Session Information:

From Change Sponsors to Agents of Change - Leading a Re-imagined People-first Transformation

To remain competitive in the current business climate and ever-evolving stream of customer needs, we are being asked to do more and change faster than ever before.

Traditionally, business optimization and transformation are initiated from a business-first mindset, with senior leadership defining desired business outcomes and timelines. But, people are the ones who need to make the changes.  And people have a change saturation limit. If that limit isn’t recognized or dealt with properly, it can be crippling for the program – and for the people impacted.

Too often, change management is not even considered until business implementations show signs of serious failure. Business transformations rarely achieve their full benefit.  This is often a result of the role leaders play in the change, plus the cultural hurdles that are only considered once projects are underway.

During this session, we’ll look at:

• What it looks like when people are considered from the formative stages of transformation strategy.
• What active and visible sponsorship of change really means for organizational leaders – making them effective agents of change.
• How to effectively support your teams as a change manager.

Session Transcript:

Good morning, Good afternoon and good evening and thank you very much for joining me for this session I'm talking about how to go from change sponsors to agents of change for the last number of years I've had the opportunity to work with some companies on how to improve the success of business transformations and I'd like to share a lot of that learning with you.

Here today it starts with a couple of looking at the couple of different aspects of how change is initiated in organizations and how to take different roles than we've traditionally taken especially at the senior leader level and what making that change brings about but first I'd like to start with a story and this is the story of what i call the blue room effect and maybe you've experienced this in your organization i kind of hope that you haven't but I imagine that you might have and and if you do then I think that it can highlight some some salient points.

So here here's the story uh one morning a director or senior executive walks into his team meeting and he announces he says we need to paint conference room b blue make sure that gets done and the people around the table his team says sure we'll make sure that gets done the the rest of the meeting continues and they talk about business activities the meeting ends and the chief of staff says to bob one of the leaders in the room bob I'd like you to uh to lead the the the blue room project and bob says no problem bob goes back to his office and he calls up uh one of his project managers and he says to her look we need to paint um conference room be blue.

I'd like for you to go ahead and scope it out and give me a time frame and a cost analysis of what that's going to take and she says to him no problem what is the you know what what's the the due date on that he said you know actually I don't know what the due date is but let's just get it as fast as possible she says sure she goes ahead and organizes her project team they go to conference room b they take a look around and one of the people says what are we painting blue are we painting the walls the chairs the table what needs to be blue here another person in the project team says what color blue what shade of blue and then another person on the team says why why are we painting this room blue the the project lead says i don't know i don't actually know the answer to your questions um let me go find out so she emails bob and she says hey we went ahead and looked at the room.

We've got a whole bunch of questions before we can give you a a time frame and a cost analysis bob looks at at the list and he says huh okay i actually should have asked those questions as well uh and so he's thinking about how to how to email that set of questions to the to the executive leader um meanwhile it's already really practically realistically.

It's a couple of days already has gone by he finally sends the message to the leader with those questions you know what are we painting blue was the color blue and uh and why and um the leader gets this message during the middle of his day he starts to read it he realizes it's it's more than a sentence long so he says okay it's also not critical for what i need to do today i put it in my read later list come the end of the day the leader goes ahead and he reads the email and as soon as he really starts looking at this email he gets very frustrated um it's almost a week since he gave this assignment out to his team and he.

It's still not done he expected it to be done right away and he's just frustrated that his team didn't weren't more proactive didn't ask these questions right away and so on and so forth so he shoots back a message this needed to be done yesterday and the the the color blue is the is the theme colors of acme ink's um corporate logo bob gets this email um in the middle of the night and realizes oh boy okay things are bad so the next morning he he quickly uh walks into his into his boss's office and he said look I'm sorry you know my bad let's just get this solved can you help me answer the other questions.

You know what needs to get painted and and by when um and the boss was like acme ink is coming in for a big meeting and two days from now the room needed to be painted already so that there was no more smell of paint that didn't they don't recognize that we've done this for them but we're really trying to to make a point and it needed to get done already and i can't believe you guys haven't done it and you know essentially unhappy boss bob takes this message he quickly calls up the project manager and he goes look stop whatever you're doing um get your project team together paint it blue right away.

This is the color just get the walls done and you got to make sure that somehow it doesn't smell like paint because there's a big meeting in there two days from now uh with acme and it's got to be perfect the project leader like says I've got five other projects that are that are in play right now he goes make this your top priority so she has to go call um the other leaders who she's working for put all the projects on hold she has to get her project team together.

They've got to put their stuff on hold they run out to the nearest paint store they find out this color is not easy to get they can get it but it's going to cost a premium cost and it's going to be a rush job they have to get the painters in rush job everything is being paid double the price or triple the price of what it needed to short story are making the story short they get the room painted and and it gets done but the costs were very high the disruption to the project teams was very high.

The impact to their engagement to their levels of happiness of trust in in bob were all impacted and and for what as you listen to my story do you resonate with it have you experienced similar situations where you didn't have all the information that you needed to do the job by the time it happened it became a rush job and it never it just wasn't a positive experience unfortunately i have experienced this all too often.

I've seen it all too often where the the information that we need um is not given up front it's not even thought about uh it's not requested from the people who should be thinking about it or ideally would be thinking about it and ultimately we run into this mess realistically however most change programs that I'm dealing with are much more complex than the blue room effect.

However the elements of the messaging of the intent of the way of going about it is really very similar so when we think beyond this example of the blue room what are the elements that are missing and i imagine that you thought about them as I was telling this story you thought oh well you know they needed to know the why they needed to know what and so on and so forth the challenge is that you know it's all very easy to be what they call in America the Sunday quarterback where we can think about or the Sunday couch quarterback.

Where we can think about what what should have been done um but when we are the ones in the hot seat when we are the ones who are leading or directing how good are we about giving all the things that are necessary there so we know that every project especially when we're asking people to change they need to understand what is the purpose of the change.

Why the why what is happening why is it happening what's it here to achieve um what's going to be that result we also it's extremely helpful if we have a good understanding of what the change journey is going to look like because change doesn't happen like a light switch it's not on and off it's a process it's a program and there's stages of change along the way and the more that we know what to expect as we go through the change the more effective.

It'll be but more than that the less resistance that we'll tend to have because what brings up resistance to change is the unknown aspects of it not understanding what it is there's other reasons for resistance and we're going to talk about some of those later this is a key element is not understanding what to expect along the way and what it's going to look like at the end of it once the change is complete what what will that nirvana look like so the elements that are necessary for people to really get on board with change and for change to be successful is why is the change happening how does this change benefit the company.

What to expect along the change journey what will it look like at the end how will this benefit the employees and if there's one aspect of this list that is overlooked more often than not it is that second to last one what is the benefit to the employees the one about what's the benefit of the company that's covered that's talked about more often however the challenge is is that it's not a company who's doing the change it's people that are doing the change and people that are being impacted by the change and so often we don't consider and even if we do consider we rarely communicate what is in it for you what's in it for me and if we want a lower resistance.

This is another element of in addition to the unknown piece is what's the benefit piece why should i care about this change oh it's good for the company okay but why is it good for me so a key one and then lastly is what do i need to do to be successful in this change or what needs to be done to be successful in this change it's another thing that we rarely communicate effectively out there to all the different audiences i will tell you that when we get this right and i've seen us get this right when we get this right what we get is an empowered change team who are armed with the knowledge of what is the purpose of the change what's the benefit of the change what's the change journey and they're able to communicate those those changes.

They're able essentially to create an effective change action plan that has all of the elements that they need to do to do timing to keep things on track in scope and address all of the human elements of change education knowledge reinforcement and so on and so forth so those are the ideal states and imagine have we done that with the blue room.

What the differences would have been okay so what am i saying what's the point of this whole conversation about going from change sponsors to change agents what does that really mean so let's understand what the typical case that i run into is is that leaders lead or they direct change they say you guys need to go do this this is the change that you need to do and mostly when i sit when i sit in the conference room talking with leaders about strategic change their big focus and rightly so is on what are the business results that we are trying to achieve.

What are the business outcomes that we are trying to get and it is rarely that they talk about what are the people aspects of this change and that's the missing piece because when leaders are talking about the business reasons for a change they are essentially going through a process an evolutionary process themselves of thinking about well what they want to do and then working through the different stages of or the different elements of what the business actually needs to do to achieve that change even though.

They're not thinking about the people aspects of change that evolutionary process is really the ultimate why the ultimate purpose of it and without them then connecting that to the people that's why a lot of times when we hear about change initiatives we're told what to do and not why we're doing it when this happens what we really sorry don't why i'm back what we really ex what we really um experience is a change in our executive leaders and in our senior leaders going from change sponsors to change agents and the three key messages that a change agent will always make sure that.

They're thinking about and communicating is what is the vision for the change what is the purpose of the change and what are the outcomes of the change so why we're doing it what are we doing and what are the benefits of it when this happens what's been beautiful is that the whole conversation expands from just focusing on the business results to thinking about the other human aspects or the people aspects of a change initiative the first of those is the magnitude of the change and magnitude comes in two forms.

One is what is the magnitude of this change to the organization how complex is it how complicated is it how many different groups is it going to touch or require something from the second aspect of magnitude is what is the existing magnitude of change that's already happening across the organization from other change initiatives and how does this magnitude overlay on that magnitude and that we'll call a heat map and the heat map essentially gives us information about change fatigue change fatigue is something that's wildly overlooked in organizations is how much change is the same person experiencing at any one time and in in today's world.

It is huge the amount of change fatigue that people experience is is is just overwhelming and when we are experiencing change fatigue we tend to drop the ball more often we tend to give less focus less care not that we're being not caring it's just there's only so much we can do we go into overload because all of these changes are on top of our day jobs of the things that we are being measured on to deliver and so when leaders start to be able to think about the magnitude of change of this event on top of the magnitude of existing change.

They can start to get a sense of that heat map of that change fatigue and then that can inform their decision about well is this the right time to do this even though there's a business reason for it if it's not going to be successful because of the change magnitude and the change fatigue we've got to do we've got to plan our timing and then the other thing that they start to think about is what is the benefit what is the benefit to the people and how are we going to communicate that benefit to the people and the people are not one thing in a global company.

There are many different types of cultures there's many different value systems at play um there's many different course cultural norms at play and it's not always possible to get it all right to get everyone touched to get the benefit communicated perfectly to all those different groups however the fact that it's being thought about changes a huge dynamic and the biggest change to that dynamic is how we start to communicate the change when this has happened.

Well it's been amazing i've seen leaders who we struggle to get as sponsors to get up and be the voice of the change going from pushing them to them asking us to communicate more frequently more regularly and when they communicate they communicate at a different level and from a different place like in their heart they communicate from thinking and talking from the place of the people of their audiences and it makes all the difference in the world.

When I'm not talking about what you need to do but I'm talking about what we need to do it's massively different and so the change communication plan changes drastically when you go from change sponsor to change agent ultimately as I said what you're getting is an awareness of is the timing for this change right how we communicate how frequently communicate and the way we communicate going from you to we changes and then ultimately our action plans are are more adaptive and more realistic so we get a more successful result all along the way what's the benefit of that the benefit is a a much more engaged employee base.

It increases and improves psychological safety trust and innovation within the teams because they are not overwhelmed they feel paid attention to and cared about and understood in a way that is often missed when people are not considered at the areas at the higher levels at the strategic levels when change is being planned the other huge benefit is to the company because the change programs have a far greater rate of adoption and ultimately this is something that a lot of times we don't really track well when we do a change program which is what is the rate of adoption not the rate of completing the rollout on time but how many people are actually using it and this is an interesting thing because i remember talking to an executive at Microsoft.

Who was telling me that the number of features that exist in excel for example and the number of people that are using all of the features in excel is hugely different there's matt excel is a wildly powerful tool but the number of people who know of those features and utilize those features is much much lower and it's the same thing if you run out if you if you roll out a new hrms system for example or a new crm system.

They're you're rolling them out because they've got a lot of new features a lot of critical features but the rate of adoption is rarely properly tracked and that means that the money that's spent on that change initiative is never really realized because of that rate of adoption not being tracked or carried about or focused on because these pieces are missing so what does that practically look like all right when we look at the building blocks.

So first of all just to level set right we're talking about a traditional change plan from the creation of the idea to then making sure that the vision and the purpose is thought about and thought about from the user's perspective from the audience's perspective which then creates the change mission and the chan and the action plan where the change team has the information that is always critical or often critically missing the why the what the journey the benefits to the company to the employees and that allows us to have a more effective change.

Now the change especially in larger ones they take a lot of time and so there's this process this over going process where the vision sometimes now needs to be revisited the plan is to be revisited and also measured along the way understanding because the magnitude of change is always changing as other change initiatives are being overlaid are happening at the same time.

What's the adoption along the pilot phase upon phase b and c until it goes into the run the business phase and then the last part that's often missing is the celebrating of the change to recognize that this process is this this change initiative is over we can celebrate its completion and now it goes into around the business so what are the ten best practices that we have learned the ten best practices that we have learned is strategic leadership and that's what we've been talking about now leaders is change agents being aware of our audiences even though.

We can't always address it perfectly but that awareness makes a difference it affects how we communicate change champions which we'll go into a little bit more in in a minute when we have strategic leadership and we've done this planning at a more higher level to filter down we also get our education plans down much better because we can plan more effectively what is really the goal of leadership for this change which is not often understood.

When the why is missing when the purpose is missing and so therefore sometimes our education plans are are not focused as effectively as they could when we understand what the change journey looks like we are much more effective in our risk mitigation planning um and of course we implement a more effective listening employee sentiment program along the way to understand that as we go through exchange especially when it's a long multi-quarter change program to really understand the sentiment along the way because the more that we do that the more that we can course correct in flow rather than missing that information.

When we start to do that with what we've noticed is that accountability leadership accountability employee accountability goes up almost naturally because everyone is paying more attention the next two are are are are the interesting ones and they're often the ones that that are overlooked which is patience because companies tend to look at things at a quarter by quarter financial basis but big programs take longer than that and the change sponsors tend to check out after the first quarter because they're now on to the next best thing or the next bigger thing but the program without having that continual sponsorship.

That continual attention tends to tends to lose traction and then of course celebrating and if we don't celebrate one of the things is is that the part of the reason fatigue kicks in a lot is because we don't celebrate the change at the end and it never feels like those previous initiatives ever came to completion and so even though they are we're not working on them actively.

We feel the weight of them so when we look at strategic teams leadership there's one other really interesting aspect i want to bring to your attention Simon sinek talks about what do you need to be a leader and its followers so often when i talk to leaders about what makes them a leader they don't say is to have followers that if i don't have followers who am i leading and what am i leading ashley goodall uh wrote a book called the nine lies about work and in it he talks about the idea of leadership is missing the idea of followers it's missing the idea that our subject here is at heart a question of a particularly human relationship namely why would someone choose to entrust their future to someone else and that's followship is where leaders understand that they need to entice their followers to trust them to believe in them to follow them and without that.

We're almost never successful at actually leading the next part we've talked about is really being aware of our audiences and what our audiences need to buy in this next part is one of my most favorite parts that i also don't see as often as i wish i did which is change champions these are people who are throughout the organization that are the early adopters the people.

Who want to be part of the voice of change and we don't often um utilize these this this this available resource it's not a full-time job it's a stretch assignment but it's people who are the early adopters they believe in the change they want this change and they are absolutely people who already are well networked and and already giving voice to things and we can just use them to go out there and communicate within the teams what the changes.

What's happening what people can do they're the earlier doctors and they can get other people on as early adopters they're also the active listeners where they can listen and bring back that information that feedback about how the change is going and what else we need to do to pivot to address to adopt and they are the leading the fosters of example uh sorry the the they they are exemplars of the change for others and it's an amazing thing an amazing resource and when you do it you get amazing results now let's just talk about some of the derailleurs because effective change is as much about what you do is what you shouldn't do.

So one of the things is always expect resistance there is what's called the 20 50 30 rule 20 people are your early adopters 50 are your fence sitters and 30 are going to be your active resistors and the active resistors could be because they like the status quo they don't want to change they like how things are change is uncomfortable if we ignore the fact that there's going to be resistance it's at our own folly so expect resistance plan for it think about the what's in it for you messaging and think about what's in it for all those different groups the 20 group the 50 group and the 30 group.

This is the role modeling piece that's critical that often leaders will say you guys go do that change i don't need to be part of it because I'm already there I'm the creator of it but if it's not if it's a you and it's not a we message then people we know this we follow the examples not what people are saying the next part that's critical is that i am not taking part in the change so it's a part of that role modeling but it's that here my job is to lead the change rather than my job is to be with you in the change making sure that we think about I've covered this already the benefit to the users to the people that are being impacted by the change and communicating it and thinking about it at the different levels at the mid manager level at the individual contributor level at the level of the of the different cultures.

This is another one that's that's a beautiful one that's often misunderstood and mistaken which is that so often when i'm given a change and i i say to myself what do i already know how to do and how do i apply that to what i'm being asked to do and this comes back to that excel example which is if i already have learned how to use excel in version one even though we're at version 10 and it's got a lot more features unless someone says to me look at it afresh brand new as if you hadn't used it before go study what's available in this new release.

I will do new things the old way and we will not get adoption of all of the new features and capabilities and so it's one of the things for us to be aware of is how often we do new things the old way patience I've talked about it that if we don't set in mind that it's going to take x amount of time and we we don't make a plan to ensure sponsorship followership along the way then it will lose it will lose steam and and so often change fails because of just the lack of follow-through and that also goes on to persistence and the difference between patience and persistence is that patience is passive.

I need to be patient where persistence is an active role because if I'm persistent on persistently communicating I am persistently sponsoring i am persistently continuing to track and to measure and to speak about it and to let people know that this change is still a priority and then lastly that we need to celebrate it we need to recognize when it's time to say this is no longer a change initiative it's now going to run the business and this is what and this is how we celebrate it so what have we seen as a result well we measured a lot of different teams and we found that it increases awareness of the change of what's going on and what's necessary it improves understanding it improves our communication and how we communicate and who communicates and at what level and how that communication feels it increases compassion for the challenges of change from the leaders and the change teams to the people that are actually being asked to make the change and adopt it allows for greater reinforcement the neuroscience of change says that we don't change quickly and we have a a a natural inclination to go back to doing things the old way and if we don't have that reinforcement to help us make those changes continuously.

Then we will almost always go back to what we did before and then lastly it brings about a level of personal accountability and accountability for the change at all the levels what is required of our leaders as change agents that they exhibit some self-awareness that they're aware of their audiences that they address their approach to leadership to change leadership with positive intent that they are continuously reinforcing the value of the change their role modeling.

They are thinking about that big picture the vision the why the what the how they're communicating persistently they're demonstrating patient and they're taking ownership and accountability these are the things that we are asking and when we make this change we get a whole different result just imagine what would have happened in the blue room had this happened up front that the that the senior leader who came in the room said we need to paint conference room be blue because acne is coming in next week and we're making a big pitch to them and we want them and that we want this to be one of the elements that helps convince them that we are the right vendor for them and if that leader didn't say it.

Then the people around the table knowing that the vision and the mission were important would have said why why are we painting that room blue what do we need to know so that we can go organize the teams effectively so my question is what type of leader are you going to be now thank you very much and have a good day.