Three Steps to Building Change Capability for Organizational Success
As a leader, you know that change is constant. The ability of an organization to successfully manage that change is the key to shifting from a culture that struggles to achieve goals to one that builds momentum while moving from milestone to milestone. In fact, in a Prosci survey, 76% of leaders reported that effective change management played a critical role in their projects meeting or exceeding objectives. Developing the organizational capability to proactively manage change could be one of the most impactful decisions you make for your organization.
At Switch, we’ve partnered with many organizations to build internal change capability that reduces risk and increases success rates. Switch’s proven three-step framework for change leverages more than 20 years of experience, driving focus on high-value activities that make change easy to understand and easy to implement.
When working to develop your internal change capability, we first recommend that you take a step back to UNDERSTAND why this is needed for your organization and align on common goals.
What is the purpose and vision for your internal change capability?
What structure will best serve your organization?
When do you need the capability operational?
Are leaders aligned that the change capability is needed?
When working with a recent client, Switch facilitated conversations around whether change management should be centralized with all change practitioners sitting in a Center of Excellence or if practitioners should be decentralized and embedded in the business. There are pros and cons to any approach and Switch can help you evaluate the best fit for your organization. What is critical to determining approach is to align the solution with the purpose and vision for the capability and with the culture and ways of working for your organization.
Now it’s time to PLAN. Switch does not offer one-size-fits all plans. We partner to understand your unique culture and develop solutions that will work for your organization.
We help to identify and develop the common language, standard methodologies, tools and language that are in alignment with your goals and support your company culture. One company we worked with landed on two sets of tools – one for practitioners who regularly managed change and another for executives who were expected to understand and lead through change.
One way to execute effectively is to build a change community within your organization that will benefit change practitioners, project leaders, and executives as they grow their change leadership skills and share best practices. They can provide input into the capability design as well as champion the change once launched. For example, Switch helped a client fold HRBPs into the change community of practice, leveraging their connections in the organization to listen and learn about change happening throughout the organization.
Change education is another important consideration. We have developed change management education for stakeholders at various levels of experience and hierarchy. Again, this education shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all, we partner with clients to identify the learning modality that best fits their people, whether it be workshops, lunch and learns, or retrospectives.
Finally, it’s time to LAUNCH your change capability. We recommend utilizing existing routines that will support a successful launch aligned to your culture.
You can achieve early success by starting with your most energized groups and early adopters, taking advantage of any functions who are excited about the change support. This enables you to build up some quick wins and spread the testimonials throughout the organization.
You can also look for opportunities to embed change skills into existing routines such as onboarding or talent management.
To sustain your newly strengthened change capabilities, you’ll want to test them on a few different projects, gather feedback from project teams on what works, and then determine any tweaks that need to be made to the strategy and approach. You will also want to reevaluate your change education offerings, adapting as the needs of your stakeholders develop. Switch can partner with you as you move forward and refine.
It's been said that change is inevitable, but growth is optional. At Switch we believe that change is critical to realizing significant and sustained growth. We are here to help you think through the pros and cons of different approaches to developing your change capability, to identify the best fit for your organization’s goals and culture, and to partner with you and your leadership team to launch a change capability for your organization.
For more information about Switch and how we can help you, send us an email at contact@switchconsultinggroup.com. If you’re interested in receiving our latest articles in your inbox or hearing about upcoming webinars, submit your email address in the “Stay in the Know” form below.