While much has been said on how to avoid complaints from your customers, they will still happen. Assuming you’re a good person trying hard, being told you aren’t delivering takes your lizard brain from zero to sixty in a flash. You are under attack! Your heart starts pounding, blood flows from the extremities, you feel… Read more »
Business Management Blog
The Human Factors that Determine ROI on a Change Initiative
The goal of change is to deliver whatever the desired outcome was that precipitated the change. No company implements a new software system just to complete the implementation. Project management criteria such as on time or on budget are necessary but not sufficient for a successful change initiative. Companies implement software to realize financial gain,… Read more »
Communication: The Leader’s Role in Change Management
The goal of a communication plan (in change management) is to create awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement with each of the audiences that will be impacted by change. An effective communication plan builds awareness of the nature of the change and communicates the risks of not changing. It enables sponsors to interact with employees, formalizes feedback… Read more »
Building a Coalition: The Leader’s Role in Change Management
In our first article on the leader’s role in change management, we outlined the leader’s role in actively and visibly participating in change. The next role they play is in building a coalition of sponsorship, which involves finding the right people in positions of authority and proximity to implement the change. Note that leaders can never… Read more »
Active and Visible Participation: The Leader’s Role in Change Management
A company’s leader plays three primary roles in change management. Over the coming months we will unpack each of these roles in a series of blog posts. This post tackles the #1 contributor to the success of any change initiative, according to Prosci’s nine benchmarking studies conducted over 20 years: leadership’s active and visible participation…. Read more »
Make the Next Change a Spectacular Success
Improve the ROI of Change Initiatives Whether you’re implementing a new ERP or just changing the way timesheets are submitted, why is change so hard? Too often, it’s because the person in charge of the change initiative is a Project Manager and understandably treats it like a project, with timelines and deliverables, while ignoring the… Read more »
How to Become a Better Listener
The cacophony of opinions screamed into the world on social media, in meetings, at conferences, and in classrooms provides ample evidence that it is a human need to be heard. But with all this yelling going on, who is listening? Great leaders have learned to listen carefully to feedback from their staff, their customers, their… Read more »
How to Run a Great Meeting
When I open a benchmarking analysis, I always ask, “are there any regular meetings coming up?” I’m interested in unraveling the organization’s communication habits. I want to discern the rhythm of communication in the business and also the quality of the execution. Although organizations should hold different types of meetings (Strategic Meetings, Tactical Meetings, One-on-Ones,… Read more »
Management Meetings*: 3 Dos and a Don’t
The most productive management teams meet weekly for 45-60 minutes for an action oriented discussion of short-term results and plans. They use Action Logs to record commitments and a Parking Lot to track important issues that arise but cannot be dealt with efficiently in the meeting itself. This type of meeting is a “Tactical Management… Read more »
The Year in Review
You may be familiar with the effective “What should we start doing, stop doing, and keep doing?” practice that helps managers learn what worked well and what didn’t in their organizations (and if you weren’t, now you are – it’s a good one). Adding these additional five questions to the beginning of the exercise will… Read more »