by The Change Compass | Change approach, Change Initiatives
In business literature having senior leader sponsorship and buy-in is always highlighted as one of the most if not the most important factor in determining successful initiative outcome. It is touted that without senior leaders to drive the initiative, it is difficult to get traction. The respective senior leaders that own the initiative are identified as the most important stakeholders to engage. As a result, most project managers and change managers spend significant amount of time aligning and influencing the senior leader.
What happens if your particular senior leader(s) are not along the journey, do not engage employees, or are simply absent? Sounds familiar? Does this mean that the initiative will definitely fail? According to research that McKinsey and others have conducted yes there will be a significant risk of failure. So what is one to do in this situation? In fact, in our recent change practice benchmarking study (click here to find out more) many respondents stated that their biggest challenge is to influence senior stakeholders.
Project or change managers will most likely not have the hierarchical status in the organization to influence senior stakeholders based on power or rank. However, do not give up. There is another way …. using soft power. What is soft power? In the field of international relations, soft power is the ability to attract or co-opt rather than coerce (hard power) as a means of persuasion (according to Wikipedia). It is having the ability to influence the behavior or thinking of others through the power of attraction and ideas.
Across the globe some countries are great at using soft power to influence other nations. How? Having strong business brands, artists/designers/musicians who are popular, etc. People all over the world are influenced by soft power through the brands they interact with every day. Apple users interact with their iPhone, iWatch, iPads or iMacs and know its Californian ideals. K-pop music lovers across Asia are influenced by the fashion trends from Korea. Ikea furniture owners experience a piece of Sweden when they walk into an Ikea store, Swedish food, Swedish minimalist design, and modern sensibilities.
So how do we leverage soft power to influence a range of stakeholders including senior stakeholders?
- Leverage your ‘popular stars’. Just as Taylor Swift and Eminem popularize trends and attitudes across the global audience, leverage your organization’s stars. They can be popular bloggers on your internal company social networks such as Yammer. They can also be well-respected figures who have established famous personal brands that are not necessarily the most senior. They can have interesting job titles or particular insights, or are just well-connected. Enlist these figures to help you influence your stakeholders through their presence and visible actions.
- Design an effective internal marketing campaign. Global artists weren’t born popular. They are popularized by marketing machines. Don’t be shy about marketing your selected stars and their messages. Leverage the various corporate channels to market their messages, including intranet articles, posters, emails, videos, blogs, talks, etc. Work on your branding consistency, consistency of messaging, and ensure there is an alignment of different communication channels used.
- To influence key stakeholders such as senior executives, conduct detailed social network analysis. Social network analysis is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups and organizations. Interview those who are close to the chosen targets and start to map out those who are connected and how they are connected. Identify and leverage the targeted network to influence your senior executives. Find out what turns them on and what their pet peeves are. Then, leverage your selected network to influence.
- Attract your stakeholders. Soft power is not about coercion or using carrot or stick. It is about attracting someone to your perspective. How do we do this? From a messaging perspective, appeal to the emotional core of what the stakeholders are attracted to, rather than relying purely on logical arguments. For example, if there is a history of employees jumping in to help one another in times of crisis, then leverage this history and theme to arouse the emotional connection. Tie your message to this theme. Also, work on your visual attraction. Use video imagery, infographic, photographs, and charts to tell a compelling and memorable story. Your stakeholders will remember these a lot more than a long speech or an article.
- Create and leverage your change champions network. In the new world, employees no longer only look to their leader for instruction and information. They leverage their social network to stay informed and engaged. A good change champion network with members that are carefully selected can do just this – pollinate, broadcast and engage a broad range of audience. An effective change champion network that is well-supported can drive significant change across the organization. There are examples of initiatives with poor senior leader sponsorship but have resulted in significant impact due to its change champions at various levels.
Ghandi popularized a non-violent struggle against Great Britain’s colonization of India. Using peaceful means, Ghandi managed to empower the masses to overthrow a dominant superpower. Martin Luther King is another fantastic example of the power of soft power. Using his oration and people motivation skills he was able to amass a large number of people to march for civil rights. This is the magnitude of soft power. While for organizations we may not have such grand ambitions for initiatives, it is worth calling out that one should not underestimate the force of soft power. For Generation Z hierarchy and coercion will not work as well as for previous generations. They want to be inspired to change the world. As a result, how we influence and drive change initiatives will also need to change – from that which is focused on top-down command and control to one that leverages soft power.
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by The Change Compass | Change approach, Change Initiatives
A lot of change management approaches are based on viewing change as negative and how to manage this negative experience. The super popular Kubler-Ross model was used to explain the grieving process and later became adopted as a change model. Kubler-Ross developed this model after observing the emotional transition of terminally ill patients, from shock, denial, anger, depression, acceptance and integration. Since then the change curve has been used to cater to all types of change.
John Kotter’s 8-step model of leading change also begins with a potentially negative context of creating a sense of urgency amongst key stakeholders. The context is … in times of change, if the organization does not do ‘A’ then ‘B’ will happen. The thinking is that providing this context of what negative things will come if we don’t act, we can get traction on building the impetus for change. Step 5 is about enabling action by removing barriers and friction – anticipating and working on these obstacles will enable change success.
Moreover, the language we use in change management in driving successful change tends to be about managing negative incidents. A key focus we have is about anticipating and managing employee and stakeholder resistance on the human side of change to support successful change management is of utmost importance. Anticipating potential obstacles of the impact of change using a structured approach is key to employee engagement. Another focus is on ensuring that senior managers are reinforcing and driving down the message as a part of effective change management strategies. The idea is that without the hierarchical charge and push change will not be adopted by employees.
Yes, in the current state, many of our changes can be perceived as negative by impacted parties, e.g. restructuring, outsourcing, and system replacement. However, there is opportunity for us to adopt a more positive approach to inspire change, versus aiming to manage the negative aspects of change. This can be augmented by strong leadership, a clear desired future state, a culture of resilience and supportive environment to work with the status quo.
When I was working a psychologist I remember meeting Martin Seligman when he was visiting Sydney, Australia. Martin Seligman is the father of positive psychology. He broke away from the traditional psycho-analytical approach to psychology that focused on studying mental illness. Instead, he was more interested in studying healthy and well-adjusted people. The basis is that, if we can better understand how healthy traits are fostered (for example, the study of happiness or being positive), then we can better contribute to the health and well-being of everyone and create successful outcomes for individuals.
So how do we practice positive change management? By simply applying Martin Seligman’s PERMA model. In ‘Flourish’ (2011) he proposed the PERMA model for achieving positive well-being: Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and purpose, and Accomplishments.
- Design in Positive emotions in the change process. These include excitement, pride, awe, etc. Instead of creating a burning platform through instilling fear and despair, focus on building hope and excitement. In selling the vision of change, leaders and change agents can focus on inspiring change and describing what can be gained at the end of the journey and how this benefits the audience. Celebrating successes along the way with the right company culture can also be a way of building positive emotions throughout the change journey.
- Engagement means being involved in activities that someone is interested in. In the change context, we should work to leverage the interests and passions of various employee and stakeholder groups. Broad engagement is important, but as important is to match the interest and type of involvement of stakeholders. For example, if we are implementing a process change, we may want to involve those who have given feedback about the current process or even have proposed options to the existing process. This may also be applied to customer feedback. Customers who are engaged and interested in product improvement may be leveraged to build and design the change.
- Relationships are identified as critical in building positive emotions. Within a change context, we should work on identifying and leveraging relationships to proliferate and support the change. This includes online platforms such as intranet and Yammer, as well as the relationships of team, business unit and communities of practice. All these are potential relationship platforms to spread the change message and generate support, excitement and positivity. Instagram and Facebook posts can also be examples of this.
- Meaning refers to purpose, or the ‘why’. Linking the change to a greater good beyond the immediate people involved is critical to instill ‘meaning’. This aims to link as much as possible, a higher purpose of the why of change. Ideally, it is not just about making more money or being more efficient, but doing what’s right by the customer, or by the community, for example. It may be linking the change to the organization’s charter and purpose. This greater good is much more motivating for people.
- Accomplishments refer to the activation of positive emotions such as pride that come with achievements and mastery. The sense of achievement can be either at an individual, team or organizational level. During the change rollout process, calling out and celebrating accomplishments is key. Acknowledgments should be made at all levels, individuals, teams, and business unit levels.
When there is a lot of change going on in an organization, significant opportunities present in the business model. There is opportunity to look at the total change picture and draw linkages to the same ‘why’ amongst different change initiatives. This linkage amongst different initiatives strengthens the meaning and purpose of the change toward the strategic goals. In the same way, employee and customer groups may be engaged for a range of change initiatives toward the new direction that may be complementary and tap on the same interest and desires of the groups involved. Accomplishments may also be celebrated across the quarter or the month if there were significant changes that were achieved. To find out how to use data to map the change picture to enable these activities, visit www.thechangecompass.com.
by The Change Compass | Change Initiatives, Sharing practices
Tell me about the state of play at IAG and your role in addressing this.
IAG was at the forefront of rolling out large transformational change programs over a relatively short space of time. For our leaders, the impact on our people and customers was very clear.
Within this environment, there was a genuine need to understand the accumulative effects of change, audience impacts, and timings. This information would enable leaders to prepare for and effectively deliver and embed change.
We began investigating platforms to efficiently capture change impact data that was easy to use and relatively inexpensive, with automated reporting. The Change Compass met these requirements.
How did you introduce this to the organisation?
In the context of the change environment at IAG, we wanted to capture a true reflection of the volume and complexity of change impacting each business area to enable meaningful dialogue with leaders about how to effectively deliver and lead through the change.
By appointing heatmap coordinators within each business unit, we drove accountability for input and maintenance within business units. This underpinned the notion that each team was responsible for leading their change while maintaining the quality of the data.
This enabled teams to present a holistic change view to key leadership groups within governance forums.
What has been your journey so far?
We’ve been using the Change Compass for over a year and we’re constantly evolving how we use and manage the tool to drive decisions and actionable insights.
We’ve worked hard over the last year to demonstrate the value to the business when it may have easily been perceived as adding more work to reporting cycles.
With data now enabling leaders to show a heatmap for both employees and customers; leverage insights; and drive governance conversations between Business Performance, HR, Communications, Change and Program Delivery teams we are building great momentum.
These conversations help guide decision making and build a network of key teams who are clear on how this work contributes to IAG strategy while driving change management, engagement, communications, and initiative sequencing.
What value have you seen so far?
While we are still at the front-end of how to utilise the Change Compass fully, we’re starting to see benefits.
There are many conversations focused on how we can keep the data current and relevant. This enables Business Units to start using the information to improve how they are delivering change, not just at the initiative level but at a wider business portfolio level.
The Compass is starting to form a useful proxy to bring together professional disciplines in governance conversations and decisions.
One of the emerging themes across IAG is the need for us to be much more effective at how we deliver change into the business in a way that recognises the capacity of the people to accept change – the Change Compass helps guide this thinking.
What’s next?
Having established the rhythms and routines, we are now focused on how governance sessions and key groups leverage data and insights beyond the heatmap.
We want to enable leaders to use the Change Compass to help inform how they lead their team through change – by using the data to implement specific mitigations and ultimately deliver more effective and sustainable change.
by The Change Compass | Change approach, Change Initiatives
Most seasoned executives will agree that implementing a strategy can be a lot more complex and challenging than the formulation of the strategy. If you read articles on strategy implementation you will find a myriad of factors to keep focused on including resourcing, prioritisation, tracking, program management, etc.
However, the one discipline that is under-leveraged in strategy execution is change management. You may ask why? A lot of change managers are hired to focus on one specific projects, whether it be rolling out a new system or introducing a new product. Many understand the skill set of change managers as focusing on developing communication and training plans.
When we look deeper into what is needed to successfully implement a strategy and the work approach of a change manager, you will see that there is significant synergy. Change management is also concerned with planning and managing not just one but a multiple of changes. In fact, best practice companies use a portfolio approach to manage a suite of changes.
Here are some of the ways in which change management naturally complements strategy implementation:
Change vision
One of the most critical parts of implementing a strategy is how we bring stakeholders along the journey. Typically, senior managers will ‘dream up’ the strategy in a closed room, and then try to roll this out to the rest of the organization. Alternatively, a consulting firm may be hired to design a strategy that may stay on the shelf and never becomes implemented.
The change manager’s approach is to design the strategy formulation process by bringing concerned stakeholder groups together to build consensus and buy-in. The classic change commitment curve shows that the more you involve someone throughout the process, the more they will develop a sense of ownership and feel that it is in their interest to make the change successful.
A typical change management approach would also encompass clarifying the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of the strategy in a way that makes sense to the audience. Is the end state clear? What is the role of each stakeholder in making this a success? How do we position the end state so that it arouses the ‘head’ as well as the ‘heart’ so that people can connect to it? Connecting to people emotionally is key to engagement.
Understanding the impacts of the change
A strategy usually involves a set of initiatives or changes that the business would like to focus on to achieve their goals. A lot of organizations jump straight into planning and implementing the various initiatives before understanding what the total impact is on the various parts of the business, and the impacts on the customer.
Having an integrated view of what the impacts will mean to each part of the organization is key. This integrated picture can be leveraged to provide a clear, cohesive and integrated set of messages and expectations to that part of the organization that will guide their change process. And depending on the change, what the Marketing department will focus on may be completely different compared to the Human Resource department. Having an integrated picture means that we are able to help employee join the dots around what the strategy and the various initiatives mean to them, versus just a set of independent projects. In this way, creating meaning for the overall change helps with engagement.
The change manager’s approach would be to focus on mapping on the various impacts on stakeholder groups, including the customer. The impacts would consist of people and organization impacts, process impacts, and technology impacts. In this way, we are able to understand and architect what changes we are making across the board before we begin the journey. This will also ensure effective sequencing, prioritization and alignment before jumping into initiative delivery.
Capabilities required to support the strategy
A typical change approach would involve looking at the capabilities required to support the strategy. A big part of change management work is analysing the requirements of implementing the change (in this case a set of initiatives to support the strategy), and formulating key capabilities required. Capabilities may be developed using a range of approaches, including hiring functional specialists, conducting learning sessions, or coaching. The Change Manager will formulate learning needs analysis, and then formulate appropriate learning interventions. For significant capability development programs, competencies frameworks may need to be set up.
Capabilities may need to be acquired rather than developed. In this case the change manager would look at how to ensure that the talent acquired can fit in smoothly in the current culture of the organization. Team development sessions may need to be conducted. This includes whether the capability is acquired through acquisition, or key talents were hired into the organization.
Engagement and communication
Ineffective engagement and communication can make or break a strategy. A significant portion of strategy implementation needs to be spent on engagement with every layer of the stakeholder impacted. Change impacts conducted will help to inform what kind of engagement is required with what stakeholder group. This includes the severity of the impact, the duration of the impact, why the stakeholders may be concerned, and how critical they are to the success of the strategy, etc.
The change manager will then design the right governance processes to ensure that key stakeholders are in the loop and embedded within the decision-making process. In addition to this, the change manager will craft a communications plan to target various stakeholder groups, with targeted messages, and using a mix of communication channels to get the message across. An effective communication approach would also include designing the right feedback mechanisms to ensure employee feedback is proactively incorporated.
Measurement
A key success criterion for implementing a strategy is measuring the progress of implementation to understand where the organization is at. It is common for change managers to devise change readiness assessments to measure and test where each part of the business is at. These assessments are conducted throughout the implementation period to understand any changes in readiness and track overall progress. The assessment can in the form of interviews, surveys or ratings by selected stakeholders. Other measurements include training attendance, competency attainment, and communication effectiveness of various channels utilised.
The most important part of charting the implementation of the strategy is measuring the impact of the change. Best practice calls for detailed capturing of change impacts on each part of the organization in a visual way to aid understanding. This includes heatmaps and reports on what the implementation roadmap will mean to the business. The change impact based heatmaps are critical to allow effective planning to balance the need to drive the strategy forward, and balance the business-as-usual activities so that the business is still able to perform.
Effective reporting should call out resourcing impacts, whether there is too much going on from a rollout perspective, potential re-sequencing opportunities, and the overall pace of change within the implementation roadmap. The data should enable effective conversations in terms of how effective the planned roadmap is in reaching strategy objectives and whether the right pace and velocity of change are being planned.
Change leadership
Last but not least driving an effective strategy requires effective leadership skills. The work of the change manager involves assessing existing leadership qualities, including understanding any gaps and challenges. These may be addressed by capability programs.
The change manager also normally takes in working with the sponsor of the change, in this case it could be a member of the c-suite on his or her change leadership skills. Some examples of effective skills include the ability to articulate the end state in a way that the audience can relate to and be enthusiastic about, ability t listen and empathise with employee groups, ability to identify and resolve any change obstacles, the ability sense check and pivot as needed (agility), and the ability to delegate and hold others accountable for achieving prescribed targets.
– Analyse change impacts to the whole system: people, process, technology.
– Map out the impacts of current and planned strategies to better sequence and plan the change
– Look at the capabilities required in the business
– Engagement and communications, involving key players in developing the strategy
– Measurement – business readiness and indicator tracking
– Change leadership is driving traction and behaviour change
– A strategy contains a set of initiatives – the key is to formulate a picture of what will be changing and be able to sequence and prioritise things to design the roadmap effectively
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