Building Change Capability: A CMP Conversation

At our most recent Change Management Professionals meetup held at SHK we were delighted to see  some new faces - people who worked on the peripheral of change management or wanted to develop further skills. One of these new faces (Aaron Robinson of Ubeetech) volunteered to do a write up of the event -- and what a write up it is! Bravo Aaron! I've included the write up as download at the bottom of the post * . Thanks also to Rebecca Cattran for hosting, and SHK for providing the venue.

Introduction

Recently I attended the July 18 - Melbourne Change Management Professionals Meet up, allured by the promise of Building Change Capability over a glass of red wine. As a Business Development Manager, I went along with an open mind to see what I could learn from others my senior in Change Management and I wasn’t disappointed!Below are some of the notes from our Meet up and I can’t wait until the next one. Big thanks to Rebecca Cattran for chairing the meeting and leading the discussions into something really meaningful.

No Trust = Minimal and ineffective change

Not to oversimplify the whole evening into one overriding theme, but the importance of “trust” for effective and meaningful change management was right up there. How do you build, manage and reward “trust” through successful engagements and implementations of change?Take the horror story shared, of “a large-scale ERP implementation that with 8 hours to go until commencement of training, cancelled the training courses and disrupted delegates who were flying from across the country to attend.” The client never regained trust in the solution being delivered or the solution provider managing the change.Lack of trust can lead to a horror story, or like with the story above, a horror story can lead to a lack of trust. Either way, trust is vital to not only ensuring a client gets the most out of change that we’re implementing for them, but also to ensuring that they are willing to work with us to build change capability within their organisation for after the project at-hand is finished.

How to communicate building change capability to a customer

What isn’t communicated is pretty difficult to be understood by the customer. So as change management professionals, let’s nut out some common language that customers can understand when it comes to change management and change capability – it was suggested. What followed was a really interesting open discussion about the terms we all use and what works best, given our respective experiences. What language do you find effective?Adaptability, flexibility, resilience and agility were all nominated as attributes of change capability. But who defines change capability? More importantly, how is it defined within the organisations we deal with? Internally is it the line managers, HR, recruitment manager? Well, that’s our job to find out!I admit that it might seem a little ambiguous to say that the answer to these questions depends on the scope / type of change, but that’s the truth of it and that’s where we put our change manager hat on and go to work for our client. What you might find yourself, and a lot of the workshop attendee’s have found in the past, is that our job is made harder by the fact that sometimes it’s best not to call change “change” and it can be difficult knowing when and who that rule applies to.Even when you are able to identify an individual within the customer organisation that is passionate about the end game (e.g. Change Capability Champion!), you’ve got to be mindful that often even they don’t want to be associated with the change by title. It’s as if labelling someone a “Change Capability Manager” or “Change Champion” gives the rest of the organisation the right to lump that person who has “change” in their title with all the stuff they’d rather not manage themselves.

We’re getting to the bottom of it!

Later in the evening when we broke into groups: something I took away as a nice, practical tool for communicating change lifecycle to stakeholders, staff and particularly to management was shared by one of the participants. Here’s how I understood it (below) and [while we’re on the topic of communicating] forgive me if I’ve miss-communicated the diagram in any way! 

Fig 1.1 “Individual stakeholder stages in change lifecycle”

  

Communicating to executive management their role as “Sponsors”

The role we want executive management to play in building change capability ongoing or even for one particular project is nine times out of ten to be “sponsors of the change.” It sounds like an easy role and it can be if you can build the confidence within the executive management team to carry out this role properly.In a nutshell what it means is that they will have an understanding of how to gauge the individual stakeholder stages in change lifecycle (Fig 1.1) and if anyone at [particularly in the “Aware” or “Understand” stages] questions or tries to derail the project/change, the executive management team will sponsor and support it just by saying “this is important and it needs to be done.”Give them KPIs to understand what their team of line managers are doing and explain that with their support, a really important behavioural “tick box” is likely to be checked by those responsible for embracing the change further down the line.

 Middle / Line Managers need to get their hands dirty!

Explain to middle management and get them on-board with interacting, understanding, committing and internalising all aspects of the change ahead of their staff. The important thing: make sure they are further along the change lifecycle individually, than the staff they manage and you’ll make their life easier.

Workshop with staff to explain the benefits to them

Staff may want to know how they’re affected directly, but try and relate benefits to them, with engaging the staff member in the bigger picture and end-game benefits of the change for the organisation.Encourage staff to follow, adopt, internalise, teach and share. Initially they will need to take the lead from their line manager (provided their Line Manager is doing their job, as above). You want those with initiative who are early adopters, to feel good about providing some tuition to their peers, where it makes sense and doesn’t disrupt that person’s own job function for the organisation.

How are we doing? (Keep the conversation going)

I think in the two hour catch up we had recently; the change management professionals group had a pretty good scratch at the surface of building change capability.But if you’ve still got an itch for digging into change capability or other areas of change management, post here and share your thoughts, we’d love to hear from you!* Aaron's write up in UBT_Change Capability Workshop_120802