Change & Stakeholders: we’re (not) all in this together
One of my least favorite sayings is “we’re all in this together”. When it comes to stakeholders and change, nothing could be further from the truth!
The reality is, different groups of people experience change differently, so being “in it together” can feel live a minor inconvenience to some, or a major upheaval to others, even though, everyone is technically part of the same change.
To predict and manage these differences, we need to understand that there are three important factors at play:
Different groups of stakeholders
Change Impact
Individual responses to change
Breaking the groups of stakeholders into broad categorizations helps us understand who and how they are affected by change. Understanding the change impact also helps us see how much effort we need to put in to support the My favorite example of this was from when I was working on a Human Resource Information System (HRIS) implementation with a big multi-national client. The experience and change for the HR team was significant. Huge even! They were immersed in it.
We also had to remember that there were other teams affected too. Every employee in the organization had to do at least one thing differently in the new system. People managers were affected by the new processes for recruiting and onboarding. Leaders had a whole new way to interact with compensation and budget modeling. Then we also had departments who were uniquely affected like, finance, payroll, site operations, and the list goes on. Breaking the groups down and then understanding the change impact, made it possible to identify the affected groups and importantly specify what the change meant to each of them.
Individual responses to change are how we can look at variability in each of the stakeholder groups. Even though a group like the finance team might be affected the same way, individuals may respond to change differently, depending on their history with change, the organization, the power structures, and their place within the organization. Understanding individual responses to change, and how they may affect the overall change is where Connected Change ™ becomes even more powerful.
We’re continuing the topics of stakeholders and change impact for the next four weeks, and we’re giving away a free stakeholder template to our newsletter subscribers! Sign up here to get yours!