CAMPS: Your Tried-and-True Tool for Leading Change Like a Boss
Ever feel like you're carrying the weight of the world – or at least the entire change process – on your shoulders? We feel you. Juggling the expectations of senior leaders and execs while ensuring your team sails smoothly through change is no small feat.
If you find yourself the lone captain of change at your org, it's time to enlist your managers and elevate them to change leaders. A great place to start is CAMPS – a handy framework for predicting where people might resist change and where they're all in.
What is the CAMPS framework?
When it comes to leading change, all managers need the CAMPS tool in their toolkit. It tunes you into your team’s feelings about change and equips you to meet everyone's needs.
Think of it this way: employees fall into one of two ‘camps’ – engaged or disengaged – during change. Of course, the goal is for them to be firmly in the engaged camp.
Engaging your team in the process is crucial if you aim for them to embrace change with open arms. Drawing from research by psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, we've identified five specific brain cravings that fuel engagement: Certainty, Autonomy, Meaning, Progress, and Social inclusion – or simply, CAMPS!
Let’s look at each brain craving and how you can feed it:
Certainty
Our brains have a serious thing for certainty. In fact, too much uncertainty can kick stress levels into high gear, triggering the fight or flight mode instead of curiosity and connection. What's more, it can create a bottleneck of confusion when employees are left in the dark about expectations, priorities, or how success is defined.
Especially in times of change, your team counts on you to bring some certainty to the table. As a leader, your role is to uncover any gaps in certainty and then collaborate on closing as many as you can. Opportunities for this include creating consistency and communicating goals.
How to satisfy certainty:
Acknowledge shared feelings of uncertainty
Be consistent and share what is remaining the same
Communicate on a predictable cadence
Focus on what is in your scope of control
Autonomy
Finding the perfect mix of employee autonomy and engagement in change is crucial. Tossing someone into a new situation without guidance or help? That's autonomy overload, stirring up uncertainty and anxiety. Not involving them in the change process? Not enough autonomy. The sweet spot of choice and control is where the magic happens – more engagement and commitment all around.
To strike the right balance, consider and talk about how a change affects each person personally. Communicate what folks will have a say in and provide opportunities to engage team members in the change process. Additionally, be sure to proactively address concerns people may have around disempowerment as a result of the change.
How to satisfy autonomy:
Provide a choice of responsibilities
Ask if more or less guidance is needed
Invite people to co-create solutions
Invite contributions through listening tours
Clarify what control/choice individuals have during and after change
Meaning
Research shows when folks understand how their work ties into their values, they're way more into it – more engaged, satisfied, and productive. The same goes for understanding change. People want to know how change efforts connect to bigger-picture goals and objectives. When this link is fuzzy, they disengage pretty quickly.
To cultivate a deeper sense of meaning, link-up, or connect, changes to your team, company, or even individual missions. This approach reinforces purpose and revs up motivation – especially important when things are new or transitioning. Studies indicate that even small efforts to infuse work with meaning lead to higher engagement and performance.
How to satisfy meaning:
Link changes to your team or company mission, or specific goals/objectives
Craft a change vision statement and communicate it often
Communicate how the change aligns with individual/team needs/work/values
Highlight small wins as evidence the change is having the targeted impact
Call out people’s contributions
Progress
To keep folks engaged during change, think about how it might impact their sense of progress. Encourage them to aim for small, continuous progress over big wins. Here's the brainy reason why: when we hit our goals, our brains dish out dopamine – the feel-good chemical that signals reward. This process sets off a positive loop where progress triggers dopamine, boosting engagement, which fuels more progress, resulting in even more dopamine and engagement.
So, how can you ensure your team meets their needs for progress and gets that dopamine hit throughout a change initiative? Collaborate on tracking goals and marking accomplishments, regularly recognize wins, and check in on their individual development.
How to satisfy progress:
Acknowledge grief of lost hope or plans
Normalize loss of productivity
Reset a small number of top priorities
Focus on results vs. hours worked
Shorten milestones to celebrate small wins
Social Inclusion (Fairness)
Exclusion hurts, like, really hurts – research even suggests taking Tylenol can help ease the emotional pain. Feeling undervalued or sidelined at work can seriously drag down engagement and productivity. But, on the flip side, promoting social inclusion and fairness can supercharge commitment, performance, resilience, and retention.
You can help people feel included and treated fairly by ensuring your change coalition – the folks leading the change – has a good mix of people from different departments and levels within your company. Additionally, don't overlook the importance of recognizing and rewarding employees for their contributions to driving change.
How to satisfy inclusion:
Ask about feelings and individual needs
Gauge a sense of fairness across teams
Communicate how equity and inclusion planning was incorporated into the change design process
Consider what inclusion might look like in your change communication plan
How and when should you do a CAMPS check?
Now that you know the five brain cravings, let's talk CAMPS checks – they're critical to getting everyone on board with change. You want your team to feel engaged and part of the process, right? A CAMPS check is like a quick pulse check to see where folks stand.
CAMPS checks assess how change might hit each CAMPS factor for every person or group impacted. You give stakeholders a score, on a scale of 1-10, for each brain craving – certainty, autonomy, meaning, progress, and social inclusion – to reveal any gaps you need to bridge and to fine-tune your approach. (Bonus tip: Consider what might move each score up by one point to make your change effort more effective.)
There are two specific moments where a CAMPS check really shines:
Using the CAMPS framework during Listening Tours
The listening tour, aka stakeholder interviews, is your starting point for leading change. You'll likely need to circle back to it repeatedly to make sure everyone's voice is heard and keep that feedback flowing.
Before jumping in, do a quick CAMPS check to get you ready for your convos. It'll help you tune in to what people really need. Knowing how your team views and copes with change is crucial, especially in virtual setups with limited casual chats.
Using the CAMPS framework during One-on-Ones
One-on-one meetings are a powerful tool for diagnosing and boosting engagement and an excellent opportunity to lead change. Approach each session with the goal to understand your team member’s mindset by doing a CAMPS check.
Check out these practical tips for satisfying each brain craving in one-on-ones:
Certainty- Commit to consistent meetings – aim for the same time and day of the week.
Autonomy – Ask where they’d like more direction or freedom to do things their own way.
Meaning – Ask what they find most meaningful and link their work to a mission.
Progress – Ask them to share small wins – or what went well in the past week.
Social inclusion – Ask how satisfied they are with their work relationships and help them network!
Leading Change Together with CAMPS
Don't go it alone when it comes to change! Give your managers the CAMPS tool to help them lead the way. This easy-to-follow framework gives you a shared vocabulary to talk about what matters most during change – ensuring everyone stays engaged. And as all leaders feed employees' CAMPS cravings, the whole team will feel valued, assured, and integral to the change process.
