Aim to Elevate

I didn’t plan a career in change.

Here’s the honest version of how it started: after a mild panic attack where I realized that Law school was out of my reach and maybe I should pick a less intense career path, I settled on teaching. Summers off. Job security. Turns out those two criteria were all I needed to majorly pivot my early career trajectory.

I’m not telling you that because it’s flattering. I’m telling you because it’s true, and because it turns out that being honest about how little I’d thought it through is exactly what set up everything that came next.

The reality caught up fast. I graduated into a hiring freeze. The Alberta government had stopped hiring teachers right as I was trying to become one. As a new grad with zero experience, I knew the odds to securing a teaching gig were not in my favour.

So I did the only thing that made sense at the time: I went where the jobs were. Fort McMurray, Alberta. It wasn’t a plan. It was just the only place I knew was hiring. December, it turned out, was not a great time to go looking for a teaching job in Fort McMurray. As winter turned to spring I finally secured a job as a Health and Safety Trainer.

Not only was I young and inexperienced, now I had to stand in front of a room of workers and teach them how to do their jobs safely. Jobs many of them had spent their entire lives doing.  There I was, fresh out of university, dropped into a blue-collar town, scrambling to figure out how I was going to connect with these people at all. For my first handful of classes I focused on appearing like I was the authority in the topic being taught and that I had the expertise required to tell them how to do their jobs safely.

Those rooms full of veteran tradespeople taught me something I didn’t have language for back then. I wasn’t there to impress them with expertise I didn’t have. I was there because they were the ones who had to actually do something differently. I learned fast, bullshitting them was not going to work. They knew I didn’t have the experience. What I did have was a real desire to learn and to listen. So I changed my tactic quickly. I started asking them questions instead of giving them answers. I asked them to share their experiences with me, had them take me on plant tours, and had them involve me in their work processes. That’s when things shifted for me and I realized if I wasn’t listening to them, I wasn’t training them. I was just talking at them.

I didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of everything I now believe about change management. Change doesn’t happen in the strategy sessions. It doesn’t happen in the rollout plan or the new org chart. It happens in the room with the people who have to live it . If they aren’t at the center of how you design that change, you’re not managing it. You’re just announcing it.

That’s what Fort McMurray taught me, long before I had a job title for it: the people living the change know things the plan doesn’t. Ignore them, and you’re not managing change. You’re just imposing it.