Change management is about preparing, giving support and equipping individuals, teams, and business to change successfully. It involves all areas of a business: technology, processes, people, market and competition. The discipline goes beyond the right concept, the right core process redesign, or even the right team of stakeholders. The core lies in changing the people system, questioning the status quo, and pursuing a valid and worthy goal.
Change Manager Mindset
You will not find change managers amongst the top management. We don’t wear executive suites. We dress casually, and we are right in the middle or the frontlines of the organization. While other managers try to keep things under control, we are determined to shake things up. We connect with top management mission and strategy with fresh market insights. Denial is not in our vocabulary. Our approach to finding the truth about what is best for the organization is to regularly talk with customers and learn from first-hand what markets are up to. We use this intelligence to energize the people who work around us.
The 360º impact
We aim to bring change in the actions of all around us. Though we focus primarily on the scope of our projects, that is never enough. We must also influence executives at higher levels and other managers and peers to adopt a change. It is impossible to make a difference as a standalone; change managers understand that and pursue to convince all stakeholders.
Change management toolkit
We don’t apply standard “off-the-shelf” approaches. Instead, we look for what will work in the situation at hand. We adapt the methodologies as we need to make a change. Sometimes we might start with a specific problem-solving tool or team structure that has worked for us before, but we never leave it at that. Moreover, we supplement past approaches with new techniques learned from others; we redesign, cut and fit, and keep on tailoring as the change effort unfolds.
Change management leadership
We are never addicted to a single leadership approach. The personal favourite style is not always the best way. When we cannot adapt our own practice, we find others to lead portions of the effort to achieve the results we all need. The important thing is to pursue the goal, the change that matters.
Change Management Qualities
We are all different—except in our determination to achieve better results through people, but we share a common set of characteristics:
- Commitment to a better way. We believe things can be done better, faster, cheaper. And we don’t stop until we achieve the set goals.
- Courage to challenge the existing status quo. We’ve developed an act of courage in the face of opposition, failure, uncertainty, and risk. We do not welcome failure, neither do we fear it.
- Highly motivated, focused on creating energy, excitement, and momentum in the people around us. More often than not, we use facts about customers and competitors to motivate our teams to make a change.
- Being fair-minded, we care about how people are treated; we intent on enabling others to succeed.
- We have a sense of humour. It enables us to stay on course in the face of confusion, discouragement, and the occasional inevitable failure.
The change manager will seldom take full credit for the job done as we know that without the teamwork of bosses, employees, colleagues, and stakeholders, making a change is impossible.