Great speaking opportunity

Do you have knowledge you would like to share with the next conference of the International Association of Facilitators in May 2012?  They are keen to hear for practitioners and researchers who can help them find new and better ways to engage and involve.  Social media has immense potential to inform and involve people in teams and organizations. Come and present or even take part by video.

The Presenters Guide has all the information. Proposals to Participate need to be sent to the Program Team by September 26th.

IAFNA 2012 Presenters Briefing           IAFNA 2012 Proposal for Participation Form Version 2 Sept 19, 2011

Step 3 – Engender a constructive climate and create conversations to develop trust (Part One)

In our experience Step 3 is the rock on which our change communications rests or crashes. It creates the lens through which everything is evaluated.  It’s a biggie, so we have split it into several parts for discussion over the coming weeks.

After reading and applying the work of  Robert Galford and Anne Drapeau*, we believe there is a framework to how we see the world. Like all lists made in business publications it is not exhaustive but attempts to capture fundamental concerns. Please debate this with us and add more to the list.

In our communications and change management support we aim to build:

• Strategic trust –helping users understand why this is the right direction for the organization and its customers
• Organizational trust – helping people to understand and buy into the impact on the team, department or business. Helping them feel that the transition will be fairly and effectively managed.  This becomes more and more important as multiple and serial changes are made.
• Personal trust – how managers and the change process will treat me appropriately and help me get the skills and knowledge I need to stay competent and valued.

Is there more to this? What have we missed? Add a Comment and lets see how it feels to you.

• New this month – have a quick look at our Trust Poll.

The results will be part of our next discussion about building trust.

In Part Two we are going to look further at the components of trust building we must understand and leverage.

See you there and thank you for being part of the Communicating Changes Blog.

* The Trusted Leader, Robert Galford and Anne Seibold Drapeau 2002

Step 2 – Finding and setting up the communications channels

I find that the next step can easily get lost in the rush to deliver something tangible for a client. This stage is about making sure that clear channels are open for communication to and from the recipients of the change. 

Communications channels will already exist but they are often saturated – like email and meetings - and they don’t give enough visibility to a change. Make sure you are enabling and encouraging the return flow of questions, feedback and gossip that will give you advance notice of responses to the change.  It is the ripples that the change makes that will influence climate and success. (Good ripples, we like). 

I work to do this by ensuring we: 

• Create and publicize a central, authoritative place to go for accurate, timely information
• Recruit, nurture and reward change champions at every level
• Invite exchanges about adding, building and growing the change to meet its aim and more
• Provide frequent updates, look for themes and answer questions in real-time
• Create a role and a rhythm for each channel to everyone knows what to expect
• Enable honest, empathetic sharing of views, ideas, stories and concerns

There is a massive oversupply of information at  work nowadays. Stripping down change communications to the point where we add real value for users is a big challenge. I find that email, voicemail messages and posters along the office walls are just cuter ways to broadcast. Without a way to see and hear the ripples that the change will bring we have no way of managing the `change overhead`.  Maybe I am aiming for perfection but surveys that only half the users complete and Twitter tools that many still find too funky make it hard to watch those ripples. Have you found good ways to do this?
 

 

Step 1 – Describing the change

Step 1 comes after the Discovery process. I have my Discovery ‘Questions’ down to about 30 questions now and that is something else I will be talking about later on.

In this stage we give a clear description of the change/s in terms that help people evaluate its scale & value

• Short, sharp and focused What, Where, When, Who and Why/Why-now with a sense of dissatisfaction with the current and urgency from the chief Change Champion/s
• Give a clear outline of what will Start, Stop, Continue
• Have experienced, trusted managers and front line supervisors describe the How
• Use terms that enable effective understanding and evaluation of what the change means to and for everyone involved
• Provide straightforward benefits for customers, the organization, employees and colleagues
• Put the change into context with other related and unrelated changes underway and give a sense of relative priority and expectation.

What interests me is the way we need to negotiate an acceptance of the impact of change process itself. People are dealing with so much that they cannot just add another set of tasks to their workload. It means we need to slice and dice the communications, training and support much more. It also means we have to make a contract with the users which spells out the commitments and deliverables. Strong benefits and a hefty dose of sponsorship are not enough to persuade users to give their time and energy to a change. How are you dealing with this aspect of change management?

Sharing 7 steps for effective change communications

There is a lot of great work in the field of change management. Like everyone I have read the works of thought leaders and compared that to my own experience. My fear has always been about not plagiarizing the ideas as I would hate someone to steal my intellectual property. But it was Rich Baker of conversational.co.uk who helped me to see that our more connected world means we can gain more by sharing and exchanging ideas.  The work done by Prosci in the US and Kaizen Training in the UK, and thought leaders like William Bridges, Dan Cohen, David Cooperrider and Roger Schwarz gives us amazing resources. Perhaps it is just re-presentation or turning it into words and concepts that make sense to me but I have found there are other ways to look at the organizational impact of a change. It breaks down into 7 steps and over the next 7 months I will sharing each step. The intent as always is to share and exchange.  I would love nothing better than for someone to find a glaring hole in the work   When you work on somethings for years it is too easy to get into the weeds.

Getting started

I was talking to a neighbour’s Son last night at a drinks party and it made me think about getting started on our blog. He was newly graduated, looking for a job in his field and facing the usual challenges about building a network. I was promoting the virtues of blogging to connect with people and it made me realize that I have to get started as well.

So, here is our first step. The intent of Communicating Changes is to engage with people who are interested in exchanging ideas about change communications. That is the subset of corporate communications that brings together communications and change management. My clients are typically making an organizational or operational change and need to inform and train employees, and sometimes their customers. The dream is to make Communicating Changes a place to exchange ideas, test out the theories and find people to collaborate with. It won’t have ads or heavy selling, just ideas and the views of those of us who find this kind of work really cool. It all starts here.

Robert

Welcome to Robert Ayling Incorporated

Are you contemplating changes to your product, service or organization? We have solutions to make that change a success.

Use the ChangeFootprint® to measure and track the scale and impact of that change. You can then tailor the way you manage communications in a more efficient and effective way.

Run a Change Plan Workshop to create a detailed Change Communications Plan in less than a day.

Play the ”Realities of Change” Game as a Change Management ice-breaker to get any group thinking about the key issues they need to address.

And when you need an independent voice to help move a team through a change, our Change Facilitation services help you do that.