Human Factors and Change catches up with Sharon Connolly, founder of changesuperhero.com.au
Sharon is a full-time Change Manager working in the banking and finance industry. Sharon is also the founder of Change Superhero. Change Superhero helps ease the working lives of change and project professionals. Her courses help us get the most out of Microsoft Office. Unique, downloadable templates are available for modification for our change initiatives.
Sharon’s background (before leading change) was in IT training and communications/brand consulting. This seemingly eclectic background has come together nicely, as change management often combines distinct disciplines.
Human Factors and Change: Sharon Connolly interview 1 (Sharon’s background)
I don’t know how she summons the energy to manage her full-time role and Change Superhero. Yet Sharon quickly points out the synergy between her full-time position and her fun in helping the change community after hours.
As I point out in The Change Manager’s Companion, Change Superhero helps project and change professionals alike. We can access a range of helpful PowerPoint templates, and these templates have a distinct project flavour. To me, they are far more beneficial than generic PowerPoint templates on offer elsewhere.
Beyond templates, Sharon has eleven courses that she runs for project and change professionals. These courses are actioned-packed with tips for getting the most out of the Microsoft Office suite.
“So many Change Managers suffer from imposter syndrome. They are busy focusing on things like getting their Product Manager’s head into a circle (on a PowerPoint slide). This distracts them from what they are amazing at: delivering organisational change.”
- Sharon Connolly
Sharon developed many of these templates to help us focus on our key message. Not to mention, easily adaptable templates frees us up to stay busy with the great art of delivering organisational change. Her time-saving templates and courses may help you, so you are not getting bogged down in trying to find a beautiful and impactful template.
Human Factors and Change Oct 2021 Sharon Connolly interview: From change templates to outcomes
I had the opportunity to attend Sharon’s courses, including a recent free course. Sharon made many valuable points in our catch-ups. One stood out to me: Change professionals need to run their change projects like a small start-up. This entrepreneurial bent that Sharon has applies to leading organisational change.
Entrepreneurs often have an obsessive focus on their audience because their daily bread depends on the next sale! With this obsessive focus, entrepreneurs learn what works in the real world. They are happy to experiment and fail, and this mindset is beneficial for anyone leading change.
Human Factors and Change Oct 2021 Sharon Connolly interview: Change professionals as entrepreneurs?
“You really need to focus on your audience. As project professionals, our audience is changing.”
- Sharon Connolly
An audience focus is a decent precursor to then (as Sharon suggested) creating a mini-brand and positioning your change. Sharon suggested concepts from an entrepreneur’s (or brand professional’s) playbook. For example, drip-feeding information to her audience.
Above all, we must put our creative hats on. Our creative licence depends on our organisation, “brand police” (as Sharon wryly suggested) and context for our change.
Yet as change professionals, we have a degree of latitude for our change approach. We can devise clever and practical ways to cut through the noise and capture the attention span of a busy and distracted audience. Plenty of practice is needed to get to Sharon’s level of communication expertise. Thankfully Sharon’s courses (and editions of Human Factors and Change like this one!) help provide you with shortcuts.
Human Factors and Change Oct 2021 Sharon Connolly interview: Create a mini-brand/position change
Having valuable tools and resources makes the mini branding process far more straightforward. Some change professionals may baulk at the cost of some of these tools. Yet when used regularly, I found my personal “technology stack” of tools yielded a high return on their investment. It’s hard to quantify this return on investment.
What if you took the time to invest in your video production skills (for example)? Your output might justify your project’s investment in change.
If your “change tech stack” provided you with some impressive imagery, your tools have paid for themselves. When your collective output impressed your project board, your tool’s value has surpassed its cost. Sharon spoke about the incomes of leading change professionals. In light of this, is a few hundred dollars a year investment significant in the scheme of things?
Human Factors and Change Oct 2021 Sharon Connolly interview: A Change Manager “Productivity stack”
What does Sharon suggest for anyone looking to “sprinkle unicorn dust” on a tired and lengthy presentational report?
- Review the presentation or report.
- Open a separate Microsoft Word document.
- Pull out any sentences which look interesting — bites of interesting text. Sharon suggested thinking of your audience(s) for inspiration. What important content might capture their attention? For example, a saving of $250,000 for senior managers with budget responsibilities. Or a reduction in team workload of X hours per week, significant for team leaders.
- Place these bites into the Word document.
- Open PowerPoint.
- On a slide, create four columns. Each column serves as a “bucket”. For example, Sharon suggested columns like “What it feels now”, “Feelings”, “Process”, and “Actions.” (see image below)
- Take each bite in your Word document, and place the bit under one of these four columns.
- Summarise each bite into an easy-to-read sentence.
- Can you remove a bite? For each bite, ask yourself — what would happen if they didn’t get this information? If it doesn’t matter, remove it.
- Draft single-sentence points for your presentation or report with your remaining bites.
Sharon is a big believer in one point per slide and using imagery supporting each point. While changesuperhero.com.au also houses dozens of powerful infographics, a single point per slide does reinforce a given message. Many of our audiences may be distracted at the time (“online shoe shopping”, quipped Sharon).
Imagery and brief video footage capture the ethos, logos and pathos behind our message.
Sharon suggested that project and change professionals take inspiration from excellent television commercials and radio advertisements. She recommended we take note of commercials like this one:
COVID-19 Health Campaign — Don’t be complacent
“’ But Sharon, you’re so creative!’ ‘No I’m not — I’m a fraud. I look around for inspiration.’”
- Sharon Connolly
Sharon found her creative inspiration for many of her templates from googling e-book layouts. She then took screenshots of remarkable ways of displaying information. Re-creating these in Microsoft PowerPoint was her final step, and this was but one way of developing her impressive template library.
The other remarkable thing I noticed about Sharon is that she kept an ear out for listening to people’s change-related problems. Her entrepreneurial approach helped open her mind to see these problems as opportunities. In doing so, Sharon devising workarounds or outright solutions to these problems. Many of these workarounds became templates or courses.
Precisely the kind of gumption needed to be an entrepreneur in the change space!