Jon Samsel

Did you know that successful communication is consistently cited as a critical factor for affecting successful change? The right amount of timely, meaningful and consistent communication–targeted to key stakeholders–increases understanding, adoption and commitment from those who are involved. To reach that level of buy-in, it’s important for organizational leaders to have a solid understanding of stakeholder awareness, attitudes and beliefs, expectations, readiness and openness to change–followed by communication that resonates with their needs and concerns.

Most companies want change implemented with the least resistance and with the most buy-in as possible, so communication is critical. For this to occur, change must be applied using a planned approach that addresses all relevant constituents so that conversion from one type of behavior to another organization-wide will be as smooth as possible .

According to Kathy Stershic, president of Dialog Research & Communications, a San Francisco Bay Area change management communications firm, successful change management initiatives that her company has been involved with help to “bridge the gap between where companies are and where they need to be.”

A change management project on the right track can answer challenging questions such as:

• Do employees understand the strategic changes in your organization?
• Is the business imperative behind key change clear, credible and accepted?
• Are communications properly mapped to your organizational objectives?
• Is your organization ready and aligned to support your strategy?
• Is the message from Leadership really being heard and understood?

Stershic says that to achieve the required outcomes, it’s important to take the time to assess a company’s business requirements, bring focus to key business questions relevant to the situation, gather intelligent information, cull out key issues and insights, and then assimilate the learnings into actionable plans that address the need – whether it’s to fix a problem or to exploit an opportunity.

Here are ten useful change management definitions:

1. Stakeholder – A person who directly or indirectly affects or can be affected by a change, in a supportive or an obstructive way. In organizational change situations, stakeholders can be a directly affected team, adjacent teams, partners, supply chain members or even customers.
2. Change Sponsor – The person accountable for driving the change or business initiative down through their business organization. The Change Sponsor creates the vision for the end state, commits budget, resources and the time needed to remove obstacles to the project’s success. S/he determines policies/procedures that will impact the business and key stakeholders, champions the business case for change and supports the Change Agent(s). May also be called the Executive Sponsor.
3. Change Agent – A person, usually one of several, who is responsible for making change happen. A change agent helps specific stakeholders through the change process, understanding their needs and concerns, relating the impact of the change to the stakeholders, communicating benefits and the value proposition, diagnosing problems and helping resolve issues. May also be called Change Champion.
4. Alignment – Ensuring that competing priorities are managed to have the right focus on the change project, and that there are consequences for non-compliance. Alignment yields a common vision and direction for a change, and drives prioritization, accountability and adoption of a new end state.
5. Change Capacity – An organization’s collective ability to accept and incorporate change. Change capacity can be increased, by increasing people’s understanding of a change and its various impacts, their commitment to it, their ability to implement it, and providing the correct infrastructure to execute change.
6. Commitment – The state where individuals acknowledge and internalize that they share responsibility for the success or failure of a project or requirement, and they take ownership and initiative to improve processes, tools or team morale to make it happen.
7. Change Overload – The condition of an individual or group reaching a point of diminished performance or lost effectiveness resulting from a disruptive organizational change. This may be caused by work overload, time pressures, competing priorities, loss of security and confidence, uncertainty about the future and/or the need to learn new skills.
8. Resilience – An individual’s ability to deal effectively with pressure, recover quickly from setbacks, and remain optimistic and persistent under adversity. A person can remain resilient during a limited time period of disruptive change, but this is not sustainable unless there is ultimately a balance between personal and work demands.
9. Workforce Readiness – Employees’ degree of openness to acceptance of a change. This is based upon their knowledge and understanding of a change initiative, their expectations about it, and the preparedness of the people and infrastructure required to successfully execute on a new end state.
10. Communication – An interactive dialog between two or more parties; an exchange of ideas or opinions– not one-directional information push. Timely communication increases commitment and adoption rates by providing the ‘why’, ‘what’, and ‘how’ of the change – to the right people at the right time, over the duration of the change, and includes feedback loops to determine effectiveness and needed adjustments.

Dialog Research & Communications helps business leaders communicate effectively through change—blending senior business expertise with Fortune 500-proven tools for objective Stakeholder Assessment, Communications Planning and Implementation, Workforce Readiness and Change Leader Assessment. Partial client list includes Adobe, Cisco, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Ford Credit and Xerox.

Contact Information:
www.dialogrc.com
kathy@kstershic.com