About This Episode

A lot of companies have seen immense growth in the past 9 months. COVID has accelerated so many businesses, and caused them to grow in ways that they may have never expected. 

And few industries have experienced the kind of growth and expansion as the food delivery industry. With us all stuck at home for the past nine months, food delivery apps have exploded onto the scene. 

Whereas a few years  ago, your options may have been pizza, sushi, and maybe Chinese, now you can get literally any food you want delivered right to your doorstep. 

On this episode of the Sales Engagement podcast, we sit down with Anneliese Niebauer, Mid-Market Sales Manager at UberEats, for a conversation about how to scale, and how to help your team through immense change in a short period of time. 

Biggest Challenge

When we asked Anneliese about the biggest challenge when it comes to rapid growth and expansion, she had some simple answer:

Change management. 

Simply put, change management is how you bring a team along on a journey of change in a very simple way. It’s how  you actually affect change within an organization. 

At its core, there are three levels to change management. Three phases that need to be considered before you can really nail change management, and make it something that doesn’t catch your  team off guard. 

Motivation

The first lever to effective change management is motivation.

How do you motivate your team, however big or small it may be, through rapid change? Knowing that nobody likes change, it’s crucial to keep them motivated so that they can be a part of the journey. 

The first step is to have a clear  vision. To be able to explain to  your team exactly what you want to see happen. To make your goals tangible, attainable, and easy to envision. 

The second step is to bring your team along on the journey with you. It’s easy to sit in meetings and discuss upcoming changes, but when you’re talking about big fundamental changes, you want to bring your team along much earlier in the journey.

It gives  them the change  to give feedback, discuss alternatives, think through the logic of the decisions being made, and by the time you announce the change, it feels inevitable to them because they’ve been a part of the process from the outset. 

Productivity / Effectiveness

The enemy of productivity is complexity, and this is especially true when you’re dealing with large scale change management. 

If you spend all of your time going deep  and solving for every single complexity, you’re going to needlessly complicate the change process.

At the end of the day, ask yourself, “What are the one or  two pillars that we need to change?” And then solve for simplicity.

Fight for simplicity, especially when  it comes to large scale change. 

Culture

Culture is key. 

All the change management prep is useless  if you  don’t have a culture where people feel a part of the change. 

The key to establishing a winning culture? Make sure that people are challenged and stretched in  their roles.

They’re not allowed  to be bored. What are they doing with their personal development time? How are they stretching and growing themselves? People that feel stretched and  challenged perform much better people who are comfortable in their roles. 

Remember,  change management should be something you can actually manage. Bring your team into the change  journey early, and fight for simplicity. 

Three simple steps to successfully manage change.

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