(highlight:: Propogating Change Through an Organization: The Importance of Buy-In from Middle Managers
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I know in change research, it states that the majority of employees want to hear about change from their direct manager. It's a very, it's a very common communication kind of statistic that people understand. You're always going to hear messages from your CEO or division heads or whatever level that is about big changes. And that's right. But the next step is how do we then equip managers or people who are directly managing employees with enough information that they can then help continue to carry that message forward With a supportive mindset. Understand it for themselves first, because you have to remember they're going through the change sometimes too. So they have to understand it, be able to build their own set of buy in and get through their biases and reject what they might want to reject. Right. They have to go through their change process as well. Then they have to be able to have the conversation with their teams and coach them as well. And when you have an entire team of people, they're all not going to think about the change the same way either. So you have to have that ability to coach. So when, and listen, absolutely, I'd be empathetic. So when Maddie comes to me and says, I don't like this change. And here's what I'm kind of afraid of as it relates to this change, I can have that dialogue with you. And I can say, okay, so tell me more about that. What is it that you're, you know, what is it that you're experiencing or what is it that you're maybe fearful of? Or what do you think you're going to lose from this change? What are you going to gain? But the next employee might come in and be like, I'm so excited about this. I want to be part of this change. Please let me be a part of this change. You have to be able to address all of those different emotions and all of those different things happening. So middle management in large scale changes becomes one of your most important set of communicators. And they're usually the ones they get forgotten.)
- Time 0:02:13
-

(highlight:: Tailoring Communication About Change To Different Levels of the Organizational Network
Transcript:
Speaker 1
The other thing too is that I'm going to say the mismatch of messages. So we haven't talked about the change curve yet. No. But if you think about change in the aspect of I'm going through, I hear about it. I mean, a little bit of shock. I'm a little bit like, Oh my gosh, what's this change about? I might drop into that little bowl of okay, I'm just going to not think about it for a while until maybe like it packs me, maybe it'll go away if I stuff thinking about it. But then when you start to come back up the other side of the change curve and realize, okay, this is happening. They're going to give me some training. I'm hearing some communications. I'm feeling a little bit better about this. Everyone goes through that change curve at a different pace. And that includes leaders and leaders are the ones driving the change so they know about it first. Middle managers maybe find out next, right? So they're the next in line and they're going to go through their little change process as well. Then the rest of the employee base is going to find out the leaders that are driving the change, they're excited about it. They came up with it. They think it's a great idea. They think everyone should be excited. That's how their messages are going to be portrayed. But if an employee is hearing about it for the first time, we need to make sure that we understand where people are out in their changed journey so that the messages are appropriately Phrased so as to not alienate people, turn them off, what have you.)
- Time 0:05:52
-

(highlight:: Communicating Change: Ensure the Right Level at the Right Time in the Right Way
Transcript:
Speaker 1
But not everybody's going to be as excited when they hear about it the first time. So you have to you have to keep that audience in mind and must communicate things at the right level at the right time and in the right way.)
- Time 0:10:04
-

(highlight:: Nuanced of Working With Middle Managers on Feedback about Changes
Transcript:
Speaker 2
How do those middle managers maybe communicate those resistances back to the person and sure planning the change? Good question.
Speaker 1
I think some of it is to go back to the change manager. You want it to be something that's at least it's real, but it needs to be concise and put in ways that they can actually go take action on. It can't just be this person is complaining about this because they don't like this personally. Right. Okay. You're right. Let's look for patterns of things. Let's look for impacts to specific organizations that maybe we hadn't thought of. Like a specific change could impact, you know, IT differently than it impacts everybody else. Okay, that's good to know. We're experiencing all of this same kind of resistance from this type of an organization. It helps the change manager know that we might need to change our messaging or our training plan or maybe we need to give them a little bit more time. Yeah. So let's put them last on the training agenda. Right. I mean, there's a lot of games you can do to shift around. The managers, like I said, they're going to give a change manager probably a lot of the raw data information. Oh my gosh, my team hates this. They're complaining about all of this. I think the job of the change manager is to say, okay, help me understand that more. Can you break down exactly what it is that they're not liking about this change? And usually you can get it broken down to one or two things. And then you can get to the root cause of why it might have to do with it was done once before and done poorly. Maybe sometimes you have to think about the messenger. Sometimes the middle manager they're talking to may not be communicating it effectively. So you can actually go in and help you can as a change person, you can go in and help facilitate a conversation to understand where the resistance is coming from as a third party associated With the change or the initiative. Sometimes that opens up all the doors in the world and it helps people to become more transparent because it has to do with trust. Right. And if they don't trust there, while middle managers are the bet, I don't want to say middle, but managers who manage the employees themselves, the people being impacted by it. It could be a senior director, it could be a manager, it doesn't matter what the title, if they're managing employees, if they don't understand or if they don't have that trust built With those people, it doesn't matter what they say. So getting to that the heart of that can be extremely beneficial because it can help actually point out gap areas or problem areas within the organization. We might have to go deal with this on the side because we have an issue with this department or this manager that's even different from our change, but they're never going to accept it Because of who the message is coming from. There's going to be all these little nuances right that happen and other, I'll say problems can pop up in the process. And then you as a change manager get, you have to decide how do I escalate this? Or what do I do with this information? And it becomes you working with your sponsor in a change project, your sponsor and your project or program manager, like you guys really work together really closely to make sure that The change is happening effectively.)
- Time 0:10:47
-

(highlight:: Effective Change Management: Involve the Most Impacted Stakeholders in Designing the Change Early On
Transcript:
Speaker 1
There are some things that unfortunately feel like they happen in the moment and it happened quickly. That's the nature of those things. But most changes that happen, we're getting a new technology or we're rolling out a new process for something like that. Involving your people early and often is what I always say, early and often. Because what research says you have to hear something five to seven times before it ever sticks. Yeah. And I would say that's probably closer to 10 or 11 times. Because until you need to know that information, you're not going to pay attention. Right? So as early as possible, also I think you can begin the communication process. Doesn't have to even be in mass. Who are the people who are most impacted by the change? And how can they help us with designing the change, bringing them into the fold so that by the time you get to the mass announcement, everybody almost already knows, right? Because you've done a pilot and you've brought in business people to help you with designing the change. And you did focus groups to get feedback on how might this impact you and your organization? Leaders just talking to their leadership teams and getting feedback, right? There's lots of ways to do communication in small pockets that will eventually build you up to the time when you finally do that mass communication. It's really not going to be as big of a deal. But now it's finally out there. Everyone has seen it. We're working toward it. And then we just keep working together. So it's kind of using like agile principles if you think about it, right? You're experimenting, you're piloting, you're refreshing, and then you just keep moving. With communications, as much as you can do that as possible, I think is the best.)
- Time 0:16:13
- stakeholder engagement, change_management, change communication,

(highlight:: Strategies for Communicating Change Through Various Channels
Transcript:
Speaker 1
If it's something that if it's a welcome change, right, it'll be a lot easier. You might not have to communicate as often. But if it's one that's going to be resisted and it's global and it's widespread, you know, you're going to have to have ongoing. That's where people will establish some sort of a cadence or a channel like a social channel where it's like for all things on this change. Look here, we're going to be providing you updates on a regular basis. Please subscribe, those are great ways of using those kinds of capabilities to keep people as engaged as possible and making sure that your leaders, you know, it's being cadenced at Quarterly business review medians. It's being cadence at monthly leadership meetings. It's being, you know, you can establish all of those true cadences. And the great thing about communication and plans and all of those things is that you have a ton of communication channels already in your organization. Leverage what you have. You don't have to create a bunch of new ones.
Speaker 2
Leverage what you have. Or where they already are.
Speaker 1
Yeah, leadership meetings, social channels, regular business reviews. If there's a change management team or whatever you're talking about it in your change team, right? If there's project management teams, you're talking about it in the project teams, right? You use those communities of practice. Communities of practice have proven to be one of the most powerful communication channels in organizations. And for companies that have very advanced knowledge management practices and they do have a structured communities of practice. When you're managing a change when I've managed changes in the past, I go to the community networks and I say, here's a change that's upcoming. Either can we send someone to a community practice if you do like actual meetings and gatherings to talk about it with the community, or can we post it in your channel, or what have you? Communities of practice are people who have a desire to continue to learn and share information and they will be your best advocates for change. And they will ask questions and they will challenge, right? So use those community of practice channels if you have them in your organization. They will be some of your best, they will do the communication for you.)
- Time 0:18:43
- change_management, communities of practice, change communication, 1evernote,

(highlight:: Branding Your Change: Use a Logo!
Transcript:
Speaker 2
We completed a case study through the change management research and something really cool that the organization did is they had a logo for different change initiatives. That way, every piece of communication that went out about that specific project, there was a little icon. So you received an email about Project A, you knew that it was Project A right off the bat because of icon. I thought that was as a former marketing person. I found that like brand recognition.
Speaker 1
That's a brilliant, actually, that's a really brilliant approach. And I have experienced that in my career as well. In a lot of corporations, they will, you have to be careful because if you have too much branding happening in your organization, it can start to become confusing to people. So usually working with your marketing department, your branding department to establish what does that look and feel like within your organization. So maybe it's certain size of initiatives will get their own brand or it's a common, a standard way of branding something, but it looks the same but slightly different. So that it always looks like your company logo and always looks like your company colors and all that kind of stuff. So love the concept of branding a specific change. Just make sure that you're checking with your organization and how they feel about that. Yeah. And they might establish a really standard way for you to do it where it's like whenever it's green, it's an HR thing or whatever, it's purple. It's a finance thing, right? They'll help you with figuring that out. So people start to see that common, like you said, it's the I see this email pop up and I see this branding know exactly what it's going to be about. Oh, this is about our HR transformation journey or oh, this is about our process improvement journey, right? That's a great point. And it's one of the, I think one of the best uses of internal branding as well is to really help people just kind of buy in and get excited about it.)
- Time 0:21:11
-

(highlight:: Change Managers are like Orchestra Conductors
Transcript:
Speaker 2
It's kind of like an orchestra or I think of the conductor. They're usually kind of hidden and then at the very end of a performance or something, you see them stand up and it's they're responsible for everything being harmonized together, But it takes each individual group to make it.
Speaker 1
And they usually do the thing with their arm where they actually give the credit to the orchestra behind them because those are the people who actually made the music happen. They just helped bring it together.)
- Time 0:25:24
-

(highlight:: Propogating Change Through an Organization: The Importance of Buy-In from Middle Managers
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I know in change research, it states that the majority of employees want to hear about change from their direct manager. It's a very, it's a very common communication kind of statistic that people understand. You're always going to hear messages from your CEO or division heads or whatever level that is about big changes. And that's right. But the next step is how do we then equip managers or people who are directly managing employees with enough information that they can then help continue to carry that message forward With a supportive mindset. Understand it for themselves first, because you have to remember they're going through the change sometimes too. So they have to understand it, be able to build their own set of buy in and get through their biases and reject what they might want to reject. Right. They have to go through their change process as well. Then they have to be able to have the conversation with their teams and coach them as well. And when you have an entire team of people, they're all not going to think about the change the same way either. So you have to have that ability to coach. So when, and listen, absolutely, I'd be empathetic. So when Maddie comes to me and says, I don't like this change. And here's what I'm kind of afraid of as it relates to this change, I can have that dialogue with you. And I can say, okay, so tell me more about that. What is it that you're, you know, what is it that you're experiencing or what is it that you're maybe fearful of? Or what do you think you're going to lose from this change? What are you going to gain? But the next employee might come in and be like, I'm so excited about this. I want to be part of this change. Please let me be a part of this change. You have to be able to address all of those different emotions and all of those different things happening. So middle management in large scale changes becomes one of your most important set of communicators. And they're usually the ones they get forgotten.)
- Time 0:02:13
-

(highlight:: Tailoring Communication About Change To Different Levels of the Organizational Network
Transcript:
Speaker 1
The other thing too is that I'm going to say the mismatch of messages. So we haven't talked about the change curve yet. No. But if you think about change in the aspect of I'm going through, I hear about it. I mean, a little bit of shock. I'm a little bit like, Oh my gosh, what's this change about? I might drop into that little bowl of okay, I'm just going to not think about it for a while until maybe like it packs me, maybe it'll go away if I stuff thinking about it. But then when you start to come back up the other side of the change curve and realize, okay, this is happening. They're going to give me some training. I'm hearing some communications. I'm feeling a little bit better about this. Everyone goes through that change curve at a different pace. And that includes leaders and leaders are the ones driving the change so they know about it first. Middle managers maybe find out next, right? So they're the next in line and they're going to go through their little change process as well. Then the rest of the employee base is going to find out the leaders that are driving the change, they're excited about it. They came up with it. They think it's a great idea. They think everyone should be excited. That's how their messages are going to be portrayed. But if an employee is hearing about it for the first time, we need to make sure that we understand where people are out in their changed journey so that the messages are appropriately Phrased so as to not alienate people, turn them off, what have you.)
- Time 0:05:52
-

(highlight:: Communicating Change: Ensure the Right Level at the Right Time in the Right Way
Transcript:
Speaker 1
But not everybody's going to be as excited when they hear about it the first time. So you have to you have to keep that audience in mind and must communicate things at the right level at the right time and in the right way.)
- Time 0:10:04
-

(highlight:: Nuanced of Working With Middle Managers on Feedback about Changes
Transcript:
Speaker 2
How do those middle managers maybe communicate those resistances back to the person and sure planning the change? Good question.
Speaker 1
I think some of it is to go back to the change manager. You want it to be something that's at least it's real, but it needs to be concise and put in ways that they can actually go take action on. It can't just be this person is complaining about this because they don't like this personally. Right. Okay. You're right. Let's look for patterns of things. Let's look for impacts to specific organizations that maybe we hadn't thought of. Like a specific change could impact, you know, IT differently than it impacts everybody else. Okay, that's good to know. We're experiencing all of this same kind of resistance from this type of an organization. It helps the change manager know that we might need to change our messaging or our training plan or maybe we need to give them a little bit more time. Yeah. So let's put them last on the training agenda. Right. I mean, there's a lot of games you can do to shift around. The managers, like I said, they're going to give a change manager probably a lot of the raw data information. Oh my gosh, my team hates this. They're complaining about all of this. I think the job of the change manager is to say, okay, help me understand that more. Can you break down exactly what it is that they're not liking about this change? And usually you can get it broken down to one or two things. And then you can get to the root cause of why it might have to do with it was done once before and done poorly. Maybe sometimes you have to think about the messenger. Sometimes the middle manager they're talking to may not be communicating it effectively. So you can actually go in and help you can as a change person, you can go in and help facilitate a conversation to understand where the resistance is coming from as a third party associated With the change or the initiative. Sometimes that opens up all the doors in the world and it helps people to become more transparent because it has to do with trust. Right. And if they don't trust there, while middle managers are the bet, I don't want to say middle, but managers who manage the employees themselves, the people being impacted by it. It could be a senior director, it could be a manager, it doesn't matter what the title, if they're managing employees, if they don't understand or if they don't have that trust built With those people, it doesn't matter what they say. So getting to that the heart of that can be extremely beneficial because it can help actually point out gap areas or problem areas within the organization. We might have to go deal with this on the side because we have an issue with this department or this manager that's even different from our change, but they're never going to accept it Because of who the message is coming from. There's going to be all these little nuances right that happen and other, I'll say problems can pop up in the process. And then you as a change manager get, you have to decide how do I escalate this? Or what do I do with this information? And it becomes you working with your sponsor in a change project, your sponsor and your project or program manager, like you guys really work together really closely to make sure that The change is happening effectively.)
- Time 0:10:47
-

(highlight:: Effective Change Management: Involve the Most Impacted Stakeholders in Designing the Change Early On
Transcript:
Speaker 1
There are some things that unfortunately feel like they happen in the moment and it happened quickly. That's the nature of those things. But most changes that happen, we're getting a new technology or we're rolling out a new process for something like that. Involving your people early and often is what I always say, early and often. Because what research says you have to hear something five to seven times before it ever sticks. Yeah. And I would say that's probably closer to 10 or 11 times. Because until you need to know that information, you're not going to pay attention. Right? So as early as possible, also I think you can begin the communication process. Doesn't have to even be in mass. Who are the people who are most impacted by the change? And how can they help us with designing the change, bringing them into the fold so that by the time you get to the mass announcement, everybody almost already knows, right? Because you've done a pilot and you've brought in business people to help you with designing the change. And you did focus groups to get feedback on how might this impact you and your organization? Leaders just talking to their leadership teams and getting feedback, right? There's lots of ways to do communication in small pockets that will eventually build you up to the time when you finally do that mass communication. It's really not going to be as big of a deal. But now it's finally out there. Everyone has seen it. We're working toward it. And then we just keep working together. So it's kind of using like agile principles if you think about it, right? You're experimenting, you're piloting, you're refreshing, and then you just keep moving. With communications, as much as you can do that as possible, I think is the best.)
- Time 0:16:13
- stakeholder engagement, change_management, change communication,

(highlight:: Strategies for Communicating Change Through Various Channels
Transcript:
Speaker 1
If it's something that if it's a welcome change, right, it'll be a lot easier. You might not have to communicate as often. But if it's one that's going to be resisted and it's global and it's widespread, you know, you're going to have to have ongoing. That's where people will establish some sort of a cadence or a channel like a social channel where it's like for all things on this change. Look here, we're going to be providing you updates on a regular basis. Please subscribe, those are great ways of using those kinds of capabilities to keep people as engaged as possible and making sure that your leaders, you know, it's being cadenced at Quarterly business review medians. It's being cadence at monthly leadership meetings. It's being, you know, you can establish all of those true cadences. And the great thing about communication and plans and all of those things is that you have a ton of communication channels already in your organization. Leverage what you have. You don't have to create a bunch of new ones.
Speaker 2
Leverage what you have. Or where they already are.
Speaker 1
Yeah, leadership meetings, social channels, regular business reviews. If there's a change management team or whatever you're talking about it in your change team, right? If there's project management teams, you're talking about it in the project teams, right? You use those communities of practice. Communities of practice have proven to be one of the most powerful communication channels in organizations. And for companies that have very advanced knowledge management practices and they do have a structured communities of practice. When you're managing a change when I've managed changes in the past, I go to the community networks and I say, here's a change that's upcoming. Either can we send someone to a community practice if you do like actual meetings and gatherings to talk about it with the community, or can we post it in your channel, or what have you? Communities of practice are people who have a desire to continue to learn and share information and they will be your best advocates for change. And they will ask questions and they will challenge, right? So use those community of practice channels if you have them in your organization. They will be some of your best, they will do the communication for you.)
- Time 0:18:43
- change_management, communities of practice, change communication, 1evernote,

(highlight:: Branding Your Change: Use a Logo!
Transcript:
Speaker 2
We completed a case study through the change management research and something really cool that the organization did is they had a logo for different change initiatives. That way, every piece of communication that went out about that specific project, there was a little icon. So you received an email about Project A, you knew that it was Project A right off the bat because of icon. I thought that was as a former marketing person. I found that like brand recognition.
Speaker 1
That's a brilliant, actually, that's a really brilliant approach. And I have experienced that in my career as well. In a lot of corporations, they will, you have to be careful because if you have too much branding happening in your organization, it can start to become confusing to people. So usually working with your marketing department, your branding department to establish what does that look and feel like within your organization. So maybe it's certain size of initiatives will get their own brand or it's a common, a standard way of branding something, but it looks the same but slightly different. So that it always looks like your company logo and always looks like your company colors and all that kind of stuff. So love the concept of branding a specific change. Just make sure that you're checking with your organization and how they feel about that. Yeah. And they might establish a really standard way for you to do it where it's like whenever it's green, it's an HR thing or whatever, it's purple. It's a finance thing, right? They'll help you with figuring that out. So people start to see that common, like you said, it's the I see this email pop up and I see this branding know exactly what it's going to be about. Oh, this is about our HR transformation journey or oh, this is about our process improvement journey, right? That's a great point. And it's one of the, I think one of the best uses of internal branding as well is to really help people just kind of buy in and get excited about it.)
- Time 0:21:11
-

(highlight:: Change Managers are like Orchestra Conductors
Transcript:
Speaker 2
It's kind of like an orchestra or I think of the conductor. They're usually kind of hidden and then at the very end of a performance or something, you see them stand up and it's they're responsible for everything being harmonized together, But it takes each individual group to make it.
Speaker 1
And they usually do the thing with their arm where they actually give the credit to the orchestra behind them because those are the people who actually made the music happen. They just helped bring it together.)
- Time 0:25:24
-