Balancing Change Management

Have you ever seen your employer invest a substantial amount of time and resources into launching a new tool or program only for your co-workers to continue doing things the old way? It’s a sadly common phenomenon because people like what’s familiar, familiar is easy. ?

If you want people to expend the energy to relearn an aspect of their job, you first need to take the time to help them understand why the current state is broken and needs to be fixed. You then need to dedicate adequate time and resources to helping your people learn the new way of working. And finally, you need to ensure that adequate guardrails are put in place to reinforce and sustain the change going forward. ?

Over the last decade I have managed change for several very different companies. Yet employees at all of them initially shared the same belief that Change Management is?simply communications and training. The reason is simple, most companies do not allocate adequate resources for managing change. Either the responsibility to manage change falls on the Communications and Training teams or communications and training falls on their Change Manager. We turn our people into a jack of all trades and a master of none. ?

Before leaders will allocate resources to change management, they need to be shown the value to their organization. Change management is about delivering desired results. According to the findings of a 2023 research study by Prosci , 87% of initiatives with poor change management fail to meet their objectives while 88% of projects with excellent change management met or exceeded objectives. You are 7 times more likely to achieve your project's objectives if you leverage proper change management. ??

It is easy for leaders to get excited about such an increase in results. So much so that it can lead to the opposite problem, applying change management to everything whether it’s called for or not. When everything is important, nothing is important. Teams quickly get burned out and experience change fatigue. ?

Finding a proper balance requires prioritization. Leaders must align on which projects and initiatives to green light, and which changes to delay. Changes people understand and desire will require much less management than ones that encounter higher resistance. The more resistance you encounter the more protracted the change effort will need to be to achieve desired levels of adoption and results. ? ? ?