Transformation programs are marathons -- they demand the kind of work you slog through every day for months or years to achieve success. It doesn’t matter if it’s a technology transformation, a contact center redesign, or a programmatic transformation, it’s detailed, focused work to understand how roles, behavior, process, and tools must evolve to activate an impactful change. And that’s without getting hung up on structure, hierarchy, and rewards for people. It can be frustrating to get stuck or feel like your efforts are not yielding results.
Here are some quick diagnostics to help you focus and advance.
1. Effective behavior change starts and ends with mindset. Can leaders and participants articulate the vision and values of this change?
- Let’s start with the easiest person to ask – yourself. Can you clearly articulate the what, the why, and the how? Does the message resonate with where the organization stands today? Being able to describe the vision is essential.
- Test this with key players participating at multiple levels – you can use formal and informal data points to achieve insights into what resonates with people.
- Address the gaps by spending some time on conscious communication. Making it easy for people to make the right connections will move things forward. If there are points of confusion or feedback, that should signal where you need to check and adjust.
2. Have team members left behind the old ways of working in favor of new ones, or have they just layered the new ones on top?
- Organizational friction is a fact of life. One group does things this way; another group has codified policies to do them another way. When building change, success requires testing the approach with a small group that can prove that the new way of working…well…works.
- Once your pilots have proved that the change works at a limited scale, you can extend it to more complex situations with more coordination requirements. It’s critical to message the vision, values, and expectations to the groups modeling or learning the new way first as well as to those on the outside. Done right, with successes that build, you will create excitement about what is possible. Done even better, people from the original pilots will help new groups come on board and internalize the change.
- Watch for the “tipping point” of coordination when change is starting to spread rapidly, and communicate thoroughly to ensure everyone is staying together.
3. Has your roll-out identified pilots or start points that can easily operate outside of old ways of working without creating friction with existing methods?
- A recent client project team was struggling to meet deadlines and commitments after a new process and set of tools was rolled out. The approach was designed to offer teams structure about how to approach their work along with enhanced speed and flexibility. The client was expecting it to be well-received by everyone and generate immediate results, however, this wasn’t happening.
- Why not? We followed up with a series of conversations to understand and address the issues. Complaints ranged from “I don’t understand how to use this template” to “I wasn’t included in the decision” to “there’s too much overhead in this new way of working.” What we learned was that some team members were doing the work the old way and then trying to fit it into the new way – double work. We also discovered that some people didn’t know how to handle requests for work done the old way because the change wasn’t thoroughly communicated.
- A from/to analysis of behaviors is a helpful approach in this situation – talking through old way versus new way with those who will use it. Anticipating the stresses in a new workflow can make it far easier for people to stick to a new way of doing things instead of regressing to the old way in a pinch.
4. Have you been clear about what organizational, team, and individual success will mean?
- Mindset and motivation are closely tied, so illustrating and modeling the desired behaviors goes part of the way in achieving change. The rest of the way is tied to helping people understand what success looks like.
- Convey both the rewards for success and the risks of not changing. Align rewards with the desired behaviors and not just outcomes moving forward. For instance, if experimentation could be a desired behavior to yield rapid cycle times and inspired ideas, then consider how some short-term risk and failure can be supported along the change journey.
- Make sure recognition is clear for trying and achieving change. Depending on the culture and situation this can be public or formal communication, bonuses or rewards, or the opportunity to teach others. Rewards work when they are right for the culture.
- Do you have the supports in place to lock in success? Two big ones are immersive learning, including coaching and mentoring, and a way to evaluate proficiency. Providing both the training before the journey and the benchmarks to indicate completion will go a long way in creating motivation.
It doesn’t matter if you use words like Agile, Lean or ITIL as a framework for how you operate. What’s essential is that you have a vision, internal alignment on values, and a path for getting there together. Change starts with mindset, and mindset drives the behavior that leads to results.
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Melissa Copeland is the Founder and Principal of Blue Orbit Consulting, a firm that specializes in effective strategies, targeted metrics and tailored programs to drive transformation in customer service and IT environments.