Further Resources

Title: Shifting Identities There’s a moment in nearly every transformation when people stop talking about KPIs and start asking, “Who are we now?” Because that question — plain, piercing and unavoidable — is the psychological in the heart of change. Organizations are not just buildings with spreadsheets; they are living, breathing ensembles of identities. When you futz with strategy, process or leadership, you are nudging that assemblage. And if you ignore the… tugging and pulling under the surface, the results tend to get all over. Let me cut to the chase: change programmes which fail to address identity are costly theatre. Wonderful slides, but it’s a bad reality! And yet leaders continue to fall into the trap — roll out a shiny new reporting line, expect immediate buy-in and then marvel at why morale drops and resistance strengthens. It isn’t incompetence so much as a blind spot. And it’s fixable. Why identity matters (and why most plans underestimate it) Organisational identity plays the role of both compass and ballast. It gives people a sense of where the organisation thinks it’s going to go and it steady behaviour in turbulent times. Change menaces both the compass and ballast. All of a sudden, people have to square “what we are” and “what we’re becoming”. Unpopular opinion #2, up front: - That pushing harder is how you speed up change (it’s often not; slowing down to do identity work speeds it dramatically) Controversial? Sure. True? Also yes. - Occasionally hiring for cultural fit — yes, right, fit not just creepy over-familiar chumminess or divisive homophily! — is better than bringing in the perfect technical plug-in. Skills can be trained; identity alignment is more difficult to retrofit. A lot of HR teams won’t like that, but it’s something I’ve seen time and time again. Identity is not static. It’s hammered out day by day in exchanges, between leadership and its teams, corporate storylines and the little rituals of work. When those stories fail — when the mission statement gets up and walks away from reality — employees experience cognitive dissonance. They tune out, become less cooperative. Gallup’s research has long shown the business case for engagement: Business units with highly engaged employees experience, on average, 21% greater profitability. That’s not some HR-nurtured fluff stat; it’s commercial fact. If identity work is improving engagement, it’s a price worth paying. The psychology of identity in transition Employees respond to change psychologically, not by project milestone. Step 1 is threat appraisal: Is this change a threat to my role, my status, my values? Anxiety spikes. Then you look for cues — what is the reporting out there, what do senior leaders say, what are peers doing, which stories start to spread in the tea room? In the end, people choose: resist, tolerate, adapt or champion. The organisational identity operates as a filter over all of these stages. If the change seems to employees like congruent with core identity, they are more likely to move through anxiety to adaptation. If the change feels discordant — if the new direction goes against what people thought the organisation stood for — resistance ensues. And not the type you can always talk away with better slides. It can be useful to think about identity as having three layers: - ‘Declarative identity’ – the words on your website, the mission statements, the speech of the CEO - ‘Perceived identity’ – what employees actually believe this organisation is in practice. - ‘Enacted identity’ – how people feel able or willing to behave day-to-day. Historical moments of change typically aim to address declarative identity first; and yet they presuppose that perceived (and enacted) identity will follow. That loss of coherence is a frequent cause of failure. The tricky role of leadership Whether they want to be or not, leaders are identity architects. Their decisions, language and overt priorities broadcast — loudly — what the organisation prizes most. When leaders preach innovation but reward risk aversion, they foster identity confusion. Good leadership during identity shifts isn’t just about finding better messaging. It’s about matching incentives, rituals and structures to the new identity. It’s tactical: promotion criteria, recognition programs, who gets airtime in town halls. These are the levers that turn abstract identity talk into everyday reality. Leaders must also endure, cope with and manage emotion.” To a lot of exec teams, emotion is noise — something to flatten out with more process. That’s short-sighted. Emotion contains information. Signals of anxiety locate the site of most pressing identity boundaries. Anger can indicate perceived betrayal. Curiosity indicates where people are willing to experiment. Read those signals and react—don’t ignore them. Strategies that actually work Here are practical ways in which I’ve seen change initiatives shift from “rolled out” to owned”. 1. Understand the map before you go out Ask yourself a quick diagnostic: what do employees say is the organisation’s identity? Do focus groups, pulse surveys and ethnography for a week. Map discrepancies between known and perceived identity. Work of this kind costs next to nothing, and teaches us everything. 2. Narratives are infrastructures Stories count. Develop micro-narratives that link the new strategy with the organisation’s history of success and its proud traditions. Don’t dream up slogans; come upon authentic stories about human beings living the new direction. Stories that have a ring of truth in them get told again, and one way identities change is through repetition. 3. Heat the heat zones first Some places in the organization will push back harder than others—frequently because identity is strongest there. Engage those teams early. Invite them to design pilots. Let them be stewards of the old and the new. This works against sabotage and enables visible advocates. 4. Rewire the rituals If day-to-day rituals (the stand-ups, the monthly review, the recognition shout-outs) don’t reflect the new identity, change them. Small ritual adjustments — sharing a customer story at each monthly meeting, say, or adjusting the criteria you use in reviews — yield outsize results. 5. Standardize transparency Transparency isn’t just about telling plans. It’s sharing uncertainties, limitations and trade-offs. When they see the trade-offs leaders are being asked to make — what we gain and what we give up — they’re likelier to trust the process. 6. Create identity champions at all levels Not everybody has to be evangelising from the stage. It is essential that line managers, front-line supervisors and informal influencers are on board. Invest in their capacity to hold identity discussions with their teams. Resistance isn’t all bad Let’s stop the collapse for a minute and state something counterintuitive: resistance can be good. Healthy scepticism of this kind tends to flush out weaknesses in strategic assumptions. The goal isn’t to dispel resistance; it’s to direct it. Establish formal mechanisms for dissent: cross-functional review groups, pre-mortems, safe spaces for criticism. That’s how shaping identity as a matter of negotiation is made into an organized part of change rather than an undercurrent that undermines it. Identity negotiation: an ongoing dance There is no one 'moment' of identity change for our organisations, this is of continual conversation and small behaviours (and formal reinforcement). Workers probe the new limits in a million small interactions. Managers respond. Leaders interpret. And then, over the months that follow, either this new identity consolidates or it splinters. Internalisation is the final step. People begin not only to comply but also to think and act differently. You are observing a lot less ‘must do’ behaviours and a great deal of discretionary effort applied to new priorities. That’s the point that identity changed. It’s also typically when business results start getting better — productivity, customer satisfaction, innovation. Practical traps to avoid There are common mistakes people make in the way they approach identity work: - Thinking that changing messaging will change identity. It’s not going to. - Identity is cosmetic: new logo, same culture. That breeds cynicism. — Failing to mention midlevel managers. They’re the translators; if they’re not bought in, the change gets stuck.” Ignoring social networks. Identity lives in the unwritten rules. A few things I beg to differ on in the typical playbook Many consultants preach the “change fast, iterate faster” allegory as gospel. That’s easy in software sprints; it’s harder when you’re asking a person to change who they are professionally, where their identity is often wrapped up in how good at the job they are.” Fast cycles matter and are in parallel with the kind of identity work that needs to be done. Otherwise you get churn — new processes, same old behaviours. Here’s one: the fetishization of role scrolls. The updating of job descriptions is necessary, but not sufficient. People want to understand how the role gives them an opportunity to contribute to something bigger than themselves and how it relates back when you consider history, legacy identity and future direction. What matters more than boxes on org charts is how, and whether, mission drives purpose. What about measurement? We’re frequently asked: how does one measure an identity shift? Good question. Use a blend of quantitative and qualitative signals: - Pulse survey items on alignment, sense of purpose - Behavioural metrics – cross-team collaboration, voluntary overtime around new initiatives, our internal mobility rate - Narrative indicators – the language used in town halls, internal comms and performance conversations. Combine these with hard business metrics — customer churn, sales conversion, error rates — and you’ll see the correlation. Why this matters now, in Australia Australian organisations are under unique pressures: global competition, digital disruption and talent shortages in major cities such as Sydney and Melbourne.The new workforce has different expectations of employers, with the average young employee seeking out purpose. Workers these days less accustomed to suck it up and play roles that are inauthentic. Organizations that nail identity — ones that have redefined their strategies in line with a true sense of self — are more likely to attract and keep people. We have clients in Canberra and Brisbane who pivot their strategies, and the key issue is not capability; it’s alignment. Boards demand new outcomes. Leaders deliver new KPIs. Work isn’t done, or if it is, not to the best of their abilities; employees vote with their feet — quietly quitting, decreased discretionary effort, poor advocacy. That’s expensive. Culture is not a soft cost; it is a hard business lever. Where we fit in We help organisations with the identity work – fast diagnostics, story design, leadership and frontline team workshops, training for line managers to hold identity conversations. To toot our own horns a bit, we worked with some finance teams in Melbourne that have taken their once toxic “reporting-first” culture and turned it into something that gets the balance right between rigour and customer empathy. The change wasn’t overnight. It was intentional, and it worked. Final thought (in progress, because identity never is) If you’ve taken something from this, let it be this: change without identity work equals performance. Real change is messy, human and, most important, negotiated. Do the difficult slow work — listen, engage, retrofit rituals and let stories lead. You could slow the early rollout; you will accelerate actual adoption. And you’ll also reduce the risk of spending hours implementing a new strategy that has great potential on paper, but totally flops in practice. It’s not elegant. It’s not fast. It is necessary. Sources & Notes Gallup. State of the American Workplace (meta-analyses, and engagement findings). Gallup Press, 2017. Gallup’s employee engagement research shows that business units with highly engaged teams have 21% higher profitability on average than those with low levels of engagement. Paramount Training and Development internal client observations (anecdotal evidence from Australian clients, those from Sydney to Melbourne to Canberra) – analysed for practical applications / examples.