Speaker #0Welcome to Ask Dr. Change. I'm Dr. Linda Ackerman-Anderson. I'm happy to have you join me today to explore how to seriously uplevel your leadership and consulting to transformational changes, all through conscious change leadership. Welcome. Today's episode is an interesting one. It's about you reflecting on your approach to supporting major changes in your organizations. Whether you are a change management professional, that's the main focus of this, project management, or change leadership. What I've done today is put together a number of factors that I see are limitations to particularly the change management field having the level of impact, not only it can have, but it should have. And so I have a list of things that I'd like to describe to you. and have you reflect on, is this the way you're approaching it? Is this the way your organization is expecting you to approach it? Are they receptive to this? And do they potentially see a shift in any of these approaches, any of these practices might offer a welcome advantage or significant upgrade in your approach to supporting change? So I'm going to go over the list one item at a time and give you just a moment to reflect on how you are doing and whether or not it's possible for you to shift into a different practice, hopefully up-level your repertoire for how you're coaching or consulting to your change clients. So let me start with leadership alignment. Leadership alignment is a critical piece where a lot of change management practitioners are embedded, if not buried, in a project team without access to the leadership team, to the executive team, or a changed leadership team that's been created to consult to or advise on or oversee a major change effort. I see basically over and over and over again where there isn't leadership alignment. where leaders may have nodded their heads that a certain change effort, a certain project is required, but they aren't really aligned on the outcome, but more certainly the process of how that project is going to be run, and that they haven't really given thought to the implications on them personally for how they may need to lead individually or collectively. to lead the change effort, especially if it's large scale and transformational in nature. So how well are you positioned to influence leadership alignment? Do you have access? Do you have legitimacy? Do you have permission to address how well the leadership team is taking on the change effort or the change leadership team, how they're navigating the change effort? These are not in any priority order, by the way, there are a whole variety of them, But that's a good question. place to start? Do you have access? That leads me to another one, which is access to the sponsor. Do you have the ability to talk with the sponsor, influence the sponsor, coach the sponsor? Is the sponsor doing what they need to do to stay engaged, to stay active, to stay really in the driver's seat for the change effort? Or are they the kind of sponsor that shows up periodically or you go to them periodically with a status report? Thank you very much. Keep on going. That's not sponsorship, especially in transformational change. So do you have access and the ability particularly to influence how sponsors are leading, how sponsors are sponsoring their change efforts? Are they championing? Are they modeling? Are they encouraging? Are they coaching? All of these are ways that we can influence sponsors. Another one I want to reference is poor governance or incomplete governance of a change effort. So there's sponsor. There's probably a project manager or project leader. There may be a few of them. Do we have a project team? Do we have other teams or work stream teams? Is the project well thought out and organized so that we have clear governance? And governance isn't just the right people named to a role. It's how they're organized. It's how they meet and interact with one another, how they influence each other. In particular, how well decisions are being made. Who's got authority for what? And how do we monitor that decisions are actually being carried out? So again, what is your relationship to how the project is being governed? Can you influence how the structure is put together? Who is important in various key roles? And are they executing according to their roles? So governance is a really critical one. One other aspect of governance is how the change governance, how the change leaders are interfacing with ongoing operational governance. That's another piece that may need some requirements, especially if a project needs to be re-scoped or rescheduled or alteration of resources, major changes that might impact operational governance. So are we positioned to influence there? One of the major key pieces of change management is that there are a whole repertoire of tools that we use. Assessments, analyses, analytics. And one of the concerns that I see is that change managers have a repertoire of various tools that they apply. They surface data and that data is delivered and that's the end of it. Our recommendation is that a change effort is process driven, not tool driven, but process driven and tool informed so that the tools are used in their rightful time. And something happens with the data that... actually they generate. And it brings me to another concern, which is projects that are data-driven versus strategy-driven. Now, some data is absolutely needed, you know, various assessments, resources, alignments, etc. But having data be what is absolutely the driver is not adequate to the twists and turns and course corrections that large-scale transformational change requires. So tool-driven, data-driven versus process-driven, tool and data informed. We want to make sure that something happens with the data that's generated. Frequently, the change management people are not in a position to use that data to alter process, strategy, timeline, resourcing, capacity, etc. And so positioning, again, to influence what the data means for the success of the effort is absolutely essential. One of the other concerns that I have about the positioning of change management is that frequently it is tapped to get involved when there are people challenges that show up. So resistance or a communication need or a training need, that's when change management gets involved. Now, I know it's evolved over these years. And so that's important. What I'd like to see it evolved into. is that it's more strategic. It's more influential over the process of change so that by prediction, we can minimize the negative impact on people if from the very beginning, not reactive when it shows up, but from the very beginning that we're designing the change to minimize the negative impact on people. That's absolutely essential. And there are a variety of strategies to do that from the beginning. not waiting for design, not waiting for impact analysis, not waiting especially for implementation, but much earlier on when we're determining the need for the change, the design requirements for the change, and special people impacts that can be designed so that they have negative influence on our stakeholders. One of the concerns I have about how a lot of change management people are being used on project teams is that they're considered to be doers. They're the ones that develop the communication plan or develop the managing resistance plan or the stakeholder map, which all of it is essential, but they're not necessarily seen as strategic advisors to influence the process. They're doers versus strategic advisors. And both are needed. there are plenty of things for change management folks to do, but that they're not relegated to do a role. They're actually asked in and given voice around the strategy in advance of what needs to happen so that there is minimal negative impact. That leads me to another one where change management is frequently brought in farther downstream in a project. And without attention to upstream, where we're setting a change effort up for success, or midstream, where analyzing, designing, and looking at impacts, frequently change management comes in for downstream. And it's a big miss, actually, that we don't have influence upstream to leadership, to conditions for success. to setting in motion the mechanisms to help redesign, course correct, adjust as we're discovering things need to be adjusted over time. Change management isn't necessarily positioned to have that level of input or influence. Now, what's your relationship with a project manager? What's your role on a project team? Are you in a position to be an advisor, to be asked in looking at implications? the good, the bad, and the ugly for what's being planned and how it might need to be addressed or adjusted over time. One of the other concerns that I have is that many projects develop two plans, a project plan, which addresses how the content solution will be implemented, and a change management plan that addresses how people will be informed or engaged or trained. We're dealing with resistance on the adoption curve. Our bias is that there is one plan, an integrated plan, because there are people implications at the very beginning when the content work is beginning to be designed and planned for implementation. There's so many people dynamics that need to be addressed there as a part of the plan. And so two separate plans, not an advocate. I suggest one integrated plan from the very beginning upstream through design, through impact analysis and planning, all the way through implementation, adoption, and sustainment of results. Integrated plan. One other concern that I have is how we're dealing with communications. One size does not fit all in communications. Various audiences, various stakeholder groups, various parts of the organization or levels of the organization need different information, different stories about what's happening around them and to them. And so being able to tailor communications to the audience over the course of a change effort, being able to develop communications to put to bed rumors, really essential. And so... Having corporate communications that is designed for one communication for everybody is helpful, but not adequate. So change communications really needs to be tailored to audience, to timing, to needs, to things that show up in the moment. How are you handling communications? I do not advise giving the authority to approve a communication over to corporate communications. Now, that might get corporate communications' nose out of joint. That's not my intention. The reality is change communications is very responsive, absolutely needs to be tailored to the moment, to the audience, and we need to establish the capability for change communications in partnership with corporate, but not driven by corporate. The last thing I want to feature is the importance for change consultants to have influence over the design of the change process. The Change Leaders Roadmap starts with the wake-up call, insight, we need to have a change effort, all the way through sustained business benefits. There's a lot to be influenced from a four-quadrant perspective. And if you recall my talking about that in previous episodes, four quadrants is addressing mindset, addressing behavior change, addressing culture change. as well as all the content change in the systems quadrant, whether that's structure, business process, implementation of new products and services, etc. So four quadrant in the design of the process, absolutely essential. What we're after here, really, with almost all of these issues, is the positioning of the change management or change consultant on the team within the governance. access to the sponsor, access to the leaders. That's really the underlying dynamic here in every one of these concerns that I have about how change management is currently being done. Now, I'm not saying that you do these things, but I'm hopefully having you consider whether or not you do, or that is how the organization expects you to operate. A lot of this is positioning change management. Lower on the influence scale than I would have it be, which is why we emphasize so much about change leadership and, in particular, conscious change leadership. so that we can raise these issues, no blame, no shame, but raise these issues as limitations on the positive impact and contribution that change management has when supporting or contributing to a major change effort. What we're after here is change leadership has to do with the leaders and the influence over the process. And conscious change leadership has to do with the leaders and sponsors' mindsets, behaviors, relationships, assumptions they're making about how the project ought to be led, and then influencing the design of the process so that it can actually be led to lead in the most expedited way, efficient way, to sustain business benefits. So my intention today is to raise a variety of areas that are potentially limitations to how change management is currently being executed in organizations. The list is not exhaustive. There are other things. Perhaps any of these items has triggered something else for you, another dynamic for you. And so I encourage you just to think about these things and think about the triggers that may have happened in listening to these items. Are you set up to have the most important, most powerful, most direct impact on the success of the change effort? And if you could, what else would you do? How else could you position yourself? How else could you influence? If you could only dot, dot, dot, I would have you think about those issues, those areas, complete the sentence. And from a personal reflection standpoint, I would have you pay attention to your reaction, listening to all of these limitations to see, are you in agreement? Are you frustrated by it? Are you defensive around it? What's going on inside of you that would have you stay in these positions, which we're seeing as limitations to the effectiveness of change management? And so I encourage you to do some self-reflection on how you are in relation to these or what else might have been triggered that you see as a limitation. Then, of course, the challenge is. How do you go about changing these things? How could you raise these areas as limitations on how the organization is viewing its change consulting expertise, whether that's project management, change management, organization development, or change leadership? How could you raise the issues? What's at stake? What's the cost? What's missing? And if your organization is data-oriented, how can you generate the data about the cost you or the lost opportunity here by continuing with these old patterns. Change management is evolving. Change leadership is evolving, hopefully towards conscious change leadership, which would give us the opportunity to raise these issues and do something about them. So I encourage you to look at how you can evolve your practice, your repertoire, your relationships, and your ability to influence, coach, and advise in ways that will support the success of the change efforts. I hope you found some value in these considerations and can take action on up-leveling your approach. Thanks for spending some time with me today. I hope you gained some valuable insights for your work. Please send me your questions and challenges by going to askdrchange.com.
