Increases Commitment, Contribution and Results While Improving Culture
Outcomes
- Increased employee commitment and contribution to change
- Significantly reduced resistance
- Increased ownership to make change stick
- Improved change outcomes
- Positive impact on culture and organizational climate
Issues Addressed
We once had a CEO client say, "If we could just get the employees out of the way, this change effort would go smoothly." What he meant was: If employees were committed and took ownership of the change, we wouldn't have this resistance and struggle.
Employees take ownership of change when they are engaged in creating it. This CEO's style was to run change top-down with as few people involved as possible. Fundamentally, he was afraid of losing control, and his autocratic style triggered people to resist. They felt left on the sidelines, victims of the change.
People do not resist change; they resist being changed. Time and again top-down, command and control leadership styles stifle change efforts. We can show you how to hit the sweet spot of employee engagement, enabling enough to make your changes successful, but not too much to negatively impact business operations.
Approach
We start by building an engagement strategy that models your values and desired culture and will produce your change outcomes. Walking your talk this way builds employee trust. For each critical task in your change process, we help you decide who must be involved in the task, what type of engagement they need (i.e., information only, input, decision-making, action) and which vehicles you will use to engage them (technology, face-to-face, small group, large group.). This involves employees in real change work so they end up emotionally "owning" your change process and outcomes. They become invested.
While employees are primary stakeholders, there are other internal and external customers who can make or break your change effort. By addressing the engagement needs of your entire stakeholder community, you build commitment faster and sustain it over time.
We address how stakeholders can be engaged during all aspects of your change process: planning, design and implementation. Most approaches make the mistake of attending to engagement only during implementation, but by then, your stakeholders will be resistant to your change because they have been left out of it for far too long. We help you engage people early, in just the right ways, to balance the urgency for fast change results with the need for stakeholder commitment to create momentum and make it happen.
Call us at 970-385-5100 for more information about how these approaches can reduce resistance and accelerate your results from change. |
