All Achievers ~ Listen Up! Learn How to Successfully Approach Cultural/Organizational Change – Part II

So if you read Part I, you’re now aware that you have to analyze your culture, its capacity and its appetite relative to Organizational Change and build a realistic OCM Plan that meets your company’s needs. But how do you go about doing that? I love the world of analogies because for me, they break down complex ideas into fractional components that can be more easily managed. Approaching change is no different than what many of you are used to doing already:

• Researching & documenting your Current State
• Defining your Future State (including Success Criteria)
• Analyzing and identifying the Gaps
• Creating your Gap Analysis
• Developing your Gap Remediation Plan, aka OCM Plan

Although the process is fairly straight forward, the challenging part is working in the world of human behaviors ~ understanding them, analyzing them, sorting through them, anticipating them ~ because all of that is required after you identify your Key Stakeholders ~ your interested, influential, affected and/or involved parties ~ then craft your interviewing questions. Even identifying your Key Stakeholders can be tricky.

We suggest that you ask yourself the following 8 questions (at a minimum), to aid the identification process:

• Who might need to know about my work as a courtesy?
• Who might need to know about my work because they or their staff will be involved at some level ~ at some time either in the near or long term future?
• Who might be positively or negatively impacted by my work ~ either directly or indirectly?
• Who might positively or negatively impact progress as I undertake my work?
• Who might my greatest advocate(s) be?
• Who might my greatest detractor(s) be?
• Who might “sit on the fence”?
• Who might be a “lost cause”?

Once you’ve identified your Key Stakeholders, it’s also beneficial to “rate” their potential level of interest, influence, affectedness and/or involvement as “strong”, “moderate” or “negligible”. This will help you focus on those Key Stakeholders who could, most likely, either accelerate or derail your change.

Next, you need to develop a short list of questions that you’re going to pose to your Key Stakeholders during 1×1 or group interviews, to determine, FROM THEIR PERSPECTIVE, how they perceive the change impacting their world. We’ll explore how you develop those key questions in Part III of our “Learn How to Successfully Approach Cultural/Organizational Change” series.