Bringing about change in your organization can be difficult if you aren't in a leadership role. Or, perhaps you do hold a leadership title, but are being tasked to inspire change across an enterprise comprised of folks who report to someone else. In other words, you must influence a diversity of employees who have no obligation to do what you say.
In these and similar instances, behaving strategically and creatively in accordance with the people who are going to be in large part responsible for your success, is crucial.
Here are six things you can do to ensure your change initiative is successful, even when you don't have leadership authority:
1. Communicate well. Strong communication skills underpin professional success. Articulating with focus, vigor and colorful imagery is more likely to sway, inspire and/or move your audience into action.
However, interjecting your enthusiasm for change upon an audience may backfire if you aren't accounting for their needs in the process. In other words, selling your change initiative is akin to any other consultative sales process: What is in it for them? What problem are you solving, and why should the stakeholders involved in the change implementation care?
Ensure you are building a case as to why this change matters not just to the company, but also to the people who are implementing and/or being directly affected by the change.
2. Be flexible. Being tasked with executing a change, whether your own idea or someone else's directive, requires a supportive team to chug ahead and stay on track.
Laser focusing on the planned action steps to achieve your destination goal by a specific date or time frame could lead to inflexibility. However, if key stakeholders interject improvement ideas along the way or unplanned issues temporary halt progress, it is important to be nimble.
When disruptions bubble up, a flexible demeanor and willingness to pivot is essential to ensure the integrity and sustainability of the project and the enduring buy-in by all who are impacted. In other words, by creating a flexible foundation to your change initiatives, you can ensure they will weather the storms of the 'change within the change.'
3. Build a team of change advocates. Before diving into the deep end of the change pool, begin the process of pinpointing and recruiting change advocates. These are people who have influence over other folks on their team, in their department or in their region. By rallying them around your change initiative, you can in turn inspire them to inspire colleagues, direct reports, customers, vendors, bosses or whoever requires influencing, to buy-in to your change project.
4. Empower others to help manage the change. Even if you do not have direct authority over someone's day-to-day, you may be able to empower them with responsibilities that will further empower their career growth and influence. In other words, instead of just dictating or 'pleading' for other others to comply with your change, use this change opportunity to help lift others into a new realm of career growth and change.
5. Let others do the leading. While the idea for change may have originated in your office, and you may be the brains behind the initiative, it may just be that you will need to relinquish the reins and enable another to spearhead the change.
In other words, if there is someone else whom you trust, and who has the political clout to propel a change forward throughout the corporation, then it may be in everyone's best interests to relinquish leadership or even share the reins with them to co-lead an initiative.
6. Spend time with stakeholders who will be impacted by the change. If, for example, the front line retail sales staff is most affected by the change, then make time to spend time with them. If this means traveling across the region, or the country (or even the world), then do so. Become familiar with their daily activities and struggles; ask them questions; invite them to ask you questions. Wear their shoes for a few days; serve their customers; become involved in their world.
Before asking them to engage in a change, get to know what their current situation is and how it will impact their work life. Not only will this increase the probability of their embracing the change, but it also will enable you to tweak the change process along the way to support their unique needs and further fortify sustainability.
