Big bang or slow n steady change – which do you prefer? For most people they say that incremental is easier to deal with, not so stressful and more likely to stick. But I ask you, how much of your change is incremental? When was the last time a change manager had the chance to slow things down and have steady paced change?

Disruptive changeI was talking at a small gathering of HR professionals the other night. When the Q&A came at the end, the questions were dominated by disruptive change questions. What I mean by disruptive change? Think discomfort, uneasy and unpredictable change. Consider it more akin to revolution and upheaval within the workplace.

So what were the questions? Typically, the theme was – How do we cope with a totally new “X”. It was less about revisionist tendencies and more about replacement approaches. It was a whole new tech platform, a whole new location or a whole new management. One question even said we’ve been told to be coaches and leaders and stop being managers!

So how do we cope with disruptive change? Unfortunately, all those great change management models struggle to fit this type of change. When dealing with disruptive change we have little prep time, usually the change is heading forward at a rate of knots and the collateral damage is a path of bruised and battered egos left in its wake. Not a good sight!

Recognition, resilience and reputation are my 3Rs for coping with a landscape of disruptive change.

Recognition:

Find a way to recognize the reactions to disruptive change that people will likely express. Recognize those tell-tale signs, the first wave responses and importantly the underlying emotional burden. Remember that what might not be disruptive change from your viewpoint can appear very disruptive from those amongst it.

Resilience:

There’s a lot to be said for the strength of a resilient workforce when change comes along! For me this is all caught up in the change readiness of an organization. If you are ready for change you don’t experience such a big hit when it occurs. You can never be really ready for disruptive change. However, if you have built resiliency into the organization it will have a lot softer landing on arrival.

Reputation:

This may sound strange but I’m not talking about the reputation of your organization to its customers or client base, because there are innumerable websites and large corporations like Salesforce which can easily apprise of where you might be going wrong with your customers. This is about your reputation for coping with change. How well did your last change go? Did it deliver successfully with little damage, or are people still in intensive care nursing their wounds? Your reputation for coping with past changes can inform the workforce how well you will cope with the next.

Coping with disruptive change is not an easy thing to do. I fully appreciate the energy that needs to be exerted and that for me makes resiliency the anchor requirement of those 3Rs. If you can build up your emotional bank account to cope better, you become more resilient and combine this with effective recognition and a high quality reputation and you will come out the other side, better for the change and without the baggage.

Good luck dealing with your next disruptive change!

I’ve seen a lot of chatter about mindfulness recently. It seems to be “in fashion” right now. I have seen it referenced recently for change activity, I’ve also seen it as part of wellness packages and employee assistance programs. It’s definitely something that is permeating to the surface in many ways.mindful

My first confession here is that I really didn’t know much about it. I’d seen some webinars, read some articles but had no true experience or even observational knowledge of the subject matter.

Through the Curiosity Culture journey, we have been providing Curiosity Labs. These supplement the core workshop and provide a safe space to explore a focus area of true curiosity. We did our first lab on vulnerability and we decided to explore mindfulness within the curiosity lab environment. Learn more about glucofort benefits.

Now I work in a world brimming with change challenges. Besides Curiosity Culture I run Capillary Consulting Inc. which focuses on learning, coaching and advisory services for change. I’ve been experiencing a significant rise in requests to understand change resilience and coping mechanisms for change fatigue and its associated experiences of exhaustion and breakdown. So I’ve been exploring, discussing and helping a number of people build managing strategies, action plans and personal contracts to deal with these challenges far more effectively. Now I’ve been looking at how mindfulness can help prepare individuals for change ahead as well cope after the fact. All part of the personal resilience needs for change and life really.

Doing the curiosity lab allowed me to experience mindfulness first hand. To really get a clear understanding and appreciate how it may impact and affect me. I admit I was nervous. I can’t remember the last time I took a half day out just for me and my benefit! I had some adrenaline rushes and some skepticism about the experience. If I’m totally honest I felt both excited by the event and conflicted by the value of taking that much time out of my busy schedule.

So I think I had my own personal a-ha moment! I won’t spoil the experience for others but I will say the way this played with my mind, body and dare I say soul, was a revelation. For the first time in more years than I can count I was able to consider myself as a focus. I was able to find a way to give my mind space to recharge without it involving sleep. I experienced a strong humanity connection and yet also a two-way link to my fellow humans. I also connected with my significance in the world that’s both great and small concurrently. I was both exhausted and energized at the same time after the experience.

In the weeks following the mindfulness experience, I discovered a lot more about my attitudes and approaches to the way I work and live my life beside and intertwined. I realized that living in a world of change I so readily focus on the future; I forget about the current.  I also appreciated that I spend a lot of my energy and effort for the benefit of others first, when I should be balancing this with myself.

I’m still exploring where this journey is going to take me. I have definitely become a convert to the world of mindfulness through this experience. I’m working on connecting resilience for change and mindfulness into an experience for people to engage with – proactive and reactive muscle building for change. I’m also excited to see how those involved in the Curiosity Culture experience take this forward as we look at resilience in a future lab.

I’ve been playing with this conundrum for some time:

“Do change managers make good change leaders or do change leaders make good change managers?”

The origins of my challenge here, come from discussions I had back in April around leadership development being part of change management, or maybe it’s the other way round. When you look at the expectations of senior, experiences and developed change managers, their leadership qualities are paramount. The greater the strategic importance of the change, the greater the leadership needs, and I could spend a whole other conversation on strategic change needs… but not today!

I think my challenge here comes from the words again (not an uncommon problem for me, see my previous posts) and the traditional view of manager versus leader. We use the term or label change manager for someone who executes change management, but significant requirements for that effective execution, requires leadership qualities in abundance. Conundrum part one!

face offWho is a change leader? Change leader is the term often used to describe a senior manager, accountable and sponsoring a change event, who is in a leadership role, yet is not a change management person. I guess we say change leaders are like the change sponsor and a good change leader will be the advocate, ambassador or agent to promote the values of the change to the organization; the PR/Marketing/Seller/Advertiser of the change.

I found myself speaking with an individual at a recent conference concerning a lack of change leadership in their troubled change event. I was effectively talking about a lack of engaged promotion from the leadership to support and promote the change – the passive aggressive resister was in full force! But it made me realise that when we talk about change leadership, we don’t always get the full leadership elements in there yet what’s missing is probably present in the leadership elements of change management, or at least strategic change management activity. For more details follow smart-ak .

So if I break it down, I think a good quality change manager will have leadership qualities, but may not be a change leader. However I think a good quality change leader can have leadership, management and change management qualities and to successfully lead a change they should all be present.

The unfortunate situation arises in appointing change leaders, to lead a change without and change management skills or knowledge. Maybe a competency should be encouraged for leadership, change leadership and change management to be present in those being made change leaders? What do you think?

So my last post was a little saccharine coated in terms of the reasoning to do the certification but having had some feedback I decided to bring this post up a few weeks. I’m not totally in agreement with all these reasons but given the feedback I had here’s why your boss, compatriot or you should think about doing the CCA.

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Since I launched my certified change agent (CCA) program one of the most common questions I get asked is “why should I do this”. ivermectina preço farmácia popular curitiba I usually explain what the learning includes, key take aways etc. but I have now taken a little time to put together something more structured. Here are the seven reason to become a CCA.

  1. Gain an understanding of the impact of change on people, their likely reactions to the change and how to effectively work with them to adopt or implement the change.
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  2. Learn what change management is all about and when, where and how to use it most effectively for successful change events to take place.
  3. Learn what it means when you take on a change agent role and get insight into the many different types and roles that require individuals to act as change agent. ivermectin solubility
  4. Understand the role of a change leader and how leadership plays an intrinsic part of successfully delivering change events.
  5. Learn from my own experience, spanning over twenty years in the field, with real life insight and discussion from the many change events I have successfully delivered.
  6. Get an internationally recognized qualification accredited by international professional bodies with pre-approved professional credits. ivermectin heartworm treatment for dogs
  7. Be part of a vibrant network of individuals going through the same experiences as yourself who can share experiences and take the opportunity to connect physically and virtually to explore not just the certification program but also how they have dealt with (or are currently experiencing) many change events.

For me these are the key benefits to becoming a CCA. 

There are many other reasons that are personal to each individual who attends. I have been told it has given attendees renewed confidence with colleagues, helped them to appreciate and manage their investment of personal energy in projects and enhance career opportunities.certified

I encourage attendees to develop their own personal learning experience from within the framework of the program, each will be unique but equally applicable to develop themselves as a change agent.

I look forward to seeing you as part of a future program.

My previous two blog posts have very much focused on the negative frustrations, ambiguities and misrepresentations of words and phrases. I don’t want to dwell any more on those frustrations but I wanted to focus on the positive and successful use of words that are out there.

circleofpeopleI was delivering a workshop a year or so back, when some attendees from out of town started talking about the rebranding their organization had gone through. The labels attached to various departments and divisions within their organization were changed to be more user friendly. Instead of division, department or other such phrases they had moved to “people” or “team” as descriptors of the groups and instead of long complex phrases, they had simplified it into one or two words. For example the finance and procurement division was now “the money people” although they are still doing all financial works like finding car finance for buying new cars and the human resources, learning and organizational development department was rebranded “the people people”. There were a few other such areas mentioned in conversation – “the tech team”, “the welcome team” and “the processing people” to name a few others. Now there may be a smile associated with hearing this but it really resonated with me. So often we think the more complex the title, name or other label associated with something, then the grander or more important it is. Yet, that is simply not so. Just saying what it is and how it works is a simple idea that really speaks volumes to me. For latest updates follow pruittvillefarms .

So how does this relate to my change management labeling challenge? I think that we have done ourselves an injustice using the term change management. It has too many ambiguities and confusion areas. People see it as change control management in projects, tech builds and the like. Sometimes it is confused with managing change which is akin to the project management the art of changemethodology. I’ve seen many discussions replace the phrase with change leadership, leadership development, organizational development and strategy execution. I hold my own hand up and say “guilty as charged” – I’ve done it myself. I have also had the 30 minute conversations around “so what is it you do?”

Around four months ago I was at the ACMP Conference in Las Vegas and had some very thought provoking moments through discussions with others and listening to conversations. The ACMP Academy was probably the catalyst for this but since that time I’ve been playing around in my head with a better way of saying what we do, change management folks. I looked at what, why and how we do things in our realm of activity. Broadly we focus on the people side of change and either we help people to deal with a change that is impacting their existence (personal and/or professional) or we help people to change based on a need to refocus their approach or direction (again personal and/or professional) and often it is both simultaneously! But I ask why are we doing this and it’s about getting people to give of their best in a given situation, or transition that they are experiencing and we act as navigator to that journey. We want to get them to maximize their potential within their existence and that is by understanding and embracing the changes they face and making their own necessary changes to best deal with this. This thought process led me to “maximizing human potential” as a tag line to better explain what I do than the label change management. What I am saying is really one and the same, but for people2 ways change who sit outside the realm of the discipline the confusion of the label is a burden I wish we didn’t have to carry.

Now I throw it open to you? What terms or phrases do you think are better? Have you come across anything like “the people people”? Is it just liability we have to manage in our world? Do comment below or email me directly – or both!

 

Continuing the conversation from my last post, I will begin with a statement that will probably annoy the most people and no doubt cause some consternation from others! With a deep breath I shall say it, Organizational Change Management is not the same as Change Management. There, I said it!

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Have we short changed ourselves? Have we undervalued or underplayed our hand of cards? Should we be rebranding? What am I talking about? Change Management of course. The focus of all of the previous blog posts are a bit of a give-away on that answer! Let me expand on what I mean.

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We’ve all been there when something hasn’t gone quite as expected. In our personal lives we accept misfires, setbacks and curve balls as part of the rich tapestry of life and how we grow and evolve through it. We try our best to see these things coming our way, but inevitably sh*t happens! Unfortunately, the same challenges happen in a work environment and the best laid plans sometimes don’t deliver accordingly.

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I repeatedly hear that change is getting more and more complex, more and more frequent and more and more rapid. www.beoutq/live The constant demands are for better, faster, cheaper, leaner, brighter and more heroic organizations. They must be more efficient, less complex and more dynamic, making more money and producing higher quality output. It’s all about more, more, more! What can organizations do to be ready for the phenomenal amount of change that they are lining up for their future?

My view is that they need to build greater change capacity, to be change ready and change agile. Having the ability to manage many changes concurrently is a challenge – I remember a change register holding over 300 initiatives at one organization – but if you build a dispersed capacity, to support, assist and enable change at all levels, then you will have a ready build network for greater change capacity.

To build this capacity you need to recognize that organizations are best served by a mix of individual involvement. Many employees with varying levels of change responsibility need to be included. I refer to three levels of change agent activism:

  • Level 1 are your full time change related roles. People employed as change managers, project leads, project managers and some of the business analysts.
  • Level 2 are your “some of the time” change people. These people do change as part of their job, either because they support the roles of full time change agents (think BA and Project support) or because their role has some level of responsibility to deliver communications, learning events or manage people going through changes regularly.
  • Level 3 are your “arms-length” change people. People who experience some level of change but this is not a fundamental part of their role and not something they are allocated time and resourcing to do. Yet often they are the front line or managers of front line staff who are going through the change event whether it be office relocation, policy and process change or the new HR technology being introduced.

3 levels of change agentIt is the level 2 and 3 people that need to be supported and unfortunately are often neglected. Many times over I have seen an organization put effort into tier 1 people and the tier 1 people are then expected to do everything and the next levels are not involved until they are “told what is happening” or “instructed to comply”. العاب عل النت And we wonder why so many people get resistant and change fatigue? Its not the level of change it’s the way they are supported to deal with it and hence the organization as a whole. كزينو

I recommend, encourage and advocate for more organizations to build in wider change programs for those employees in the second and third levels of exposure. The numbers are far greater, but the impact is equally greater. If you increase the knowledge base at this level, you increase the knowledge across the organization and produce a far more change capable organization.

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