interact, and it was a big hit. The marketing team has also used this analogy externally to show the different touchpoints in the customer experience and how they support each other.
Participants were excited to realize that their departments embodied characteristics of the Earth (HR), the ocean (Technology), the plains (Marketing), and the mountains (Enterprise Sales). Customer support was likened to a chaotic jungle where you never know what the next call you receive will bring, which sparked much laughter.
What we really wanted to highlight is that in order to thrive, all individuals must work together, connect with others, and build lasting bonds. Similarly, nurturing this interdependence can increase resilience. If you look at rainforests, they continue to thrive even when depleted because they are constantly regenerating from within. Similarly, as a business grows, departments can become overwhelmed, but seeing ourselves as interdependent allows us to collectively tackle the biggest disruptor to ecosystems: change.
The “why” behind change management
In an ecosystem, nothing happens in a vacuum. If a major change is needed in one department, we bring all the key stakeholders together to understand how that change will impact all other departments. If the change is too burdensome for that department, we ask other members of the ecosystem to support the change.
HR’s role as a stakeholder is to ensure the “why” behind change is explained. I have seen change management fail when this isn’t done. The verticals, strategic plans, and quarterly targets may all be in place, but people need to know how their actions lead to desired business outcomes. Otherwise, they feel disconnected from the ecosystem.
We provide software solutions in the wellness space, and delivering real value to our customers requires close collaboration between marketing, technology, sales, support, and HR. If our “purpose” is to help independents, mid-size businesses, and large enterprises, the people in the field will be fully on board when they realize that their advice may be taken as truth by customers. And that positive motivation permeates the entire ecosystem.
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Benchmarking Best Practices
Once HR has determined the “why” of the change, they should ask if they need more resources, staff, or training before implementing it. But ecosystems are teeming with life, and HR doesn’t always need to look outside the company. We partnered with LinkedIn’s AI solutions to bring together an individual’s experience, education, goals, and job description to uncover “hidden talent.” Often, they find that people with the necessary skill sets are already within their ecosystem.
Next, you need to benchmark best practices, which fall into three categories:
- If you have successfully managed this type of change in the past, document it and aim to refine your process to make it even better.
- If you’ve failed in the past, find out what went wrong and do a root cause analysis to avoid falling into the same trap (e.g., just because you once spent $1 million on marketing and acquired 10,000 new customers doesn’t mean that spending $2 million will double your profits).
- If this is an entirely new change, compare it to other organizations that have made the same change before.
Make sure your benchmarking involves all the right stakeholders. Just as fire, drought, and deforestation can devastate ecosystems, external pressures can expose disconnects between departments and functions. For an ecosystem to take advantage of change, all components need to work together in harmony.
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Adapt together, thrive together
There are two types of change management: change that can be planned and managed, and change that sometimes must be made quickly in response to a crisis. When the board of directors fired a C-level executive in a previous role, I learned that even desperate situations can be salvaged, and that prevention is a much better approach.
An ecosystem is a good analogy for keeping teams connected and fostering a community culture where no one operates in isolation.
As a customer experience person (representing the underground layer of the ecosystem) said in the video, “We rely heavily on customer success, marketing, engineering, and all key stakeholders to continuously improve the solution through an iterative, user-centric approach.” Organizations can best adapt to changes in a thriving ecosystem if everyone is aware of the impact.
