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"If we build it, they will come" may work for baseball fields, but when trying to adapt or improve your business it's an unrealistic assumption. In fact, the most common reason great ideas or upgraded processes fail - or fizzle after a brief burst of success - is lack of buy-in by key stakeholders.
Gaining support for change can't be an afterthought, and it can't be delegated to the HR department. But it is not easy and takes an understanding of how to position ideas and build acceptance that can last. That's where Pivotal Resources' Change Leadership™ consultant can help you build a plan to strengthen and streamline adoption of change through a series of realistic and practical change management practices, tailored to your initiative.
Ratonale & Benefits
Resistance to change is a given. For many reasons - some obvious, others unconscious - getting people to buy-in to new ideas and actually alter their behavior is a major challenge to almost any improvement effort. Even when change agents recognize and take action to "build support," their methods are often narrow and ineffective. Just "selling" won't work, for example, when people don't want to buy.
Through Change Management Planning, Pivotal Resources works with your leaders and project teams to identify key audiences and develop a coherent set of actions to engage and gain acceptance for important change initiatives. We focus on a comprehensive approach that may include such elements as:
- Strategic support - Identifying important influencers and personalizing an approach to gain buy-in and/or advocacy
- Overcoming objections - Recognizing specific arguments opposing new approaches or solutions and defining ways to overcome or accommodate them
- Building enthusiasm - Developing "marketing" programs to create excitement and help people understand the benefits/advantages of a change
- Validating benefits - Preparing evidence supporting the beneficial results of an initiative, or demonstrating that certain concerns can be effectively addressed
- Enforcing compliance - While the "carrot" is usually a preferred approach, having a "stick" - i.e. negative consequences for opposing or failing to adopt new procedures - is usually essential to solidify change over the long term.
This type of advice and support is most useful for efforts which the stakes are high and where the importance of adoption is critical to success.
Our Change Management Planning process emphasizes the dynamic nature of change efforts and the need to evolve the change/buy-in efforts as a project progresses. This consulting support for change can be supplemented by Pivotal's Change Management Workshops for project teams or facilitators.