Imagine if you are leading a change, and your sponsor briefs you on your responsibility as a Change Lead:
“You have to work with between ten and twelve thousand employees across a large geographic in the next twelve months.
You need to ensure they are aware of a change to the employee experience. Your role is to help already change-fatigued employees adjust to this Change. Oh, this includes working with their employee union).
Most importantly, you have to ensure they are sufficiently skilled in this new way of working so we have a smooth change.”
Been there, done that. Being responsible for leading change can be exhilarating. Principles are powerful guides — a compass if you will. What ten principles do I rely on to lead change in organisations?
One: Habits.Habits sustain you when willpower runs out. Good habits give you a sense of control, and this control is over yourself — and your environment. You rise above the boredom of tasks that don’t energise you. Analysis for some is banal; others wilt under the burden of necessary meetings. Why did William McRaven, a leader of a pre-eminent special forces organisation (the Navy SEALs) suggest to people to “make their bed”? Habits ensure you control the controllable aspects of your environment, giving you a sense of control. Despite the often-mundane nature of sustained habits, they pay off only in the long term. How did a sense of sound habits help me lead organisational change? I made a habit to regularly apply the other nine change principles here.
Two: Systems.Your change is a system, and this change also operates in a vast system — your organisation. Your organisation is a system comprising people, software applications and a data pipeline. I learned to conceptualise any change challenge as a system. Yet know that great skull sweat needs to go into the second change principle: thinking of change challenges through the lens of systems.
Three: Perspective. Habitually walk in your stakeholder’s shoes. But what if you have thousands of stakeholders? Don’t know where to begin? Pick a decent representative of your stakeholder population. If no one person represents the whole, break down your stakeholders into groups of clusters. Choose the larger clusters then find a suitable representative. Let the second change principle (systems) guide your pragmatism. Have you truly walked in your person’s shoes? Can you articulate their employee journey (related to your change) almost as well as someone who works in their environment? Now can you thread this vital information into change impact assessments and your change approach?
Four: Promotion.Is any of your stakeholders aware of your change? Do they know about the support available for employees to adjust to change? But you send comms, right? It is easy to blame stakeholders when they do not read or listen to your messages. Or be annoyed when leaders fail to cascade your messages to employees who desperately need to know about your change.The change principle of Promotion sounds simple but is increasingly difficult. It is about an evolving and sophisticated art: winning stakeholder’s hearts. But you’re a “people person” already, right?
This principle is not only about getting along with people but capturing their attention span. This finite resource needs your effort and adaptability. Your audience is already bombarded with messages. Your audience has a small window, and evolving behaviours around how they engage in technology to absorb change messages.
For instance, your painstakingly crafted .pdf poster doesn’t display on a leader’s mobile phone as they sit on the bus going home. As change leaders, we need a voracious appetite for learning the best from sister disciplines. Copywriters, agile filmmakers and behavioural economists are our muses. They share a similar obsession for mass influence.
Five: Planning.Planning sharpens the mind. Like top-flight salespeople might say to you: “Plan the work, work the plan”. The fifth change principle is about being resourceful. Do you make the most of every stakeholder engagement? Are you sharp in following up or joining the dots between your change and other initiatives? Do you aim to “close the sale” to build a coalition of capable and influential Change Champions? Or reflect upon complicated stakeholder interactions as a worthy interpersonal challenge?
Six: Clarity.I attribute a large part of many organisational change success stories to this change principle. I love the art of distilling complicated moving parts into clear one-pagers. Or turning complicated concepts into well-scripted training sessions. I also love transforming messy, imprecise data into straightforward, adaptable change plans. Why? The resulting “A-ha!” moments in my team when we collectively achieve clarity. When others are forming working relationships over coffee and chatting up a storm at the start of a project, I do too. But only briefly; I intentionally place a time limit on this activity. My most immense effort goes into the front-end of a project. The mental effort to absorb the enormous and evolving project scope and stakeholder landscape is exacting. As is the art of planning. We need to be comfortable about anticipating the likely twists and turns of the battle ahead: changing the behaviours of hundreds or thousands of employees. Where I can, I aim to absorb complicated concepts — then spit out a simpler model or way of how I (tentatively) think the world works. Sense-making takes many iterations and conversations. While I enjoy a relaxed, unstructured coffee chat with stakeholders. Yet my questions belie the purpose of making sense of a complicated world.
Seven: Unconventionality.I had the good fortune to work for Unilever, a multinational fast-moving consumer goods company, decades ago. Unilever invested considerably in its leaders. Their leader training started and finished with a clear profile of great leadership qualities and skills. One of these skills was “breakthrough thinking”. This creative yet pragmatic thinking creates new products and invents new industries. Most remarkably in Unilever’s case, it creates product advertisements that influence positive social change. For instance, the Dove soap “real beauty” marketing campaigns. Marketing and organisational change management are one and the same thing. Yep, I said it. One has an obsession with the paying customer, the other with the employee and changes to their employee experience. Yet both disciplines need obsessive and sometimes breakthrough thinking. Got to introduce change to a unionised workplace? This workplace is in another state, and the workforce is not computer literate. Due to COVID-19 lockdowns, you will never meet any of the employees there in person. You are allowed to meet their (busy) leaders, but they don’t have much time. Oh, and the change has a few moving parts which make human error quite likely. Training guides or other helpful artefacts may reduce this error rate… but will your workforce find out in time? You need an involved understanding of the employee’s context soon, with limited resources or definitive answers. If you don’t, your change may be a failure — or at least, add to the leader’s workload. What unconventional thinking can you deploy to solve this puzzle?
Eight: Failure.I tell my son, who is now thirteen that his father is a professional loser. I am. I have failed a lot in my career, and my apprenticeship has been lengthy. I am not the only Change Manager who failed to hit the mark with a stakeholder engagement, get comms right or avoid burnout. Organisational Change Management has many aspects too, much like a multi-sport endurance race. This complexity makes for plenty of opportunities to fail. Failure is part of learning — I would dare say failure is a form of psychological inoculation. Failure is temporary. But learning from failure endures.
Nine: Leverage.Any leader of organisational change has no choice. You have to leverage power to influence effective change. Power is a value-neutral tool. Can you use power gently yet deftly? Your success in working with power isn’t necessarily about working only with leaders. Can you win over support teams, who operate on the front-line of your change? Could you reframe your change work as a noble undertaking? We can learn from clever people who tackle wicked, thorny social problems. Like who? Political activists, psychologists who work to shape better communities and politicians.
Ten: Quantification.Quantifying the value of your change interventions illustrates your professional maturity. Can you work as a behavioural scientist for your organisation, and capture metrics of how your change work makes a difference? The tenth and final change principle helps you convey risks, future benefits and the value-add from your change. I learned many ways to calculate the value of both my change interventions, but also the change yielded from my entire project team’s work. This benefits realisation work is the cherry on the cake of your change. Quantifying success is a great “project closer” as the entire project team is finishing their change to their organisation.
What did I do next?I codified these ten change principles. How? By writing a book. Twelve months (or so) of hard work. Ironically, during the marathon of writing my book my efforts tapped into all ten change principles. Want to see the outcomes of my efforts? You can read the first chapter of my book — The Change Manager’s Companion.
Our book — The Change Manager’s Companion — is available now. You can also check out our online course on Change Management.