People & Change

Have you been on a team where the sum is greater than its parts, where there’s electricity throughout interactions, where working hard toward the shared goal can be characterized as, well, fun? We truly hope so.

We are passionate about the people side of change because we want more people to be part of high-performing, well-connected teams that accomplish meaningful goals. This doesn’t just happen: it takes real effort and expertise to accomplish.

There’s a lot included in people and change, so let’s be clear about what we mean.

We focus on two sides of the people and change coin:

Organizational change management: effectively supporting team members in adopting a major change
Operating model and organizational structure: designing and equipping teams throughout the organization to deliver their unique value and contribute to overall success

Let’s start with organizational change management. In business transformation, we typically have a variety of elements changing across an organization.

Technology will almost certainly contribute to a transformative effort. This could feature a major software update (like an ERP, CRM, or other core technology). It could include hardware or hosting updates (like moving from on-prem servers to cloud hosting). Oftentimes, we’re changing multiple technology components at once.

New/updated technology will almost certainly have both people and process impacts. People changes refer to new or updated roles, responsibilities, behaviors, mindsets (the list goes on) that are required to make the most of the transformation. Process changes point to the new or updated workflows, handoffs, dependencies, and more that we need to work through to achieve the desired benefits of the transformation.

Say you’re rolling out a cloud data warehouse. You’ll have quite a few technology updates – the new data storage and usage tool plus all of the tools to get data into it, to make sense of the information, and then to get insights out for analysis and decision support. The cherry on top may be a reporting and data visualization solution, or even advanced analytics tools.

That checklist can seem like a lot, but we’re just scratching the surface!

We need to equip people to use all of these new tools, and we probably need to define new processes to make the most of them. In emphasizing people and change, we’ll get crystal clear on:

Who’s impacted by this change? We typically define this by group or functional area.
How are they impacted? We’ll describe specifics on the tools, behaviors, mindsets, and more that must adapt to make the most of the transformation.
What are their feelings toward and readiness for change? Some folks will be enthusiastic from the get-go, while others will require some convincing to support the transformative change. Similarly, we expect a spectrum of readiness – a major goal of our organizational change management plan will be to get everyone impacted ready to absorb the change.

Findings from this exercise form the basis for our organizational change management (OCM) focus.

To address people and change, we draw on insights and methodologies created by Prosci, leading OCM researchers and trainers. (See helpful resources and underlying research at prosci.com.)

One of their foundational insights is that organizational change is ultimately a collection of individuals changing. Each of us needs to work through our portion of change for the whole organization to transform.

The Prosci team defined five elements of successful change that everyone involved needs to work through. These form the acronym ADKAR, using the first letter of each element:

Awareness of the need for change
Desire to participate and support the change
Knowledge on how to change
Ability to implement required skills and behaviors to change
Reinforcement to sustain the change

Our goal is for each person involved in transformation to move through ADKAR in time to successfully adopt the technology, process, and people changes required. This requires a concerted approach to organizational change management.

We structure the OCM plan around these pillars:

Sponsorship and Leadership: we equip and support sponsors and team leaders to direct, promote, and support their team members through the various changes included in the effort
Communication: we work with communications SMEs and sponsors to share about the effort in easy-to-understand communications through accessible channels
Training and Adoption: we work with learning & development SMEs, sponsors, team leaders, and the technical implementation team to create and distribute training and supportive materials through a variety of methods to help impacted team members effectively adopt the changes
Resistance Prevention and Management: we equip sponsors, team leaders, and change champions with an understanding of what resistance looks like, typical reasons for resistance, and best practices in addressing it; we support their resistance management efforts with resources and problem-solving as is needed
Setting Us up to Sustain the Changes: we monitor and evaluate progress through ADKAR for each impacted group and tailor our approach and resources to help sustain the changes; we provide resources for sponsors, team leaders, and change champions to recognize and celebrate effective adoption of change, which will help embed new behaviors and mindsets throughout the organization

Taking a thoughtful approach to organizational change management – investing in the people side of change – makes it much more likely that our business transformation will be successful. In fact, Prosci researchers found that a project with excellent change management “is approximately seven times more likely to meet objectives than with poor change management.”

The people side of change isn’t limited to organizational change management. You’ll hear the FlexPoint team talk about operating model and organizational structure as key differentiators in business transformation, too.

An operating model is how an organization operates with various business units and segments, as well as with vendors. We don’t have to overthink this: it’s literally how an organization operates. It’s defined by how and who delivers value for an organization.

Gaps in an organization’s operating model are often at the core of communication, customer experience, quality, and delivery issues. And, taking a careful look at the operating model doesn’t always make it into business transformation plans, but it’s often critical to overall success. (That’s why the FlexPoint team can be a bit of a broken record on this topic.)

On the other hand, alignment around how the core functional areas interact to create value can help to clarify accountabilities and form the basis for analysis of the gaps in resources, skills, processes and governance required to deliver successfully and effectively.

While it can be tempting to skip straight to the org chart when talking about how a company is organized, we do well to start with more foundational concepts. Here are key aspects we define to get an organization’s operating model, in order:

We start with strategy and vision: what ultimately is the organization trying to achieve? This is best answered via several deliberative sessions with a cross-functional leadership group, considering all stakeholder groups.

1

With the firm’s strategy and vision clear, we move the action to the department level. We clarify the strategy and vision for the department as a whole, then we create contribution statements for each major function within a department.

With each of these contribution statements, we answer:

What value do we provide? How does the function contribute value in service of the strategic objectives?
What key outputs, deliverables, or outcomes do we provide? Who is the recipient(s)?

Contribution statements – often presented as a summary by department – clarify the value that each function brings.

2

With our expected value and contribution in view, we create capability maps for each department. These describe how a department backs up its responsibilities. First, we define the functional areas of responsibility that are essential to the department’s success. From there, we identify five or six key capabilities per function: these capabilities are critical to delivering on the responsibilities we’ve promised to cover.

3

With critical capabilities clear, we use a capability framework to align capabilities to teams and groupings across the business unit. It displays, at a high level, how they interact among one another. We answer several questions in creating our capability framework:

Who are our customers (think both internally and externally)?
What are our products/services and value being delivered to the customers? What is the work and how does it come into the organization?
How should this organization manage the work (employee experience)?
Where should our groups interact? What are some of the foundational deliveries?

This capability framework is the bridge between strategy and org structure. We see how pieces of the organization interact and where ownership should sit in each component part.

4

(Now you can see why we don’t start with the org chart! We have some really intentional work to do first to identify what’s needed, how to organize its delivery, and then who’s on deck to deliver.)

For more on these topics, listen to our podcast with Jeff Dixon, a former consultant and McKesson leader with expertise in strategy and business transformation.

“We were working with a Fortune 10 client, and they needed to scale their talent acquisition without adding head count. Sounds like probably every organization and ultimately we redesigned the operating model to embed AI across the recruiting process all the way from requisition to slate. So, from the first need that’s expressed to the point of presenting really your finalist candidates.

And really the payoff there was they accelerated the recovery of a $4 million digital investment by a full year and improved time to fill. And that’s a value that you can measure, which is really important to make sure that you’re unlocking value as a result of the new operating model.”

Interested in learning more?