Successful Communications
At the core of any change effort is the communications effort. The right people receive the right message, at the right time, from the right people. Consider that the messaging needs to start early, it needs to be regular and it needs to be honest. Keep your messaging relevant to the change, don’t get distracted, and don’t fill it with unnecessary content. Ensure you follow the 3 C’s of communication: Consistent, clear and concise sharing.
Developing Change Agent Networks
With leadership support and delegated autonomy, change agents working collaboratively within your organization can help it successfully deliver change time and time again. Networks are opportunities to share good practices, and knowledge gained and truly understand how to enable change to be delivered, WITH people rather than TO people.
Leadership
True leadership is a people-focused competency and recognizable behavior. It is not something that comes with position and title. Developing quality leaders, who demonstrate true leadership, enabling individuals to feel inspired, motivated, and trusted to take ownership of change is necessary for any change to be successfully adopted by the people within the organization. Lead by example.
Curiosity & Innovation
Developing a culture of innovation, through questioning the potential of every aspect, will not only encourage the organization to achieve greater things but also encourage the people working there to be comfortable outside the norms and stability of the historical way of doing things. When you enable people to question the current, they embrace the future new opportunities.
Continuous Learning
As Peter Senge says, “Through learning we become able to do something we were never able to do” and that is the heart of successful change. When we fully learn and build up our expectations, capacity, and abilities to undertake new things, we have developed ourselves to undertake new, different, and better ways of doing things. Embracing continuous learning is akin to a continuous environment of change, undertaken with a positive mindset.
Strategic Alignment
Whatever the change is, you need to be able to answer the “Why are we doing this?” question. If you cannot answer that then nobody will engage. The vision of a change is the answer to the why question, the vision of an organization answers the why of the organization, so next time you are explaining a change to an audience, begin with a focus on the why not the what of the change.
