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Welcome to Changemaker stories from LOCAL - an ongoing series of personal interviews with leaders driving change across every industry and discipline. Because change shouldn’t mean going it alone.
This week we spent time with Aubrey Byers, a director and program leader with experience across a wide range of companies and industries, to talk about getting change to stick, why relationships are invaluable for creating ever-lasting change, and what behaviors leaders should model to see a change through to the end. Here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Aubrey:
A Changemaker is someone who doesn’t take the current way of working at face value. They’re always looking at areas of the business and asking "How can we make this more efficient, simpler, better?”
Thinking ahead about how to evolve as a business is crucial. It keeps high performers engaged. Showing change and growth helps people see what’s on the horizon.
We must always take the time to teach, train, and inform. You lose people because the change seems too complex or they feel like they will fail. It helps to ask, “How can I make my employees successful in adopting this change?”
Relationship-building is key to driving change. I work on a complex program for one of our German brands. Before we kicked off the program, I was intentional about visiting the teams in person to build partnerships and learn about their business, their culture, and who each employee is individually. When we got to the point of making changes, we did it together instead of the change feeling forced on them.
The hardest part of making change is getting people to support the new path forward. We must make it as simple as possible and take the right steps to guide someone through a change.
Be sure to have alignment across the top before you start the change process. If some people are not on board and are feeding negativity or disconnection down to the teams executing, it plants bad seeds, causes confusion, and builds barriers in the work.
I always remind myself that change is all about iterations. 2.0, 3.0, and onward.
My favorite Changemaker is Brene Brown. She helps people see vulnerability, shame, worth, and perfectionism in their personal and professional lives as positive instead of negative. She constantly brings about new ideas and perspectives and pushes people to change the way they think about themselves.
When leading change, it’s important to model courage, agility, trustworthiness, open-mindedness, and kindness. Not everything will always go as planned, especially when it’s new, so give grace to all parties involved.
I love living in San Diego. To disconnect from the world for a bit I take a sunset walk near Kellogg beach in Point Loma. It’s so calming just looking out at the boats docked by the marina.