Peter Drucker<\/a>\u00a0once said, \u201cculture eats strategy for lunch.\u201d<\/p>\nHow do you prepare your organization so your strategy is not lunch? Make your organization more change-flexible by introducing basic change management practices to manage the people-side of change. This doesn\u2019t mean you have to build a new change management department overnight, but building basic change structures into your organization\u2019s DNA will allow you to support growth, accommodate falling revenues or implement any other strategic objectives.<\/p>\n
Most employees can distinguish a bad strategy or uncoordinated change effort. And, as leaders jump away from your maiden voyage, so will employees. So prepare for your next major change initiative by ensuring you marry good change practices with the following guidelines:<\/p>\n
1. Develop a sound strategy and\u00a0create a \u201cGo-To\u201d or Change Agent Team.<\/h3>\n
Start with a good strategy. That sounds simple enough, but it needs to be vetted and developed through key leaders and influential and knowledgeable employees that can support and evolve the strategy prelaunch. You can have the best change structure, but the strategy has to be effective on its own. To make your strategy solid, you need input from multiple levels of impacted employees to build a better solution. Great leaders create great leaders who in turn create great engaging strategies! Once the initiative begins, this\u00a0Go-To\u00a0team can become your\u00a0Change Agents\u00a0to support the change with their teams.<\/p>\n
2.\u00a0Design a clear and concise one-page Case for Change.<\/h3>\n
Or, in other words, the who, what, why, where, when and how for your initiative. Use a strong change resource to create this message and vet with your\u00a0Change Agent\u00a0team. Beware vague, unrealistic or deceptive messaging! This sounds simple enough, but over the years, I have seen so many initiatives with unclear, poorly directed or misaligned visions. Employees will sniff this out and your initiative will lose credibility or create confusion. If your leaders are engaged and can\u00a0clearly articulate the vision without laughing, you are probably close.<\/p>\n
3.\u00a0Develop a multi-level communication structure that works with your culture.<\/h3>\n
Who do you need to communicate to and when? What do you need them to do? The development of a multi-level communication campaign is required to effectively answer these questions. For example, you may have a project team, steering committee and executive committee meetings where you share information and ask for their support. But what about the impacted groups? You need to consider a multi-level and multi-message approach. This could be in the form of road shows, fairs, intranet sites, digital displays, posters, emails, lunch and learns, training invites, etc. Once in place, you can use this structured time and time again.<\/p>\n
4.\u00a0Build a culture that celebrates the small wins and measures progress.<\/h3>\n
Change is a process, not a one-time announcement. The sponsor and project team need to share the good news. As the word spreads, more employees will become excited and engaged in the initiative. This also includes keeping a pulse on the overall perception of the\u00a0initiative. Use your\u00a0Change Agent\u00a0team to gauge what\u2019s working and what needs to be adjusted. How is this initiative being perceived across the organization? This can be as simple as meeting with your change agents and developing pulse surveys or as complex as dashboards on employee compliance.<\/p>\n
5.\u00a0Reinforce the right behaviors.<\/h3>\n
Recognition reinforces those behaviors and engrains them into the culture. For example, try praise (acknowledgment at meetings, thank you emails, or annual review performance comments) or small gifts (dinner or gift cards). Understand what recognition has worked well in the past for your organization and incorporate these ideas. And finally, don\u2019t forget to address challenging behaviors. If you have a leader that is not supporting the effort, you need to have a conversation and start moving towards alignment.<\/p>\n
6.\u00a0Engage the appropriate change and project resources.<\/h3>\n
Whether you are staffing this internally or externally, gather the right team to lead this change. If you rely too much on internal employees that have five other roles, they won\u2019t be able to give your initiative the time it requires. And if you don\u2019t have change expertise in-house, bring in an external change resource. Change Management is truly a mix of science and art. This person understands how to align leaders and employees, address change challenges, measure progress and develop effective communications, engagement and training strategies and tools.<\/p>\n
Start building these steps into your initiatives to support a changing culture. It will take time, but if you put these steps in place you will have stronger alignment, engagement, acceptance and success, which translate into better return on investment and a much more enjoyable change journey!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Use these six steps to ensure your next initiative successfully marries good change management practices with a sound strategy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":12490,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2024-07-21 21:58:15","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12489"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12489"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=12489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}