Change Management Competency - Change Guides LLC - Guiding Organizations Through Change

Our Change Management Pocket Guide is now an App!

June 4, 2014/0 Comments/in Change Management, Change Management Competency, Change Readiness, Communication, Culture, Employees, Leaders, Resistance, The Change Management 101 Model/by admin

Many of our customers have asked over the past year about offering our Change Management Pocket Guide as an eBook. We listened. Change Guides is very excited to introduce The Change Management Pocket Guide in a mobile App format!

Here is some information about our new App:

The Change Management Pocket Guide mobile application is a practical resource for anyone tasked with making change happen. The tactical, hands-on electronic pocket guide is a fully functioning and integrated mobile app solution for Android and Apple devices.

Like the hard copy book, the Change Management Pocket Guide app uses the Change Management 101 Model to step you through three major phases of managing change: Plan, Do and Sustain. These three major phases are broken down into the two specific stages as you move from one phase to the next. The tools in the Change Management Pocket Guide are used to interactively gather information, set milestones, and measure progress. There are over 30 valuable change management tools and templates that are integrated within the mobile solution so that they can be purchased, downloaded and easily customized to match the requirements of your specific change challenge. Each tool in the change toolbox is detailed, flexible and scalable.

Use the In-App purchase functionality to download the tools you need directly from the Change Management Pocket Guide and customize them for your project. Each downloadable tool has already been created in Word and Excel and can be used as they are explained in the Change Management Pocket Guide.

Overview of App Functionality

The Change Management Pocket Guide mobile app allows you to use the “tools for managing change” in an interactive and useful format. You can read and learn about the Change Management 101 Model™ and use the tools, answer key questions and build your own change management solution with an actionable plan for each change initiative you encounter. The mobile app is designed around the following functional areas:

PDF Reader format: A consistent format with the ability to search, bookmark pages and zoom in/zoom out
Integrated Change Pocket Guide companion templates: In-App purchase functionality for all Change Management Pocket Guide templates
In-App share integration using Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

To Purchase the Change Management Pocket Guide App: Visit the App Store (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/change-pocket-guide/id864653668?mt=8) or the Play Store (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.changeguidesllc.changepocketguide) today to buy the app for your mobile device.

About the developer: Apptimize Group is a mobile application design and development company that creates general and enterprise internally deployed mobile client solutions. Our focus is to create simple and useful mobile apps that make for a memorable customer experience. For more information visit www.ApptimizeGroup.com and contact John Gurnick at [email protected].

The Leadership Looking Glass

November 21, 2013/0 Comments/in Change Management, Change Management Competency, Communication, Leaders, Uncategorized/by admin

Leadership is the core of change. When it comes to change within an organization, leadership is the most important contributor to success… or failure. Employees watch their leaders relentlessly. They know a leader’s action speaks louder than their words. If the ‘walk’ doesn’t follow the ‘talk’ then the employees won’t follow either.

When it comes to Change Management there are key behaviors we look for in our leaders. In our book The 8 Constants of Change we note that these behaviors include:

Get involved in the change – by attending meetings, process reviews, workshops and making time to attend executive training. Your attendance and participation signals that these activities are important.
Communicate the Change – by getting the message out there, ensuring it is understood, updating the information as progress is made, and paying attention to issues and concerns.
Reward people for doing the right thing – by encouraging employees to get involved in the project, rewarding them publicly and maintaining a regular contact with the change management team. People who are doing a really great job need to be recognized and rewarded.
Walk the talk – by showing what is really important in action rather than just words. There are endless projects competing for time and resources, how a Leader supports any given project reflects directly the likelihood of success or failure.
Keep a positive attitude – by expecting the learning curve and knowing that productivity will dip while changes are put in place. Be patient and maintain that positive outlook, even if the messages are negative.

There are a couple additional behaviors that aren’t included in The 8 Constants but certainly merit a mention here:

Never stop nurturing – Mentor the team, and in turn you may learn new ways of thinking and approaching things. This effort creates a working infrastructure of shared values, ideas and accomplishments.
Try what might fail – Empower the team to try things that aren’t necessarily guaranteed to work. Look at any outcome of an effort as either success or education. Both are invaluable.

The times when leaders are tested most is when they’re not looking…in a hallway conversation, a passing comment or even a facial expression. Can you hold up the Leadership Looking Glass and know that your actions reflect your words?

So How Big of a Deal is This Change, Anyway?

September 26, 2013/0 Comments/in Change Management, Change Management Competency, Communication, Culture, Leaders, The Change Management 101 Model/by admin

During the first few weeks of a new project it is not unusual to hear concerns expressed about how impacted employees can take on more, or refocus their attention or even survive a major change initiative. Typically these concerns are expressed from an intuitive or empathetic perspective. Management or team members may not know for a fact that the stresses of change will be challenging, but their first-hand knowledge of their team or unit can typically be right on target. So the question becomes: How can the change management team capture the data needed to identify the impact to the people of the organization?

Well, there’s a tool for that! The People Impact Assessment tool, newly added to the 2nd edition of The Change Management Pocket Guide is an assessment that measures the impact that a change will have on people within an organization. A well implemented assessment will show how the changes will impact people who work in the organization, identify where within the organization to focus change management activity, contribute to the Change Management Workplan, and ultimately help the team get people in the organization ready, willing, and able to work in new ways.

Dimensions that need to be explored in order to assess the impact of the change on people include:

Roles – How will the changes impact primary roles and job tasks?
Staffing – Will the size of the workforce be impacted?
Relationships – How will the organizational structure change? Will there be new types of workgroups or interactions?
Employee Competencies – Are new skills or knowledge required?
Decision Making – Will there be changes in scope and decisions that employees and managers make?
Culture – How must the culture change to support new behaviors?

Assessing the people impact of any given change can become a huge effort. It may require more than a spreadsheet to manage the data and could include several people to help gather the data needed. And like many change management tools, the people impact assessment will grow and evolve as the project progresses. New data that surfaces as the project progresses will require updating the assessment.

But, it is worth the effort. A complete understanding of the impacts of the change on people is really the basis for most of the work that a change manager or change management team does. If you have limited resources and can only focus on a few change management activities, consider a people impact assessment. Knowing how people will be impacted and where to focus your time and change management resources will be well worth the effort.

Assessing Effort to Manage the People Side of Change

August 19, 2013/0 Comments/in Change Management, Change Management Competency, The Change Management 101 Model/by admin

For years, people have asked us how we “scope” consulting work on projects. So we finally decided to create a tool that captures how we decide how much effort will be required to manage the people aspects of a change. The tool is called the Change Management Effort Assessment. The tool will be included in the upcoming second edition of The Change Management Pocket Guide.

Sure, we would love it if you ran out and go the book, but you can think about these same ideas on your own to assess how much effort will be involved in managing the people side of an organizational change.

Of course, like any tool, it is not a magic bullet. But it provides the process and the critical considerations to define how much effort will be required to plan and execute an effective change management strategy. When deciding how many resources to apply to a change management project, it is important to consider both the degree of the change, as well as the expected difficulty of managing the change.

The degree of the change is an assessment of how broad the change will reach, and how different the new ways of working are from the current ways. The things to think about when assessing the degree of the change are: how many people are impacted by the change, the severity of the gap between the way things are done today and the way they need to be done in the future, and the extent to which there are other projects or changes going on within the environment that will add complexity to the change.

The difficulty of managing the change includes many factors that make changes more challenging to manage. They include things such as the involvement of unions or legal issues, the volume and frequency of communications that will be needed, the level of training that will be required, and the degree of changes in performance measures and HR structures that will be needed to support the change.

Situations that involve a “low degree of change” and a “low difficulty of managing the change” naturally require less resources than situations that have higher degrees of change or more difficulty in managing the change. Based on the results of the assessment, managing change could be an activity that is managed by a team member along with their other project responsibilities, or a full change management team that is dedicated to managing the people aspects of the change.

Of course, every change is unique. A change that impacts 30,000 people around the world by asking them all to change one small thing that they do on a weekly basis has a high degree of change, and is very complex (think about the language and time zone issues, the different leadership structures that need to be involved, etc…). At the same time, a change that impacts only 50 people but changes their entire jobs from top to bottom also has a high degree of change, and is very complex (think about the changes in compensation and benefits that might result, the potential for letting some people go, etc…).

Don’t forget to use what you know about the organization, the change, and the people involved. But using a Change Management Effort Assessment will help you get a good head start on defining how much effort will be needed to manage the people aspects of the change.

If you want to see our version of a Change Management Effort Assessment, check out the Change Guides website (www.changeguidesllc.com) to find out when you can get a copy of the upcoming Change Management Pocket Guide. And let us know how it is working for you!

What Kind of Person Manages Change?

February 7, 2013/0 Comments/in Change Management, Change Management Competency, Uncategorized/by admin

Change is tough for organizations, and helping people navigate through change takes a special kind of person. There are of course leaders that need to champion and sponsor change. But there are also people that need to actually manage the change and help people in the organization work through the transition.

There is a lot of hard work involved in helping people in an organization change the way they work. So what are the characteristics of great change managers?

They’re empathetic. The ability to continuously ask and answer the question “what would I want and need if I were in their shoes” is a critical skill for an effective change manager. Having empathy and understanding what others are experiencing and what will help build commitment is the core of managing change. When it comes down to it, anyone who has a good strong sense of the golden rule (“do unto others as you would have others do unto you”) has the basic stuff to be a good manager of change.
They’re good communicators. That may seem obvious, but it is really an important skill for successfully managing change. Good change managers communicate simply. They interpret complex messages and distill them down to simple, easy bits. Effective change managers tailor their message to their audiences, and they use lots of different communication vehicles well.
They are naturally influential and generate informal authority. Effective change managers naturally draw others to them. They don’t need formal authority to have influence over others and they are able to leverage their networks to make things happen. They are persuasive and likeable.
They have courage. It is not always easy being on the front lines of an organizational change. Change managers are often times put in a position to be “representing” the interests of the people impacted by change with the people who are creating change. That can put the change manager in situations where they need to say and do things that are unpopular. They may need to tell leaders and or associates things that they don’t want to hear. Change managers need to be willing to call things like they see them, even if it is unpopular and not typically expected in an organization.
They are discreet and maintain confidences. Change managers can be put in positions of having sensitive information. During focus group meetings, interviews, or just hallway conversations, it is not uncommon for people to share specific information about specific individuals with change managers. If a change manager divulges information that they have agreed to keep private even once, they lose credibility and trust. It is imperative that change managers know how to keep a secret.
They’re organized. Some people assume that managing change is mostly art and little science. But managing change usually requires tremendous exercises in logistics and orchestration. Being organized is a critical skill for effectively managing change.
A bias for action. Change management has a bad reputation among people who think managing change is only about asking questions and analyzing people. Managing change is both art and science. While questions should be asked and assessments made, real change comes when action takes place. If someone doesn’t actually do something with the results of assessments, the exercises are moot.
They get their hands dirty. Change managers can be speaking to executive committees in the morning, and stuffing envelopes in the afternoon. Good change managers are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and get stuff done. Anyone who is not able or willing to dig into the nitty gritty (editing a poster, developing talking points for leaders, editing an agenda for an important meeting) is not going to be as effective managing change as someone who is.
They are subject matter experts in the field of organizational change management. They understand the human and organizational dynamics of change, as well as the many methodologies that describe ways that change can be managed. In addition to general change management understanding, great change managers have experience in several different change environments to see how change unfolds. Having “stories” to share is always helpful when managing change.
They are personally comfortable with ambiguity and change. An effective change manager can navigate through ambiguity relatively well, and is more comfortable than others working in a changing environment. Being part of a change project is by its very nature an environment of change. But it is also true that most changes are not linear, stable activities. There are ups and downs, periods of acceleration and periods of deceleration. People who are not comfortable with the ebbs and flow and the ambiguity of change (scope changes, a new leader that enters the picture, changes in direction) will have a tough time effectively managing change. An effective change manager quickly assesses a shifting situation and adapts to the new environment. And they don’t get upset or anxious about it.

Changing for the Workforce of the Future

July 25, 2012/0 Comments/in Change Management, Change Management Competency, Change Readiness, Communication, Culture, Leaders, Uncategorized/by admin

Can you imagine fully half of the people who work for your company being either contractors such as the best roofing company in Denver, CO, temporary workers, or freelancers? That may very well be the future we face.

A 2012 Economic Intelligence Unit Study shows that by the year 2030, 50% of the workforce will be made up of contingent workers. The U.S. contingent workforce is made up of self-employed individuals, independent service firms, entrepreneurs and temporary workers. By 2020, 40 percent of American workers, or nearly 65 million people, will be contingent, and shortly thereafter that percentage is expected to rise to 50 percent.

Others confirm that the use of contingent workers is already on the rise, and will continue. The Bureau of Labor Statistics as well as reports from the Staffing Industry Analysts, a research and advisory firm focused on staffing and contingent labor, have demonstrated that the number of contingent workers has been increasing year over year for a few years. And in June 2011, over 34% of the 2000 organizations surveyed by the McKinsey Global Institute said they plan to use more temporary labor in the next five years.

The trend is clear. But are organizations ready for it?

Work in the future will be more collaborative, flexible, and goal oriented. Temporary workers will need to be sharp, and stay sharp, to keep their jobs. An organiztaion with more and more people flowing into and out of it will need to be radically different than today.

A current client of ours is working on a large project that requires a lot of consultants. A full time staff person spends over 80% of her time giving out and tracking computers that are given to consultants. Can you imagine if half of their workforce was contingent? If the task of managing assets is so cumbersome now, the process and technology implications of a 50% contingent workforce would be astounding.

We have several large clients that are working on becoming more “digitally enabled” in order to meet the needs of their customers. But with all we have heard from clients about embracing technology to meet the needs of future customers, we have not heard any talk at all about how to be more digitally enabled to meet the needs of their future workers. The shift to more temporary workers will change how an organization works with its people in profound ways.

Current technology certainly makes workers more “plug and play” ready. But it will need to make significant strides to meet the needs of a future more transient workforce.

Our clients will have to re-think how they manage people, how groups form and disband to tackle work, how people are on-boarded and rolled-off, how corporate cultures are built and maintained, how they attract and evaluate temporary workers.

They will also need to embrace technology and new digital technologies in an entirely new way. More digital maturity can help organizations build stronger connection to their staff… especially temporary staff. Not only allowing access, but also targeting communication, facilitating relationships between roles, connecting people to other people and ideas.

Organizations that will win with workers of the future will be more mobile, and will be more agile by providing more personalized or customized needs for each temporary worker. They will flex based on the work, the location, the worker, and the required interfaces with other people within the organization.

If you are thinking about where your organization will be in 20 years, think about your customers, your products, and your markets. The demands they place on your organization will certainly challenge you to change. But also think about your staff. You might be surprised at the magnitude of change that meeting their unique needs challenges you to also.

Organizational Muscles to Manage Change

May 8, 2012/0 Comments/in Change Management, Change Management Competency, Communication, Culture, Leaders/by admin

We have been working with several large organizations lately that are trying to build their internal ability to manage ongoing change. Change is the new normal for many organizations. Managing how people adapt and adopt change is something that many are seeing as a critical competency.

Change Management is the discipline of helping people in an organization get ready, willing, and able to work in new ways that are required by a change. Many leaders that see a long string of changes ahead of them are looking to build an internal Change Management competency. They, in effect, are trying to build their change muscles so that they can handle the seemingly endless series of changes headed for them.

Organizations that build a Change Management competency do a few things.

First, they foster leadership sponsorship for employing Change Management. Leaders at the highest levels know what Change Management is and why managing change will help them change more successfully. And they are committed to making Change Management a strong capability in the organization. They are willing to stand up in front of the effort, to put money where their mouth is, and walk the talk.

Second, these organizations use a common methodology and model for managing change. Having a common Change Management framework across the organization builds a common language that shapes the way people think and talk about change. A common model also introduces methods and tools that can help people in the organization actually do the work of managing change.

Third, organizations that have a Change Management competency have a broad based understanding of the value of Change Management throughout all levels of the organization. Everyone has a baseline understanding of why people make the difference between successful organizational change and unsuccessful change, and why managing change is important.

These organizations also each have a strong and capable Change Management team. A group of people in the organization who are focused on supporting the organization as they begin incorporating Change Management into their projects and change efforts helps the new practices take hold. The Change Management group has highly capable team members, clear roles and responsibilities, and an appropriate or organization structure.

Lastly, organizations that have a strong Change Management competency reinforce effectively managed change. When projects succeed because teams have helped people in the organization engage and adopt new work, they are celebrated and rewarded. Leaders eagerly to put effective changes in the limelight, and the organization learns what successful change looks like.

If you see change coming at your organization like a speeding train, don’t hide. Instead, develop a change management competency. That way, you can face change head-on now, and you will be ready for all of the changes to come in the future.