Change Management and Effective Implementation
When introducing anything new into our personal life, within an organization or the society – it is natural to recognize that the introduction of change must be managed, or we will not achieve the desired outcome. That brings us to the meaning of Change Management – a process, tool and technique developed to manage the people side of change, in order to achieve an optimal business outcome. It is a systematic management of employee, client engagement and adoption when a new method is presented. Ultimately, change management focuses on how to help employee accept and utilize change in their daily activities.
Effectively managing change requires an individual and organizational perspective
Individual Change Management
This is focused on understanding how people react to change. Prosci’s ADKAR Model describes change as successful when an individual has:
- Awareness of the need for change
- Desire to get involved and support change
- Knowledge on how to change
- Ability to implement required skills
- Reinforcement to sustain the implemented skills
If any of the above listed is missing, then the change has a high tendency to fail. In summary, in leading the people side of change – you must ensure that they have awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement.
Organizational Change Management
This perspective of change management is the process that teams utilize to support successful individual change. To further clarify, organizational change management (OCM) is the set of actions to help build awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement across the organization. Some of these actions that help an organization implement change are:
- Communication plan – Create an effective plan that is targeted for each of the different impacted audiences
- Sponsorship roadmap – Build a coalition of support with senior leaders and managers
- Coaching plan – Organize the change coaching session to engage managers and supervisors. Once they familiarize themselves with the change, then conduct both group and individual sessions to engage frontline employees
- Training plan – Identify the skills and capabilities that are needed, and plan a comprehensive training session
- Resistance management plan – Monitor resistance and develop set of steps that you can take to answer these objections.
Change management practitioners are the drivers of strategy and plan development. In times of change, it is the effectiveness of senior leaders, sponsors, coaches and managers that will determine whether a project succeed or fails.
