How to Deliver Successful Change Management (Part 5)

Read parts 1 to 4 of this six part series here:

Change needs people to do things differently. At a personal level people have to change some of their established habits. This doesn’t happen overnight and some people can find it quite difficult.

Making sure your change or transformation really sticks is about keeping the momentum up of all the elements which you used during the launch phase.

From my experience as a change management speaker and expert the key danger point tends to appear around nine months into the change. The first three to four months there is enthusiasm, hopefully, a clear and specific plan, everybody has responsibilities To some degree, even if the plan is complex, from the perception of people it’s a simple objective.

Six to nine months in things start to get less clear, the plan will potentially have had to be adapted in different areas, people will have been working hard, the change has become almost day-to-day activity.

Also never forget that during change and transformation people essentially have two jobs – keeping the organisation running and making the change. That’s why change and transformation has to be as simple and practical to engage them and enable them to do both. If they don’t have the bandwidth to do both it’s the change which gets dropped.

This 9 month point can be a tipping point where those engaged in the change can often move from enthusiasm to apathy so it’s essential to maintain momentum. This is done by focus on communication, clear milestones of achievement, celebrating success in teams and sharing success stories across the organisation.

Really simple actions such as Town Halls, lunch and learn sessions, briefings on progress by senior leaders and cross area focus groups can play a significant role in keeping momentum up. Also including change leadership skills in development plans keeps the leadership team capability constantly at a high level.

As long as momentum is maintained the change will spread across the organisation and overtime embed more deeply into day-to-day behaviour and organisational culture.

If the change or transformation takes a long time this momentum is critical as inevitably people will move within and out of the organisation with new people coming in. Good momentum keeps things moving forwards despite those changes. That works better if new arrivals are briefed and engaged in the ongoing change from day 1.