How to Make Change Stick in Your Marketing Team

Episode Transcript

If there is one word that seems to be all over the place — like it's part of the air that we are breathing right now — it's change. We've got changing technology, changing buyer behaviors, changing tariffs, changing government regulations. Just about every day something around us changes. And that means that as marketers, we've got to change too. If we keep doing what we've always done while the world around us is evolving, we become irrelevant and ineffective. But changing what we do and how we do it is not as easy as just swapping out our heels for flats or putting on a hoodie when it gets cold outside. Change management at work is a skill. And not only that, it is a hard-won, critically important skill.

So this week's episode is all about change management — a must-have modern marketing capability that needs to be on everybody's resume. To help us understand what it is, why it matters, and how to master it, we are joined by the amazing and insightful Elizabeth Venter Botha. She has been through many, many transformative changes, both as a leader herself and as a coach helping other leaders navigate these murky waters. We are very lucky to have her with us today. So let's get going.

Welcome to the Agile Marketing Edge, the first podcast dedicated to turning Agile theory into real-world marketing breakthroughs. I'm Andrea Fryrear, CEO of Agile Sherpas, and your guide on this climb to smarter, faster, outcome-driven marketing. Every week, we unpack the what, who, and how behind Agile marketing — from building high-velocity workflows and slashing waste, to measuring what really matters and scaling success across teams. You'll hear quick hit strategies you can deploy today, plus candid stories from marketers who have traded chaos for clarity and never looked back. Hit follow wherever you listen and let's carve the next switchback together.

Andrea: Thank you for being here, Elizabeth. Can you kick us off by telling our listeners a little bit about you and your background, and why you're excited to talk about change management today?

Elizabeth: Thank you so much, Andrea, for that warm welcome. This topic really excites me and I feel it's incredibly pertinent in our modern world. I've been involved in transformative change initiatives for around two decades, either on a local level in my country, in other countries, cross-regionally, or even globally. I design the change strategy, get the buy-in, get teams and people ready, and then see it through implementation. I'm a career marketer, but I've had the privilege of working across different functions and departments, and I've also spent six years in tech to really see how the other half live — which has given me great insight into various areas of the business. I've seen firsthand how different industries and organizations behave around change, and I also understand that an organization is a connected ecosystem. So I'm usually the person you go to if you want to do something new or something difficult — starting up a function or a department, for instance. My biggest change initiative was Ford's global user experience across 132 countries, where we worked through $30 million successfully in about nine months to stand that up. For agile transformation specifically, I cut my teeth in 2017, leading a large-scale transformation across every single department of a luxury automotive brand. So I've been successful at change and have also learned through mistakes, which is incredibly valuable.

Andrea: That's great. It sounds like you've seen some good and some maybe not so good, so we've got a lot to learn from you. Let's get started. I want to level set first about what change management actually is, because on this show we talk about a lot of terms that get thrown around and people think they know what they mean but don't really. So from your perspective, what does change management mean to you? And maybe give us a comparison — what does it look like when it's going well, versus when it's maybe not done so well?

Elizabeth: That's a really good place to start. If you look at a textbook definition, change management describes a very structured way to guide people — the people side of change. I see it as preparing, equipping, and supporting individuals, teams, and leaders for change. It's often associated with the adoption of technology, but really it spans systems, processes, strategies, and different types of transformations. When it's done well, it helps minimize resistance to change and aims to manage the disruption that a large initiative can bring into an organization. In good practice, the change management process evolves — we iterate on it and facilitate change in a way that becomes a consistent practice in the organization, not a one-and-done. When done poorly, it's really a checkbox exercise. There are one-and-done activities, and it plays out in a linear way. Anybody today would know that change is not linear, and neither is transformation. It's almost seen as a project that runs alongside a change initiative, with a clear start and then a clear stop. But as I mentioned, that's just not the nature of change.

Andrea: That's really helpful. Can you give us something concrete — a specific good practice versus a bad practice, something you've actually seen make a real difference?

Elizabeth: Yes, absolutely. A checkbox activity would be sending out beautiful communication to announce the change, and that's kind of where it stops. But an activity that's real — one that could minimize resistance — could be pulling managers or employees into workshops or sessions before you even embark on the change, so they can build and design the transformation themselves. Because it's very difficult to resist something if you've built it and feel you have ownership in it. Another activity that can help minimize resistance is delivering small, tangible wins first. It could be fixing a broken workflow or simplifying an approval process. With one of our financial services clients, for example, we worked right up front to simplify and fast-track approvals with legal and compliance, which was such a pain point. We did that through conversations on both sides, and it brought immediate relief to teams — a real "so this could work for me" moment. The checkbox version of this, by contrast, is a large-scale rollout plan with no real feedback loops to show progress or actual tangible improvements.

Andrea: Right — a beautiful slide deck with sort of nothing really behind it. And it does feel very different: having this done to you versus having a say and a role in how it's happening.

Elizabeth: Exactly. Every time change is introduced as a "done to you" scenario, I've seen it flatten out. There's a little excitement in the beginning, and then the real pain starts to show. And by then it's very difficult to pull it back.

Andrea: And as you mentioned when you were sharing your background, this is something you've been involved with for a really long time. Right now it seems like change is faster, deeper, and more disruptive than ever. Do you see change management as an evergreen capability that organizations have always needed and will always need? Or do you think there is genuinely a higher demand for it right now — or is that just a perception because things are so frothy and intense?

Elizabeth: Things really are frothy right now — it's like we're in rolling change all the time, and that's a lived reality for all of us. Do I believe that facilitating change is evergreen and increasingly needed? Absolutely. But we really need to change the way that we see change management. Your really popular models often imply that project-based approach I spoke about earlier — a clear beginning, middle, and end, and then everything stabilizes and there's a return to some new level of normal. But now, in our environment, it's constant, disruptive change. We live and work in an era of continuous evolution, instead of the occasional big transformation like maybe twenty years ago. So the whole notion of managing change as a temporary project or initiative is outdated. Instead, the capability to facilitate and adapt to change should be deeply embedded into the core competencies of every leader. That's a real shift. It's no longer just a task we can delegate to a change management manager or specialist — it's really an aspect of modern, adaptive leadership. And in practice, that means things like open and transparent communication being the norm, not just something you do at the beginning. It means leading with empathy, openly discussing employees' fears about change, actively listening, and really getting to the root cause of the fears that could help people shift. The agile mindset is also incredibly valuable here — being open to experimentation, open to feedback, embracing curiosity and innovation. It can help employees really work with change rather than against it. Ideally, you want to shift the goal from simply implementing a specific change to building a culture that is resilient in the face of change — empowering teams through continuous learning and adaptation. When you've integrated some of the principles of change management into your culture, change resilience becomes an intrinsic capability in people and in teams. And with AI introducing such rapid, shifting change every single day — just when you think you've gotten accustomed to something, boom, there's something new — this is our current and our future. Teams that are able to facilitate sweeping, rolling change have an incredible edge right now.

Andrea: I love everything you said there. I just want to underscore two things. One is that this needs to not be an isolated skill or capability — this isn't something we wall off and say it's a problem for one or two people in the organization to deal with. This is something every leader needs to have as a core competency, because change is going to be continuous. And then also, the stories we tell ourselves about change and how we think about it really matter. We have an earlier episode, which we'll link to in the show notes, where we talked about how you and your team think about change — is it an opportunity or a scary thing? That's going to influence how everybody approaches it. Really connected to everything you're saying.

Andrea: All right, so far we've been thinking about change as a general topic, but let's zoom in to the specific focus of this podcast — marketing. Let's talk about marketing teams in particular, because you and I spend a lot of our time working with those groups specifically. And I do feel like we love our marketing teams dearly, but they do tend to have some special kinds of resistance to change. Where do you think that's coming from? Why are marketers often struggling so much with change?

Elizabeth: I think there can be multiple reasons. Let me tell a story first. Recently, I was speaking to a manager who explained how she had been protecting her team from using a new digital tool that could really save them time and effort — and she was quite proud of it. Another team was using it with a lot of success and suggested she check it out. So she brought it to her team, had a demo, and showed them how it really could help them. The team was just cold. She didn't challenge their mindset at all — didn't say, "hey, what if we just try it a little bit?" to spark even a little curiosity. And she did admit to me that her team is really change-resistant and that she felt she needed to protect them from change. When we looked a little deeper, the team members really felt that if they resisted change, they could resist it away — that as long as they kept saying no to anything new, the manager would always cave. Not addressing resistance with marketing teams can really leave them stuck in their ways. And the world we're in is a brave new one. Not helping individuals and teams move forward means we are actively holding them back. And what I find so interesting is that it's so often executives, directors, and managers who hold people back. An area — whether it's creative, digital, or anything else — has its own way of working, and they feel very strongly about it. When change needs to come along, it's very often the managers or executives who resist it, and then the members of their departments feel they've got to be loyal to that manager. They resist it too, even if they weren't originally intending to.

Now, as a career marketer I'll also say this: sometimes we can see ourselves a little bit as mavericks, with an air of "don't tell me what to do, I know stuff." I've also seen in marketing teams that there can be such a focus on being a superstar — really high achievers — but at the cost of the greater team. Modern ways of working really need teams to work together, to be cross-functional, and for collaboration to be part and parcel of the team. We can be a bit closed off to our own blind spots. We drink our own marketing Kool-Aid and think that the experience we've built up, or what we know right now about marketing and our way of working, is just good enough. So we lack marketing maturity because we're not necessarily embracing new ideas, technology, or new ways of working. We become stuck. Resisting tech and trends can have a really limiting hold on us. Marketing stagnates, it becomes copy and paste. We're not experimenting, so we don't really know what's working and what's not. And sometimes teams even balk at using data to make decisions or inform their campaigns — because "I know what to do, I've done it this way, it really works." Well, I'm not really sure it really works, but I'm used to it and this is easy. A little bit of self-assessment and a willingness to change your own beliefs can really help us push forward, become more mature in marketing, and stop putting ourselves and our departments at risk.

Andrea: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's also a feeling of overwhelm a lot of the time, right? We just have so much to do — how could we possibly take on change in addition to everything else? It ends up creating this perfect storm of resistance. So when you're coming into a team to help with change management, what are some early warning signs that you might be in for a bit of a battle — that you're going to be encountering some change resistance?

Elizabeth: There are definitely some early warning signs, though I'll caveat that sometimes it creeps up on you and just whacks you. But some of the signs you're going to struggle are the open verbal ones — you know upfront it's going to be hard. You're hearing things like "leadership doesn't get it" or "they won't let us," which signals blame and deflection. Or "we've already tried this" or the classic "is this the new flavor of the month?" — okay, there's a tough road ahead. Some signs are a little more subtle: it's the tone, subtle behavior, and small contradictions between what people are saying and what they're actually doing. I was on a large-scale transformation with a fintech company during COVID. We really believed we were tracking in the right direction — teams showed active support and positive results, and the managers seemed to be on board from the beginning. But about eighteen months in, we started to realize that what we thought was active support maybe wasn't really there. As the teams became more self-sufficient and self-organizing, the managers started feeling less relevant, and employees became a little less controlled. The managers no longer felt that they owned things. That is actually such a strategic opportunity for a manager — to say, "how can I be more strategic?" But if you're so focused on command and control, you can miss that opportunity completely. Their resistance showed up as quite a contradiction: they were saying their goals were aligned with the transformation, but their actions and behaviors indicated the opposite. Above the surface, they were saying, "yeah, sure." Below the surface, they were saying, "hell no." They started blaming Agile or the agile transformation for all kinds of problems that had existed even before Agile walked in the door. Team members reporting to them, as I said before, chose to follow their managers, and so they showed up disinterested, unengaged, or passive — attending the events but not really there, not really engaging. It cost the organization in low morale and sluggish execution, which meant missed deadlines that impacted business partners and customers. It took some of that showing up before we were able to turn the tide and get everyone rowing in the same direction.

Andrea: I love that — the quietness. You expect people to fight you, but sometimes they're not coming out and fighting. That's really interesting.

Elizabeth: Honestly, Andrea, I would prefer people fighting me openly than doing nothing. A month down the line it's like, my word, the wheels have gone off.

Andrea: Yeah, it's so much easier to deal with things out in the open. When you can't see it happening, it's so much harder. And you mentioned earlier people referring to a change as "the flavor of the month" — just another thing they're being asked to go through. When that's happening, is it a sign of change fatigue? And especially now, when teams are under-resourced and people might be on the verge of burnout — leaders are trying to balance the sense of "we have to change, we don't have any choice but to evolve," while also giving their teams the time and space they need to work through fear and uncertainty and all the emotions that come with change. How do you help teams and leaders walk that line — balance that patience and that sense of urgency?

Elizabeth: You're touching on something really important — change is so emotional for people, and sometimes they don't even understand why they're resisting it. They don't necessarily see the underlying fears that are sitting there. For managers and leaders, balancing urgency and patience is really an art of modern change leadership. You want to move fast enough to keep momentum, but also slow enough for people to come along with you. Urgency without empathy burns people out. Patience without progress erodes trust. It's such a fine line to walk. When we talk about change fatigue, I do see that. And through my experience, we generally associate it with too much change, too fast and too often — but I think there's more to it. I also see it as change without meaning, and too little time for recovery between waves of change, which takes a deep toll on people. People's patience grows when they can see that their efforts are meaningful and matter — how what they're doing contributes to the organization, the customers, even to team well-being. That way people can release some of their fears and feel more meaning and less burnout. And if you as a leader decide to pick up the pace — you want to move faster, you want your teams to deliver at pace — you have to remove friction and constraints for them. That really helps them feel like they can move forward. Capacity management becomes a really strategic act in this context. There are some agile practices that work well for this: work in progress limits, streamlining approvals, and reducing rework can all help. My mantra these days is that the work you choose not to do is as important as the work you choose to do. And you really need to reconnect people to purpose. I was at a conference a couple of months ago where a keynote speaker said that the most effective way to drive change — or to ask people to engage with change — is to speak to their highest values: integrity, openness, connectedness, curiosity, fairness. That helps people connect meaning to the change being introduced. It's not all just about the work — it's also about how we show up. If you're a leader facing this, some really good questions to ask are: "What's most important to you about the way that we work?" or "What could success look like to you in a way that feels aligned with your values?" That's a very different way of speaking to people than "this is what we must do, this is what the CEO wants." Knowing what people value can go a long way in shaping your change approach.

Andrea: That's really amazing. And so, since change is this ongoing thing in organizations — continuous, not ever really over — it's going to come in waves. But we don't want backsliding either, and we have to give people some room to breathe in between the waves. Let's talk quickly about how leaders can fully integrate one wave of change before introducing the next — how to avoid the backsliding and loss of momentum, let everybody internalize things, and let those new ways of working solidify before moving on and before everyone catches their breath. What are some practical things leaders need to keep in mind in that phase, after the first wave of excitement and momentum, when you're moving into stabilizing and normalizing?

Elizabeth: Such a good point. This really speaks to the stickiness of change. When we treat change like a project and just focus on "we need to adopt this thing" without rewiring the culture, it's very easy to backslide. The rewiring of culture is that slowing down and checking in — that's so important before the next wave starts. It also speaks to the pace at which we introduce change; people do need a little bit of slack in the system. Practical ways to create that: go back to taking things off people's plates, making sure work is easier for them to facilitate. I think about the iceberg metaphor here — all the events, practices, and visible stuff like people checking Kanban boards is at the top of the iceberg. But the real change happens underneath, in how people think, what they value, and what they practice. That's what embeds change. Spending time on that bottom piece — whether it's managers speaking to individuals, or individuals working together on certain initiatives and deciding how they're going to tackle them in a little bit of downtime — can really help stimulate the good stuff below the surface and embed a genuinely different mindset. We are the masters of stickiness as marketers, and I sometimes think we can apply our own approach to developing campaigns and messaging to this. Even in the lifecycle of a campaign, you have ebbs and flows. Sometimes taking a little bit of time to stand still — going a little bit slower before you speed up, giving a little slack in the system, maybe holding off on certain initiatives — can help people become more change-resilient.

Andrea: I love that — the campaign metaphor. We don't always go a hundred miles an hour on every campaign; some are at different levels of focus at different times. Same thing with change. I really like that. All right, big focus for every episode here is leaving people with something practical and tangible to go home and start working on. So if some of our listeners are thinking about maybe the last quarter of this year or looking ahead into next year, staring down a big change initiative — whether it's an AI rollout, changing ways of working and adopting agile, or something else entirely — what's your strong advice for them?

Elizabeth: Get ready to build resilience if you want to embark on something that's really transformative. You've got to have some staying power — we talk about it as grit, or as we say in South Africa, "growing hair on your teeth." So the first thing I'd say is: make sure you can see it through. If you want to use a change model, adapt it to make sure you're changing in a way that's really adaptable for your organization.

First, build clarity before you start the launch party for whatever change you want to introduce. Make sure there's a clear purpose. Start with honest conversations about why change is needed, but also get input from people about how they want to see the change taking place — that co-creation or design I was speaking about earlier. That takes time and effort, which is exactly why a lot of leaders and organizations skip it and go straight to "this is what we need to do, and this is what our roadmap looks like." Also make sure people have support along the way: who can they talk to? Where can they give feedback? If they're experiencing panic about, say, an AI change that's coming, where do they go to find support? People follow meaning instead of roadmaps. Co-creation is the best form of change management that money can buy. Know what people value up front, and then shape your approach to speak to those values so they can genuinely connect.

Third, design for sustainability — and think about it up front. How are you going to sustain the change? Your first three months are exciting: there are t-shirts, balloons, lots of communication, all the fanfare. But nine months later, you're going to need discipline in the system. If you're going through an agile transformation, for instance, make sure you stabilize the rhythm up front. Look at running change in smaller cycles instead of big bang. Choose the pilot approach, and then give a little bit of a break after so you can communicate the value out — what worked, what didn't, and what you'll do differently — because we need this change. Open communication, feedback cycles, communicating early and often, and then taking some time for reflection: that is what helps change be sustainable. Do the pre-work. Make sure people feel part of it at all levels — especially managers — so they can co-create and design. That way you're building something that could last instead of being ripped out six, nine, or ten months later.

Andrea: Absolutely. And we didn't plan this, but next week's episode is all about pilots — how they're supposed to work and what happens when you don't set them up properly, so you can tune in next week for that. Elizabeth, this was so helpful and insightful. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate you joining us this week.

Elizabeth: Thank you, it's my pleasure. This is a topic I'm truly passionate about. I really want to say that change can make you incredibly resilient. Harness it, use the opportunity to learn new things, and you'll become accustomed to change and it won't be so scary anymore.

Andrea: It really is like a superpower — change becomes a superpower once you achieve that level of resilience. And if you're feeling like you need some support in tackling some of the really thorny problems Elizabeth was articulating today, the Agile Sherpas team is here to help. I should also mention that Elizabeth is a member of that team, so if you want the opportunity to work with her, you can reach out to us at Agile Sherpas. She and the rest of our amazing team of Sherpas coach marketing teams, leaders, and executives as they evolve their behaviors to align with modern agile ways of working and navigate these processes of change management. You can drop us a line at AgileSherpas.com/coaching-contact and we'll see how we can help. Until next time, I am your host Andrea Fryrear. Don't forget — the struggle is real, and so is agile marketing.