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Riding the Roller Coaster of Unexpected Change — Part II

From the moment you realize change is inevitable to the moment you begin to feel comfortable again, you experience an in-between and uncomfortable time of transition. For a time, you’re carrying both the weight of the past and uncertainty about the future. It may feel like a huge stone tied to your back, making it difficult to move forward.

There will be moments when you feel exhilarated about new opportunities change creates. And then, there will be moments filled with fear about what lies before you that makes it difficult to keep going.

As you begin walking a different path, you will likely encounter obstacles to overcome, barriers to breakthrough and challenges that could make you consider running back to the world you left behind. But, there is no ‘going back’ to go back to. Every change you experience changes you. You are not the person you use to be and you are not yet the person you have the potential to become.

There are actions you can take during this in-between time to make your roller coaster ride through transition triggered by unexpected change a little smoother:

A Manager’s Guide to Managing Change: Checklist For Success (Step I)

***Is your project on the path to success or to become one of the many that fail to achieve the expected benefits?***

The lessons I’ve learned, from the past twenty-five years of working with senior leadership of Fortune 500 corporations to prepare for enterprise-wide change, can help you avoid mistakes that can prevent your change initiative from succeeding.

There are six critical requirements for success:

Shared Vision
Understanding of the Full Impact to the Organization
Effective Stakeholder Engagement
Clear, Consistent and Continual Communication
Adequate Preparation
A Plan to Sustain

We will focus on one requirement in each of the next six blogs as a step you can take to minimize resistance, increase readiness, and realize the benefits of a successful change initiative. Together, they can serve as a checklist to evaluate the current status of your project.

A Manager’s Guide to Managing Change: Assessing Impact (Step II)

***Is your project on the path to success or to becoming one of the many that fail to achieve the expected benefits?***

Step One, Shared Vision, was the focus of my previous article. We will now shift our focus to Step Two: Understanding the Full Change Impact to the Organization

Have you identified the degree and type of changes required to realize your project’s benefits?

If not, how can people be prepared when you haven’t determined what type of change to prepare them for?

There is no such thing as a “small” change. Change has a ripple effect that is often underestimated. A change in technology will require a change in process that will affect how and where work is done.

A Manager’s Guide to Managing Change: Checklist for Success (Step III)

Effectively Engaging Stakeholders

The third step on the path to success is to effectively engage stakeholders. A stakeholder is anyone who will experience change because of your project or who has the ability to influence the outcome of your project. The keywords here are impact and influence.

The Impact Assessment, described in Step 2, is a tool to identify the type and degree of change and the areas and individuals affected. You can identify the high influence stakeholders by asking who has the power – whether formal or informal – to prevent your project from achieving success. Your Stakeholder Engagement Plan established the timeline, defines key objectives and describes the approach to involving the high impact/high influence stakeholders throughout the project.

Communication alone is not sufficient to achieve the level of support and preparation high impact/high influence stakeholders require for your project to be successful. Engaging the right stakeholders at the right time in the right way creates an opportunity for them to take ownership of the outcome. They become part of what is happening instead of an observer or a victim of what will be different. We are less likely to resist what we have a voice in creating.

Changing The Way You Think About Uncertainty

The Key to Mastering Uncertainty

“Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.” ~ John Allen Paulos

It’s 4 a.m. and you’re wide awake, thinking about all the bad things that might happen in your career, relationships, and life in general.

These thoughts are creating anxiety that is preventing you from sleeping. But, any fear you are feeling is self-imposed and created by thinking about a scary future rather than focusing on the reality of what’s happening in the present. Because, at the present moment, you are safe. There is nothing to fear other than what is being created by your imagination.

We’re very good at using the power of our imagination at 4 a.m. Maybe that’s when we should schedule our team calls. Everyone awake at 4 a.m. can get together and redirect the power of imaging bad things to imaging phenomenal things! Just call 1-800 No Worry.

In all seriousness, when you are living in the misery of uncertainty about what’s next in your life, sleeping at 4 a.m. is not easy to do. We don’t like the feeling of not being in control of our life. We don’t like not knowing. We need to fill in the blanks about what’s likely to happen next.

If Only “They” Would Change

“Be thankful for the difficult people in your life and learn from them.
They have shown you exactly who you do not want to be.”

I always begin my change management workshops by asking each participant what they hope to learn. “I’m here to learn how to change my boss because he really needs to change,” one woman responded. She literally thought the workshop was about how to change management instead of how to manage change.

When life isn’t going our way, it’s easy to get caught up in the blame game and fall into the trap of thinking that if only someone else would change, our problem would be solved.

If only…

‘I Want Things to be Better. I Just Don’t Want Anything to Change.’

What we’re really saying is “I want to experience the benefits of change without experiencing the disruption of change.”

And, who wouldn’t?

When confronted with the reality that achieving what we desire requires more changes than we are ready or willing to make, we often choose the status quo.

I’ve had many projects launched on a giant wave of unrealistic expectations about how much better life will be once the change is implemented, only to come crashing down when the reality of the impact of changes required to realize the expected benefits becomes known.

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Effectively Engaging Stakeholders

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The Key to Mastering Uncertainty

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