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Friday Response: 16 Ways to Successfully Influence Change

  

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Dom Del Borrello, Client Director in the Melbourne office of Vantage Performance has recently published a thought piece around change management - highlighting 8 ways to influence change. I thought I would bring 8 additional ideas to the table.

The key factor to any successful change management initiative is of course communication, but more than just talking – showing that you really understand your client’s business (and your individual stakeholder’s) drivers, inhibitors and inertias and working with them to achieve their goals in addition to developing useful outputs that they can take away and use.

Here are 8 additional suggestions that could help your next change management initiative:

• Understand your stakeholder’s needs and drivers: What are they trying to achieve and what are their pressures?
• Understand perceptions of yourself / your department: How can you change something if you don’t know what needs to be changed?
• Align your goals and objectives with that of your stakeholders: Ensuring you are both aiming for the same target – letting your stakeholders know you are here to help not hinder.
• Talking in their language: Stop using your favourite acronyms and colloquial terms (your stakeholder might not know what they mean) and start talking in a language your stakeholders can relate to (Procurement example: When talking with CFOs, focus on hard savings, risk management and spend control – not how your SRM program works)
• Develop guidelines which are easily understood and easily integrated with your stakeholders operations
• Develop consistent feedback loops with your stakeholders and ensure you are being seen as actively working on the relationship. Regular meetings and face-to-face time should all be done with consistency and regularity to condition your stakeholder (ensuring there are no surprises with the messages you are presenting)
• Ensure there is visibility across everything you are doing which has an impact on your stakeholder (no surprises)
• Be proactive and take solutions/ideas to your stakeholder – don’t wait for them to come to you with something that needs to be fixed.

Original post can be found here