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This picture reminds me of how I used to approach change communications! It seemed like an endless array of tactics and in-the-moment decisions and writing key messages. Each leadership decision would drive another flurry of activity and we’d finally catch our breath to do it all over again. I now have a more structured way to approach this task. It starts with me communicating to my sponsors and leadership about how change communications work, what makes them effective and their role in leading the change and how communications is part of that. I find the biggest challenge with change communication is that sponsors and leaders underestimate their role in making this successful. Many leaders think that facilitating conversations and aiding in decision-making and getting obstacles out of the way for the team is a job well done. It is a critical part of the work, but as important as any of these items is their visibility, mastery and ownership of change communications. In the Connected Change ™ framework we talk about power and influence as a key element. Your sponsor should have a level of power, and their role is also to recruit supporters with additional high levels of power. At times, change messaging and visible, vocal support for the change in front of stakeholders will need to come from the most powerful person in the room. Ownership of the change lies within the organization and sponsorship, and the leadership need to take on this role. The change manager never leads communication efforts and should not be the person delivering any messaging. Change communications work well when the change manager can help the leadership and sponsorship look good. I have a friend who used to work on political campaigns. He likened his role to speech-writer, event coordinator and personal assistant. To an extent, this is how the role of a change managers works in communications. Set up the leader to look good, tell them what to say, you write and they deliver! Then you also have to think about when and where and how that messaging is being delivered, all while coaching that leader through the process. What makes leadership communication effective is authenticity, consistency and empathy. Change can be a hard message to deliver. Many leaders are cautious about saying too much too soon or getting the message right. I have a ton of understanding and patience for this, as they understand the gravity and importance of what they are saying and want to make sure it is successful. Change communication works in line with the phase of change that you are in. For leaders, at the beginning they’re focused on understanding, excitement, and benefits. In the middle, they are rallying support, thanking people for their commitment and effort, and shining a light on success stories. At implementation and later stages, they are sending out calls to action, talking about the stories of the organization, and aligning their new world with history. Talking about the change and its success as well as what we have learned and will improve in the future, is the key part to focus on at the later stages of change. You may have noticed that there are some things missing! During the implementation phase, there is lots of communication happening, but leaders don’t need to be delivering detailed tactical messages (for example, where to get trained and what training to complete, who the super-users or change champions are). This is the role of the change management team to fill in those details, but a leader has a minimal role in communicating the tactics of change. I have developed a communications planning tool that helps break down who is doing what, and what types of communication is happening at each phase of change. This can be easily linked to a project plan and aligned with various initiatives and dates. We’re sharing this free communications plan template with our subscribers in the November edition of our newsletter. Sign up before November 1st HERE to reserve your copy! Going forward we’re going to be sharing free templates for core change management deliverables every month with subscribers to our newsletter.
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You are defined by what you tolerate. If you are a leader in an organization, I hope these words have weight this week. This is one of the core tenets of Connected (Culture) Change ™, and this prophecy is coming true for Hockey Canada this month. You can read more here and read the latest at pretty much any national news outlet. Canadians sure love their hockey. For my friends and readers who are not Canadian, let me tell you that this is a big deal, the center of our identity is falling apart. The very core of Canadian-ness, Hockey, is being eroded to the core. We are facing some very ugly music. I say this with a bit of humor. Hockey certainly isn’t the centre of the Canadian experience for many, but these happenings are having a broad impact. The governance review only scratches the surface of what needs to change in the institution that is hockey, the elite levels of professional, amateur and national sport, and the sport that is played in millions of community rinks on weekend mornings and late into school nights across the country. The board was incompetent and ineffective, and failed at their fiduciary duty, yes. But keep in mind the way that non-profit boards work, the people on them may be highly qualified, but they typically do not have long history with the organization. Board tenure is typically capped, and only the CEO of the organization is accountable to the board. The rest of the leadership and management is under the responsibility of the CEO. Boards have no power when it comes to management and leadership decisions. They have jurisdiction only over the fiduciary health of the organization, and their governance responsibilities, they set strategy, hold the CEO accountable, evaluate and compensate the CEO and monitor the progress of the organization against the strategy. Hockey Canada is not the first time I’ve seen catastrophic governance failure, especially around fiscal responsibility. It probably won’t be the last. When this happens, it is typically a lack of experience in both board membership and Leadership (CEO and CFO). We’ve always known there was a culture problem in the sport. These problems are not new. But nobody wanted to do anything about it before. I’m not going to detail the history, but the criticisms from Pascal St. Onge, Canada’s minister of Sport are on the right track. She criticized Hockey Canada treating sexual assault as an insurance problem rather than a systemic issue that should be confronted. The key to understanding how this happens is culture. Hockey, as a sport, views bad behaviour of the players (and often coaches) permissible because the team must win. Therefore, the behaviour and actions of the players on the 2018 junior team (and others) is seen as a foregone conclusion. The institution and organization expect that this “type of thing” will happen along the way, accepts that this is “part of the game” and sets up a damages fund, using player fees from community organizations across the country to fund settlements when someone comes forward with a claim. There is a huge advantage to the organization to doing this. It protects players from potential legal actions brought against them, by offering an alternative to victims. After all, you can’t travel out of the country with a winning team if a bunch of players have ongoing criminal investigations against them. Legal settlement is always in the organization’s best interest. Protect the players, protect the game. The problem at Hockey Canada is accountability – you see it at the board level, you see it at the management and leadership levels, and you see it emerge in lower levels of the sport as soon as competition becomes more important than personal and professional ethics. The challenge here is that, fixing this goes beyond fixing Hockey Canada, the national institution. The ENTIRE culture needs an overhaul. An allegory to this is, a criminal doesn’t wake up one morning, rob a bank, and make off with a million dollars spontaneously. This behaviour starts early, it is repeated often, and is reinforced. Maybe it is pinching a few candy bars from the local corner store, and not getting caught. Later, stealing a necklace from a relative and pawning it. Family members write it off as “they are a good person at heart, just going through a rough time”. At school, they are caught with fundraising proceeds from an event at the school. But they are a star football player and suspending them means that the team will certainly lose, so the principal lets them off with a warning. Later, they embezzle small amounts from their employers, a little cash out of the till, cash a few cheques, but they always get away with it. Nobody holds them accountable, and the behaviour is tolerated and reinforced until it escalates to a point that they rob a bank. Crime does not start with robbing a bank, just as the actions that are the subject of the review do not appear for the first time at the 2018 junior championship. Hockey Canada is no different from many organizations with toxic cultures. Tolerance of bad behaviour from star performers has caused this. It's so steeped into the culture that it is accepted as a foregone conclusion. A foregone conclusion that the CEO and CFO supported and that the board didn’t even think to challenge. The lesson learned here, for leaders, is that you are defined by what you tolerate. Photo by Jayne Harris on Unsplash
My first house in Toronto was in the beautiful neighborhood of Wychwood. We would go for long rambling walks with our 1-year-old Labrador rescue Ella through the storied Wychwood Park. There is a beautiful state home in the center of the park, which is known as the McLuhan House. Who? Well, Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher who coined: The Medium is the Message. So why do I bring this up? In change communications what your saying (the message) is as important as WHO is saying it (the medium). This is the top area of friction I find with change leaders. So many of us want to share the message but don’t want to be the medium or be the main delivery point for the message. But THIS is the fulcrum of success for change communications. If you’re the change leader, you are in many ways, the embodiment of the message. So you need to be out there, early and often, talking about change. Secondly, many leaders overestimate the impact and power of their words, and underestimate the frequency and repetition required to make communications impact. Despite our world being saturated with communications, digital, audio and otherwise, people still require a level of repetition and consistency with a key message to understand it, internalize it and importantly, act. I’ve often heard the “rule of 7” referenced, in that people need to hear a message 7 times before it sinks in. I found a great breakdown of where this comes from, and also, a very old communications outline from the 1800’s that shows we haven’t changed much. But change communication is about more than a catchy advertising slogan. More often than not, we need people to understand and then act on the messages being communicated. This is why:
A communications plan helps keep things organized. Really, it ends up looking a lot like a project plan with a few other key inclusions. We’re sharing a free communications plan template with our subscribers in the November edition of our newsletter. Sign up before November 1st HERE to reserve your copy! Going forward we’re going to be sharing free templates for core change management deliverables every month with subscribers to our newsletter. The planning stage of a change is often the most overlooked and underused stage of change. Most leaders want to jump to creating a compelling vision, or trying to move the change forward and work though the challenges with their people. Others have a fear around things not going well and try to avoid the change as long as possible.
A good plan sets up your change for success. And I’m not talking about a change management plan (yet!) but the preliminary thinking and planning that goes into getting ready to change. These are the key questions I work through with the change sponsorship team and senior leadership as we’re getting ready to start the planning process. 1. What is the change Establishing a clear understanding of the problem, and what the change will address is critical before any work can start. If the team and leadership is centered around a common problem, and the change is a solution, then it becomes clear WHY the change is happening. Alignment among the leadership of the organization is key here and helps to avoid challenges later on that can arise when people have different ideas about what the change is, and what benefits it will bring them. 2. What are the goals for the change? This leads from the first question – what are the 3 – 5 key things that the change will accomplish for us and for the business. If we don’t have a clear idea on this at the beginning, this is where we can see lots of different stories bubbling up! In the absence of a main “headline” people will make up their own stories. While identification of the positive goals of change are important, also identifying the downsides of the change is important. 3. How and when do we know we are successful? Many change managers call this the future vision, but I like to make this a lot more tactical. While future visioning can be important, and thinking big a wonderful way to look at possibility, success for change means that we need to get tactical. This is a key item that will go into your change management plan, and it is important to know “benefits management” but really its all about knowing what success is, making sure everyone is aligned on that, and agreeing to when you’ll measure it. 4. Who are the people most affected by this? Understanding from your senior core team how their people will respond to change is going to give you a clear picture of how to build and address your stakeholder strategy in the next phase. Understanding who is highly affected v.s. who is marginally affected will help you align your efforts in the next step where you use Connected Change ™ to understand the group dynamics and systems that undelay the stakeholders that will be most affected by the change. 5. How do communications work around here? Getting a sense of how things are done today with regards to communications is going to help you understand what you need to be thinking about in terms of planning the communications and approaches in the change management plan and the communications plan. Use the approaches that work well, and add or enhance from there. Remember, repetition is key here! Get prepared for “short, sweet and then repeat” so that you are communicating early, and often. 6. How confident is the senior team about early communication? Nobody likes to feel that they are the last one to find out about change! Often teams and stakeholders feel that communications are “late” and they would have liked to know earlier on about the change. On the other hand, leaders feel cautious around communicating too early when they don’t have the answers. A key approach with change that makes it successful is transparency. Leaders need to get comfortable with saying they are “figuring things out”, “we are working on it” or “this is part of where we need your input to make it successful”. Having all the answers isn’t a prerequisite to a successful change, but communicating early and often is. You’ll need to be working with the team to get them comfortable with early communication, as it will reap rewards later These are the six key questions that I like to ask as I’m embarking on a change journey with a leadership team and sets you up well for the planning stages of change. |
Natalia LobachArticles, posts, thought pieces, emerging research, podcasts and videos from the founder and principal at Charthouse Advisory Services Archives
November 2022
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