Beyond the Basics: Elevating Your Change Management Approach to Achieve Results
It’s a new year and time to make your resolutions. Evaluating how you approach change might not be something you’ve considered doing this year, but maybe it should be. The success of your 2024 projects is critical and Switch has seen that when senior leaders take a moment to assess how their teams approach these projects that success rates increase.
In this article, we outline a framework for conducting a retrospective to take your change initiatives to the next level. This is a New Year’s resolution you can keep and you’ll be glad you did!
The first step is to plan appropriately. Below are a few best practices to consider before leading a retrospective:
Timing: Switch recommends conducting your retro at the end of each phase of the project. Another good opportunity to do this is early in the new year. The sooner you conduct your retrospective, the sooner your initiatives will reap the benefits. You should consider how much time to block to ensure a thoughtful discussion can take place and if your attendees need time to prepare in advance of the session.
Participants: It’s important to have just the critical number – too many participants and you risk not hearing all the voices; too few participants and you’ll miss out on important perspectives. Consider also including vendor partners who may have important insights into your change and transformation efforts. Remember the Bezos “two pizza rule” – if you need to order more than 2 pizzas for lunch, you probably have too many people in the room.
Facilitation: Give careful consideration to who will be the best person to facilitate this conversation. Choose someone who is trusted enough for participants to be candid in their feedback. You may want to lead the session yourself, but it may be more impactful for you to contribute as a participant.
Identify questions that will drive the necessary introspection and conversation. The goal is to elicit thoughtful responses without being overly prescriptive. Switch recently used a simple but powerful framework with a client’s core transformation team: “I LIKE, I WISH, I WONDER.”
I like: Identify what your team likes about the change efforts to date and gather feedback on what went well and highlight successes to build on.
I wish: Understand what your team wishes for in the new year and drive healthy discussion about what can be improved. Encourage your retro team to think creatively and support conversation around open questions and new ideas.
I wonder: Encourage your retro team to consider what might be done differently in the new year. For example, will your effort benefit from refreshed meeting cadences or a revamped way to report status? On engagement, are there new stakeholders to consider and / or new touchpoints or engagement tactics needed?
You’ve planned and had a meaningful conversation, but there is still one more step. You and your retro team must transition from questions to recommendations and commit to action. Begin by prioritizing the recommendations that come out of the I like / I wish / I wonder exercise. Prioritize what is important to implement in the first 30 days and who is assigned to accomplish those tasks. This is also a good time to draft a comprehensive action plan, plotting the key milestones and activities in a six-month or possibly one-year view. This plan can be revisited and refreshed as you move through 2024.
Another call to action is to consider what it would mean for your projects if everyone resolved to get just a little bit better every day – the 1% better concept¹. Personally and professionally, the benefit of compounding small improvements will drive new levels of success. These small, continuous improvements can take a lot of forms – caring for one more stakeholder, committing to more productive meetings, working to make communications that are a little tighter, more timely, and / or more transparent.
Our final recommendation is to model this type of retrospective with your direct reports and then “pass it on” by encouraging them to retro with their teams. You don’t have to be stuck with old patterns or decisions – you can SWITCH to new ways of working! Wherever your change programs currently stand determines your starting point – this investment in taking stock to drive change will determine where you can go in this new year. Switch can provide support by creating a structure for your conversations that is in line with your culture, offering skilled facilitation, and helping to craft your 2024 action plan. We’d love to help you see this New Year’s resolution all the way through to success!
Happy New Year from the Switch team!
(1) Atomic Habits by James Clear
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