A Manager’s Guide to Managing Change: Checklist for Success – Step 1

Is your project on the path to success or to becoming one of the many that fail to achieve the expected benefits?

The lessons I’ve learned, from the past twenty-five years of working with senior leadership of Fortune 500 corporations to prepare for enterprise-wide change, can help you avoid mistakes that can prevent your change initiative from succeeding.

There are six critical requirements for success:

1.       Shared Vision

2.       Understanding of the Full Impact to the Organization

3.       Effective Stakeholder Engagement

4.       Clear, Consistent and Continual Communication

5.       Adequate Preparation

6.       A Plan to Sustain

We will focus on one requirement in each of the next six blogs as a step you can take to minimize resistance, increase readiness and realize the benefits of a successful change initiative. Together, they can serve as a checklist to evaluate the current status of your project.

Step One:  Shared Vision: 

Do leaders at all levels of the organization affected by your project understand and share the project’s vision? 

If you don’t have a vision of the post-change world, it’s difficult to build support in the present world.

If the vision isn’t shared by those affected, you will encounter resistance because the benefits of the project aren’t defined nor the reason why changes are required understood. If you can link the purpose of your project to a shared problem, and explain that change is required to realize the benefits, it will be easier to craft a shared vision that people will support.

Recommendation:

If you don’t have a shared vision, schedule a meeting with your project team and senior leadership.  Ask each person to describe what a successful outcome for the project looks like. What problem(s) will this project solve? What benefits will the organization realize?

Take those descriptions and craft a vision statement that each person can explain and will support.

Even if you believe you do have a shared vision, going through this exercise will validate that you are all on the same path to success.

This vision statement should be included in all of your communication and cascaded throughout the organization so that every employee affected by the project understands and can explain why this project is important and the changes that are required to realize the benefits.

In the next blog, we will focus on Step Two: Understanding the Full Impact to the Organization


Copyright © 2019* Rita Burgett-Martell; Organizational Change Consultant, Keynote Speaker, Personal Coach — Strategic Transformations Consulting Inc; — Author of Change Ready!  and Defining Moments — Available at Amazon