Leading Change (Part 2)

Welcome back everyone!

One of the great parts of blogging while you're in the middle of other major projects is that every day's meetings and interactions give you more topics to write about. This week had it's fair share of interesting interactions, but you'll have to tune in later for those since we're in the middle of a two-part series.

In Part 1, we saw that leading change could be broken down in to two distinct phases based on the different activities and different emphasis on communication between the Initiation Phase and the Implementation Phase. We focused our efforts in Part 1 on the initiation phase. If you haven’t read Part 1, you can find it [here].Even if you have read it, sometimes it's good to recap.

There are two parts to Leading change: the first part is about developing the change initiative, and the second part is about implementing the change.

The kinds of things you do, as a leader, and the kinds of conversations you have are different in each of these phases.

The Initiation Phase is everything required to develop your change initiative up to the point where you get the approvals and resources to move ahead. The steps involved are:

• Identify the symptom
• Uncover the root cause or problem
• Validate the problem and impact to the organization
• Vision and Intent
• Course of Action (Options)
• Objectives and Tasks (The Plan)
• Stakeholder Support and Overcoming Resistance
• Permission and Resourcing to Proceed

At the end of the Initiation Phase you should have the following:

• Problem Definition (Root Cause)
• Business Impact
• Guiding Vision/Shared Vision and Organizational Intent to Resolve the Issue
• High Level Plan (Objectives and Tasks)
• Preliminary Stakeholder Analysis (Supporters and Resistors)

With those, you’re ready to change gears for the Implementation Phase. If you really want to get good at this, use our free Planning Worksheet here. The worksheet covers more than just the Initiation phase, it also covers what you need for the Implementation phase. Download the PDF and keep it handy as we go through the process.

Implementation phase

Where the Initiation phase is mostly linear, you have to do the steps in order, the Implementation phase is a lot less linear. This means you need to be monitoring and reacting to things on an ongoing basis.

Another name of the implementation phase is Sustainment, because you’ll spend a lot of your time and energy on sustaining the change in progress, especially when things get hard.

What kinds of hard?

• Extra work on people
• New processes and procedures – not habitual, require more conscious effort and energy – actually more draining therefore feels like extra work
• Emotional uncertainty – job security, even simple things like ‘Will I like my job after this change?’
  • This is not to be dismissed
  • Especially when combined with new process/procedures drain
• Organizational uncertainty
  • Especially in a ‘burning building’ scenario
  • Will this be enough to save the team/department/organization?
  • Is this all wasted effort?
  • Was this actually an emergency or just a tactic?

Key activities in the implementation phase:

• Establish teams
• Finalize detailed planning
• Initiate work
• Proactively remove obstacles
• Monitor and re-motivate team members
• Highlight successes
• Identify and address problems and risk
• Manage stakeholder communication and messaging
• Achieve success and make changes permanent

Establish teams

These are the teams that will execute on the actual work. These are the subject matter experts and the individual and team contributors.

From your planning you should know what skill-sets you need; which ones can be found inside your organization and which ones you’ll need to find from outside. You’ll also know what your budget constraints look like.

You have two other concerns when building your team:

• Ensure the people on your team have understood and bought into your vision of the future
• Understand conflicting priorities – if your team members are pulled away at key times, or are focused on other things, you may be missing key people at critical times

Finalize detailed planning

This was started at a high level during the initiation phase, enough to get the estimated resourcing required. Once you have the subject matter experts assembled, they can finalize the details of the plans based on their unique skill-sets and knowledge. You may be an expert (or may have been an expert) at some of the things required to move the project forward but you’re not an expert at everything.

Initiate work

Once the planning is complete you can get started on the work.

You won’t be doing the work, you’ll be coordinating it. Don’t under-estimate the importance and the need to keep the vision clear and fresh in everyone’s mind. It answers the question ‘Why are we doing this?’ when things become challenging.

Proactively remove obstacles

While your team is working in the present, your view is at least two weeks out, in some cases months out, depending on the nature of the resources you may need to call on or the type of obstacles you may need to remove. If your team has to stop working while you deal with an obstacle, it means you weren’t working far enough ahead.

Proactively removing obstacles also applies to people, communications and relationships.

Monitor and re-motivate team members

In the initiation phase, it was all about getting people aligned and excited to start the change process. In the execution phase, it’s all about keeping people motivated to carry out the work, especially when the ‘newness’ of it has worn off and the daily grind makes it a challenge.

Your job is to help people keep the goal in mind. Help them to see that today’s hard work is building to something worthwhile. You need to keep people motivated when things get hard:

• Help them see progress
• Deal with rumors, concerns, and obstacles

People want to know that the pain is worth it, that they are making a difference and that they’ll be ok when the change is complete.

This is one of the reasons to structure the work to deliver early/quick wins and ongoing wins/visible progress. Your job is to highlight these successes and help the entire team (and stakeholders) acknowledge and celebrate those wins.

Highlight successes

Hard work is being done every day. The progress and the successes need to be reinforced regularly or even the most dedicated people will eventually lose faith and give up.

So many people will be tempted to give up before reaching their goals because they don’t know how close they are. Your job is to help them see the big picture and keep them motivated towards the goal.

Identify and address problems and risks

Watch, listen, think.

Keep in contact with your supporters and resistors. Your resistors will continue to act, sometimes overly, sometimes not. Your supporters need to be engaged and updated. Sometimes changing external circumstances can turn supporters into resistors too. If you don’t keep relationships and communications up, then you risk missing the early warning signs.

In many cases the risks stem from people getting tired, losing sight of the vision and what they are working towards. This is why the vision (originally your vision, but becomes the shared vision as people believe and follow) is so important. You may have it in mind all the time, but others will lose sight of it unless you are active in communicating it. You can’t just talk about it as you did during the initiation phase, from a "Let’s start this" messaging, because it will not resonate. They’ve already started. In the execution phase, your conversation about the shared vision needs to incorporate the following:

• The problem and its impact – why did you collectively start down this path to change
• The value of what you are doing and how it outweighs the current challenges
• The progress you’ve made so far, your wins as a team
• That the individual and group effort have had an impact, that people have made a difference even if they can’t see it from their perspective (because they are deep in the work)
• What new help or support is coming to assist with the next part of the work – why the team can keep going even though they are tired and there is more work to be done
• How they can reach out to you for help if they encounter obstacles – what you want them to do instead of giving up!

Manage stakeholder communications and messaging

Your stakeholder messaging is an extension of your focus on the vision (above) and the re-motivation of your team. You have two main goals with your key stakeholders:

• Make sure you don’t lose support when things get hard
• Make sure you can use your wins to convert more Resistors to Supporters

The core of your messaging is based on three components:

• Refreshed and reiterated vision
• Successes and progress in the change initiative – especially in the areas that matter to them
• Managed risks
  • more important if their people or teams are feeling the strain of the change
  • help them understand that you are aware and working to resolve issues
  • they need to see you helping solve the problems their people are facing

Implied in the messaging above, but important enough to repeat here, is that your conversations with key stakeholders needs to be in one-on-one settings. You may have town-hall style update meetings, but they should never happen before you’ve had one-on-one sessions with your key stakeholders unless you want the embarrassment of a blow-up in your public meeting.

As you continue to interact with your key stakeholders, you should be learning new things about them. Your stakeholder analysis just keeps getting refined and keeps getting used. You don’t stop referring to it. You should be constantly learning new things about your stakeholders, either yourself or through your network.

Achieve success and make the changes permanent

One of the biggest challenges in organizational change initiatives large and small is the resistance to change. It hits in every phase and in every stage. Resistance to change is a very human thing, even the people who objectively stand to benefit often resist the change that will help them.

At the end of the project, especially when people are tired, it’s easy to want to declare a project complete and move on to something else. Some resistors are waiting for that very moment. Once the organization focuses on its next objective, there are individuals who will try to revert back to the old way of doing things.

Your change initiative isn’t complete until that stops and the ‘new’ way of doing things becomes ‘the way of doing things’.

Any of the points above, or in last week’s blog post [here] could fill an entire blog article or more. If there’s one in particular you want to see us do a deeper dive on, then comment on the Facebook page and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss out when new articles are posted.

If you didn't download it earlier, don’t miss the free planning worksheet [here].