Preparing your team to pivot and change. The process of deploying transformational change, while day to day work must continue.

Part 8 of Allyn Bailey’s Series on Driving Talent Acquisition Transformation

In the last segment of this series, What You Call a Thing is as Important as The Thing Itself. The Power and Impact of Words to Drive Transformational Alignment, I talked about the power of words and labels to make or break your transformational journey. If you missed that or any of the other articles in this series where I outline lessons 1 - 31, you could read them all?here. In this segment in the series I am sharing my final four lessons in talent transfomration.??

The number one reason well-meaning Talent leaders don’t pursue transformational change is their belief that it is too challenging to take on while attempting to meet the ever-increasing demands put on their organization to meet current commitments and objectives.??Basically, what this boils down to is the same reason most people don’t take on change, even when they know there is a better way to do things, fear of dropping the ball on what people expect from them today for a promise that things will be better tomorrow.??It is unbelievable the amount of pain we will put ourselves through slugging through our current existence, to avoid the imagined pain of attempting to change.??In the world of talent, we have an easy scapegoat to point to.??Our volumes are always too high, our staff always over worked, our stakeholders immensely impatient and unforgiving.??The lie we tell ourselves as talent leaders is we will get to making the changes we know we need to make when things quiet down, when the current hiring ramp is over, when we have the extra bandwidth to spare.??Here is your wake-up call.??That time will never come and if it does it will not be long or sustained enough for you to accomplish the level of transformative change you need before the pace of every day work becomes overwhelming again.??The only way to break free of your pain today is to invest in creating change now, even if it the mere thought of adding one more thing to your plate feels unimaginable.?

Lesson 32: If no one owns the change agenda, it will not happen because no one including you will ever find time to do it.

First off, it’s important to recognize that the fear of being overwhelmed and unable to juggle today’s deliverables while building for the future is legitimate.??You are overtaxed today, and trying to envision, plan, and execute strategies for the future is too much to do while managing your daily grind. This is especially true if you approach it as an add on task for yourself and your team.??The most important piece of advice I can give you is, assign someone to own your transformation.??Make it their job and their primary focus, not their additional responsibility.??Their primary initial task is to remove the stress of designing and planning how to achieve your transformative vision from your day-to-day plate and that of your overtaxed team.??Yes, this requires an investment in headcount, but it will pay dividends immediately.??It’s nearly impossible to make forward traction if you are mired in managing today’s fires.??This angst of not making forward momentum or even having time to think through how to make forward momentum can eat you up inside as a leader.??By taking the forward step of assigning another human being to take on the task of preparing the path forward, you will alleviate yourself of the angst and the guilt and free yourself to focus on providing vision and direction and keeping the current day to day afloat.??Attempting to program manage this level of change and transformation yourself is a fool’s errand destined to cause you an ulcer.?

Lesson 33: Don't try to swallow an elephant. Be iterative but with purpose and intent.

The next trick to creating change momentum in your organization is to realize, not every element of change you create needs to happen as a big bang.??Transformation is both an outcome and an action.??The act of transformation is often so subtle that it is hard to even recognize it is happening.??Creating this kind of change is easier for many teams and organizations to swallow because it does not leave them feeling lost and untethered to their current environment. This sort of slow and methodical change, however, requires purposeful intent for it to be valuable and generate the long-term outcomes you are looking for. This is where having a change owner in your organization will pay off.??They can help you define your transformative intent, ensure you have strong design principles and then collaborate with you to help identify those moments in time, decisions, and actions occurring in the normal course of business, that can be taken advantage of to help propel your organization forward on their transformation journey.??This sort of iterative transformation becomes successful when every choice you make is intentional and in service of your larger purpose.

"True life is lived when tiny changes occur." - Leo Tolstoy

Lesson 34: Every time you open your mouth, write an email or decide, you are teaching, preparing and aligning your team for the future.

Even if you cannot bring yourself to invest in a resource to drive your change and create focus, you can still make huge strides in your transformation journey, by recognizing the power you have in your words, tone, and messaging.??You can proactively leverage your voice in the organization by being conscious of how you use it to help create alignment with your transformative vision, prepare your team to take on new ideas and teach your stakeholders and organization new ways to think, act and behave.??Before you send out your next email reread it and ask yourself, is there an opportunity here for me to reiterate a core transformative idea, to recognize someone for taking a positive step forward or to link and label an action or decision to a design principle of the transformation.??By being intentional about what you say and how you say it, you are laying the groundwork for the transformation.??Your words and decisions show your organization what you expect from them and signal your intentions.??

It should also not be underestimated the amount of education your team may need to understand the transformative ideas you are bring forward and how to execute on them.??I see organizations often make the mistake of seeing organizational education as the piece that is only done during deployment, when you are training and organization on a process or system.??This is a mistake.??Learning new ways to think, act and behave takes time, is scaffolded learning, requires repetition, reinforcement, and the leveraging of multiple modalities. Even if you do not foresee your organization taking on a major transformative change in the near future, it is to your benefit to begin setting the stage now, by finding ways to introduce new concepts and build new skills and ways of thinking through the day-to-day communications, conversations and activities you do as part of maintaining the business.

Lesson 35: Brand the future

Finally, you need to provide a beacon your team can move towards that is recognizable and inviting.??When your team has a moment to lift their heads out of the day-to-day grind, you want them to be excited about what they see in front of them, to compel them to want to do a few extra or new things today to get there, even if they are tired and over stretched.??You do this by branding your vision of the future that you are leading them towards.??Create a memorable way for them to identify what is of the today and what is of the future.??To do this, you need to create a brand identity for the future you are leading them to.??It needs a name, imagery, taglines, the whole kit, and caboodle of a brand campaign.??The biggest step forward you can make in transformative change can be in identifying what you are doing and making it a “real” thing because it has a name and an identity.??Once you have these things, you take your transformation journey out of the ideation stage and into the place where it becomes part of the ethos of the organization.??It is in that moment, you can begin to generate the iterative moments of change you need to propel you from having some ideas to creating a better tomorrow.

Well, there you have it my 35 lessons on driving transformation from the front lines. Over the course of the last year, I have attempted to provide you with both practical advice and honest talk about driving talent transformations.??If you want to check out any of the lessons you missed, here is a summary and links to the accompanying articles.

Lessons 1 – 7:?Building a Business Case for Talent Acquisition Transformation

1.?Build a scenarios-based response plan to make stakeholders comfortable with the “why now” question

2.?Never try and build a business case on a “promise” of the future, instead build it based on a logical series of probabilities.

3.?Choosing to drive change gives you and your organization some control, it does not determine whether change happens or not.

4.?Talent acquisition is an HR change leader. Talent acquisition must and will always go first because it is the one talent process closest to the outside world.

5.?Only you can build your strategy and only you can build your business case.?Copying someone other companies’ strategy or business case won’t help you with your problems.

6.?By playing with the level of detail and clarity you share in your business case, you can allow stakeholders to not just buy in to it but also become your advocates because they believe they were part of creating the plan.

7.?You cannot build a project plan with definitive timelines and or even a straight series of steps for getting buy in to a transformation business plan.?Be patient and bide your time.        

Lessons 8 – 12:?Finding the Heartbeat of Your Talent Acquisition Transformation

8.?Transformation requires a “why“ before you start defining all the “whats”

9.?You are going to define a “why” and then you need to be comfortable letting it take a back seat to your fellow travelers’ interpretation of the “why”.

10. The trick to getting people to understand the “why” of your transformation is to use psychological learning theories.

11. A beat needs notes added to it to make it a song. The notes need to resonate together to make a song.

12. You need to be front and center on the opportunity train.        

Lessons 13 – 16:?Driving Transformation by Understanding Your Customers

13. Skip customer research at your own peril because what you think you know is never the whole story

14. You are not your customer.

15. Understanding your customer is about understanding that feelings drive thoughts, which in turn is what drives actions.

16. Creating a meaningful transformation is not about making all your customers equally happy all the time.        

Lessons 17 – 19:?Transforming TA While Remaining Compliant

17. Take control of the compliance conversation

18. Do your homework.

19. Know the difference between a process decision and a legal compliance decision.        

Lessons 20 – 24:?Take Control of Your TA Technology Choices and Use Them to Drive Your TA Strategy

20.?Don’t choose a technology until you know what your TA philosophy and design principles are

21.?You own your technology configuration choices, not the vendor or implementation team hired gun.

22.?Align your organization roles & processes to your technology capabilities.

23.?Be purposeful about the data pathways.

24.?Technology is like a living breathing thing, you need to be prepared for it to grow, develop, and change over time.        

Lessons 25 – 28:?The Power of Design Principles in Your Talent Transformation

25.?Design Principles Articulate Your How

26.?Design Principles Are Simple and Easy to Understand.

27.?Design Principles Create Alignment.

28.?Design Principles Are Measurable and Should Be Measured.
        

Lessons 29 – 31:?What You Call a Thing is as Important as The Thing Itself. The Power and Impact of Words to Drive Transformational Alignment.

29.?Old Words Bring Old Baggage

30.?New Words Need to be Linked and Labeled.

31.?Words Create Identity.        

Lessons 32 – 35: Preparing your team to pivot and change.?The process of deploying transformational change, while day to day work must continue.

32.?If no one owns the change agenda, it will not happen because no one including you will ever find time to do it

33.?Don't try to swallow an elephant. Be iterative but with purpose and intent. 

34.?Every time you open your mouth, write an email or decide, you are teaching, preparing and aligning your team for the future.

35.?Brand the Future.