Chapter 11

What Happens Next? Keeping the Change Ball Rolling

In This Chapter

Building for lasting change

Managing change advocates and barriers

Driving a successful after-change review

Well done. You made it through the good times and the tough times; now your change is implemented, your boss is thrilled with the initial results, and you’re ready for your next big move . . . to that corner office. But before you shut the door on this change, you should do a few things to make sure the change doesn’t unravel the second you and your team move on to bigger and better things.

Keeping the ball rolling is often perceived as a footnote to the overall change project, yet it can be the difference between people saying “Wow, that change was great, we’re really doing things differently around here!” and “Wow, we’re glad that change leader is gone; now things can go back to normal.” Ensuring that your change retains momentum does more for your organization’s future than anything else you do in the project. You owe it to yourself and your organization to make sure the change sticks — even if means postponing that celebratory vacation to St. Bart’s for a few weeks.

This chapter describes how to develop the structures to make change last, including processes to redesign performance measurements and align resources to the new way the company operates. You can also find out how to communicate your change structures and how to manage the change helpers and hindrances within your organization. Then get ready to head up the after-change review, the final step in leading business change.

Developing the Structures to Make Change Last

Back in 1904, a famous psychologist named B. F. Skinner proved that if you reward a mouse with cheese when it presses a button, the mouse will continue pressing the same button to get more cheese. (For all those psych students out there, we know Skinner’s work was a little more complicated, but that’s the gist of the psychology behind rewarding a specific action.) Well, people are really no different from mice in this case. People repeat actions they are rewarded for, so it makes sense to establish a reward structure if you want a change to stick. Rocket science, we know.

In many cases of business changes, the change takes place and everyone is happy, and a new report may come out with metrics that show the change happened. But little if any change to the structure of the organization occurs to establish the change for years to come. As a result, things sometimes come unraveled rather quickly; other times the change remains on the surface of the organization, ready to be blown away in the winds of the next big thing.

To avoid this problem, you can develop organizational structures to make change last. This sustainability is not really that hard to tackle, as long as you know what you want to achieve. In the previous chapter we provide a checklist for getting through the change process. Well, you can use a similar list after the change happens to increase the likeliness that it sticks. This new checklist can be broken down into two categories: redesigning performance measures and aligning resources to the new way of doing things.

Developing useful performance measures

Carefully considering how people are rewarded for performance in your organization can help you anticipate their eagerness to embrace or abandon your change. Individuals and teams will simply go back to the old way of doing things if they are paid or otherwise rewarded for doing so. The most long-lasting changes within a business are accompanied by changes in how the organization measures the new desired performance or behavior and how individuals are rewarded for their performance. Both of these transitions require two things:

Ongoing evaluation and measurement: You cannot stop at measuring how successful the initial change is. By helping your team evaluate and design how the new way of doing business is assessed — on a continuing basis — you can keep the change implementation rolling long after the change has happened.

Clear policies and guidelines: At this point, even you may be overwhelmed by the volume of your own communications about organizational change. Well, to make sure change sticks, assure everyone that the new way of business is official by establishing — and clearly explaining — policies and guidelines. This step ensures that the new way of doing business is locked into daily operations.

With those steps in mind, you’re ready to identify what the new organization should be measuring and how to tie these metrics to individual employee performance.

Measuring team and organizational processes

In Chapter 6 we discuss the importance of balanced measurements in defining the success of change, and the same principles hold true for determining how successful the change is long term. The first step in developing (or redesigning) new measurements for your organization is aligning them to the new way of doing business. You may be able to continue using the same measurements you used throughout the change, but some may need minor tweaks. If you’re struggling to develop meaningful metrics for the organization — or if you need some creative juice to take a few metrics to the next level — you may want to ask your project team for new ideas.

For instance, you can ask the team, “What are you learning from the metrics we’re using?” Often, measurements have been in place for as long as the company has been around. Use the change as an opportunity to refine measurements to best track current operations and how the company is meeting its future goals. If the measurements the team or organization had in the past are still the right measurements in the future state, the targets for these measurements may simply have to change. For example, if the change is focused on improving customer satisfaction and the organization was measuring customer satisfaction before, you probably want to keep measuring it but the target may move from 80 percent of the customers being satisfied to 95 percent. If the team seems happy with the current metrics and the old targets, something may be amiss and you may want to revisit the purpose of the change.

Try to balance leading and lagging measures in the new measurement system. Here’s what these terms mean:

Lagging indicators: Response measurements, such as customer complaints or monthly sales, come after the fact. Lagging indicators can prompt change in the way you conduct future processes.

Leading indicators: Forward metrics may include such things as attendance in a call center on busy call days (which may contribute to the wait time for callers) or the number of sales positions opened in a current month (which may indicate sales growth in a territory).

The second step in developing (or redesigning) new measurements for the organization is identifying the target or goal for the measurement. If your measurements are staying the same, your targets probably have to change to show that you changed for a reason (not just for the fun of change!). Targets can be set based on industry performance, best practices in other departments, or company goals. In the end, your new performance measurements will be aligned to strategic goals and have clear targets like the ones shown in Table 11-1.

Table 11-1 Example Performance-Measurements Chart

Strategic Goal	Measurement(s)	Target
Improve use of technology	Percentage of clients using Web customer service	70% of sales
Stay on top of industry knowledge	Number of hours of professional development for employees	12 hours a year

Evaluating individual performance

After you refine your organizational metrics to support the change, you can adapt them to monitor the performance of individual employees. Organizational metrics are great at keeping the company on track, but the people make the metrics move. The closer you tie organizational metrics to individual metrics, the better your chances of individuals working to make the change last.

For example, say your change focuses on creating an organizational culture that runs the business more efficiently, resulting in higher profits. You may have a metric like profit growth to gauge this goal for the entire organization. Executives and investors will love this metric — it looks great on a spreadsheet — but the average employee may have a hard time tying it to his day-to-day work. So make that metric more meaningful at the individual level by asking an individual to make an improvement that maximizes company profit, such as finding three areas to cut costs in your daily job or identifying one process improvement to impact product quality. The key is to make metrics meaningful and actionable to individuals. When employees can tie what they’re doing to the new way the business is operating, they often become more invested in the change.

When creating individual metrics, focus on the critical few and include the details. Here’s what we mean by this advice:

Focus on the critical few: Don’t try to accommodate every goal or performance metric that could possibly influence the survival of the change. In addition to being cumbersome and time consuming for managers, overly ambitious measurement systems for individuals lead to resentment of the new way of doing business. Instead, focus on initiatives that are most strategic to the business. Try to keep individual assessments to three or five metrics.

Include details: Include both what needs to get done (the results you expect) and how it needs to happen (living up to the new company culture) in individual metrics to reinforce that you can’t just get something done for the sake of accomplishing it; you have to get it done right.

Performance measurements and momentum are closely related, so track the progress of change regularly (at least each month or quarter) to make sure the change continues to reach organizational and individual goals.

Monitoring change over time

With measurements in place, the project team can implement a plan for collecting data. In some circles, this plan is known as a control plan, and we like to compare it to dieting: If you spend a year losing weight, how do you know you’re keeping it off? You can step on the scale every day or just see how your clothes are fitting; either method works, but you need to do it on a regular basis to make sure you’re staying on track. So find a way to measure the progress of your change, and make sure that the measurement method works for your team.

The purpose of a control plan is to make sure that the impact of the change is trending as expected and desired. A practical control plan includes the following information:

Metric: Describe the measurement with a straightforward two- to four-word definition of what you are measuring. Think: cost of goods sold, new jobs created, customer-satisfaction ratings, and so forth.

Goal: Simply state the objective in a way that can be measured. What do you want to accomplish? Some examples of goals may be to reduce caller wait time to less than three minutes or to increase the online help-desk support by 50 percent.

Data source: A clear guideline on where the data comes from ensures consistency and accuracy of findings. In our experience, asking people to tell others where the data comes from helps make collecting the data a little easier. If someone can explain where the data came from in less than a few words, it most likely is easily accessible. If someone has to write a novel on how to collect the data or where is comes from and who has to do what to it before it is used, the data may be a bit difficult to collect (and may slow down the process).

Review frequency: Make sure the frequency of data collection is suitable for your information needs and not overused. If your objective is to create 25 new jobs over five years, for example, then a daily count of new positions is not likely to be helpful. A quarterly collection may be more suitable. There is no sense in collecting lots of daily data points if they will just sit alone in a database somewhere.

If your change potentially has daily results, then you may want to display daily reports in the early stages of implementation to encourage employees to embrace the change; after the change is securely in place, your reports may be more effective as weekly accounts. We like the motto of quality over quantity. Bottom line: Make sure your control plan works for the project team and other stakeholders.

Just as the change plan focused on different stakeholders at different times in the process, the measurement system must address the information needs of people on different levels of the organization. Check out Chapter 6 for more ideas on creating a meaningful change scorecard.

Aligning resources to the new way

With the change in place and the project team disbanded, sufficient resource support for the new way of doing business is critical. To support resources most effectively, make sure the change is reinforced through training, documenting info, integrating changes into daily operations, and clearly assigning process owners to champion the change for the long term.

Training

One of the most important aspects of implementing change that sticks is relevant and ongoing training to individuals and teams. Employees with the skill set and ability to perform according to the change are the best resources. Use this training opportunity to ensure that people know what to do and how to do it the right way to support the change for years to come.

Be on the lookout for unspoken confusion. People don’t always know what they don’t know. If people have been doing a particular process before the change, they may have trouble recognizing — let alone communicating — that they don’t know or understand how to behave or perform a task differently in the new environment. Make sure you provide ample training and mentoring for everyone; don’t assume people know what to do or how to do it.

To hire or train — that is the question

As you go through the change process, you may find that an entirely new set of skills is required for the new way of doing business. At this point, you must decide whether to hire new people with the desired skill set or to train current employees in order to develop the skill set internally. Neither the task nor the decision is easy.

To guide this decision-making process, a needs assessment of current and desired skills can help you assess the feasibility of your options. Take the time to carefully consider what resources you have and what you need.

If you find that an individual or team is lacking the skill set and the potential (based on interest, competency, or other factor) to be trained, then hiring resources to do the job may be a strong option. However, if existing employees have some of the skills and can be trained on the others to do a new job, then your best bet may be to train or redistribute work.

Documenting the details of change

You, the change team, and perhaps the entire organization may think the change is obvious, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be documented somewhere. The change should become part of the knowledge-management process in the organization so that as time passes and memories blur, people in the business can refer to it for reminders of who is supposed to do what. Following are a few aspects to document:

New organizational charts

Job roles and responsibilities

Process maps and instructional guides

Budgets and strategic-planning tools

Action plan for what to do if the change reverts back to the old way it was done

Integrating change

Incorporating changes into daily operations takes much more than writing up procedures and policies (although you need to make sure that is done, too). An organization implementing change benefits tremendously by leveraging formal and informal influencers in daily operations. Here’s what we mean by these terms:

Formal influencers include the organization’s top leadership, who must advocate the change and be role models for it. But formal influencers are more than people; they include clear responsibilities, new job descriptions, updated reward systems, and perhaps even new technology to support the change.

New procedures are great, but if the team only follows the procedures when you’re looking over people’s shoulders, the changes aren’t sustainable. That is where informal influencers can make a big impact.

Informal influencers are people in the organization who may not have a leadership title but are trusted sources of information. These people often have been around the organization for a long time, have political savvy, and have a strong commitment to the success of the organization.

A great example of an informal influencer was a long-term mechanic at a manufacturing company going through significant cost-cutting changes. The manager at the facility was the official change leader, but nothing got done until the mechanic said it was the right thing to do. People trusted his opinion, even though he had no direct management responsibility. Informal influences can make things happen if you give them access to senior leadership and allow them the opportunity to voice their opinion.

Designating process owners

Until now, you (or a team member) may have been driving the change and owning (or co-owning) the improvements. But now you need to designate a clear owner for the change in the long term, and that person may or may not be you. If you have been in charge of revamping how new employees are recruited and oriented in the company, you have probably been working with the human resources, recruiting, and training teams. You may also have been working with hiring managers and new employees to get their feedback and buy-in for the change. As a change leader, it is time to make sure someone owns the new process. Ideally, the process owner has been part of the change all along and has authority to make modifications to the process as necessary to meet the organization’s new challenges.

Top leadership can make this choice, but sometimes the process owner will step up and take ownership because it is a natural fit. If you are still looking for someone to own the process in the long term, consider finding someone who has these traits:

Making the change stick is her priority. The process owner must be accountable for continued results, so now is not the time to drop the ball.

She has enough influence to make adjustments to the change, if necessary. Influence often means strong leadership skills in the areas of continuous process improvement and coaching others.

She understands metrics. The process owner will need to explain and review how the process is going, so she should be comfortable and perhaps even excited by numbers and metrics.

You can’t give someone a process without power. Process owners should have access to senior leaders, be involved (perhaps even lead) review meetings, have control of the budget, and be rewarded for making the results stick.

Communicating for Lasting Change

As we describe in Chapter 7, a strong communication plan can do wonders to help you implement business change. As you move from implementing the change to making it part of day-to-day business, communication messages should continue to go out to the organization. Although not necessarily as elaborate as the messages sent during the development and initial implementation stages of the change, these communications are no less important. Following are some key questions you may consider answering as the change process becomes the new normal:

What were the results of the change? Use stories (like the ones described in Chapter 10), case studies, and metrics to show how the change happened and why things are better now that the change is in place.

Where can people get more information? While you have been living and breathing the change, other people may have been going about business as usual or just hiding out in their office (or perhaps someone was recently hired and knows nothing about the change!). Make sure you provide ample opportunities for employees to learn more about the elements of the change, including online resources, information on the company intranet, education and training programs, and perhaps even coaching or mentoring opportunities.

What can people do now? Although the change has been implemented, let people know if there things they can do to get more involved in the new way of doing business. From self-directed training related to daily tasks to a systematic review of how they do business, give people a way to ensure that they’re supporting the change and new company goals through their day-to-day performance.

As part of your assessments related to the lasting impact of the change, monitor the impact of your communications. Were any specific communications especially helpful? Did any create disruptions and controversy? This information can feed into your after-change review (which we describe in the later section “Leading the After-Change Review”) and help you identify the best practices for future communications regarding this change and others.

Managing Helpers and Hindrances to Change

Difficulties, annoyances, hindrances. Call them what you want, but obstacles to success are probably still lurking around your change somewhere. Whether your hindrances are people in power positions not willing to fully embrace the change, dwindling budgets, or resourcing constraints, you need to overcome the major obstacles in order to bring the project to a close and make the changes stick.

But before you start letting all those obstacles get you down, remember that you have helpers on your side, too. Helpers are those informal influencers, employees with political savvy, and people who really want the change to happen. Manage those correctly — as well as the hindrances — and you’ll be well on your way to mixing up a successful change cocktail. Cheers!

Minimizing the impact of hindrances

Basically, a hindrance is anything stopping the change from being 100 percent successful in the long term. If you put on your optimist hat and approach your hindrances with a determination, you can turn them into helpers, and you just may gain important new support for the effort. Following are the three primary competencies you’ll want to tap into to engage your to-be helpers (current hindrances):

Patience: The change needs time to succeed, and sometimes hindrances just require a little patience. If the change plan had any setbacks or if the entire strategic goal was not immediately achieved, people in the hindrances camp are perhaps overly focused on those elements of the change. As a change leader, stay positive about the big picture; business change will succeed if you have the right performance measurements in place and resources are adequately aligned.

Effort: Converting hindrances to helpers requires effort. If specific people or processes continue to impede the progress of change despite the time and energy you’ve allotted to date, then you may need to align more resources to further investigate the obstacle or just continue to chip away at the problem.

Consistency: Consistency is paramount. When faced with a hindrance in the organization, consistently respond to questions and address negative behaviors. Although you would probably like nothing better than to just ignore a specific hindrance and hope it goes away, consistency improves the likelihood that things will change.

Now that you know what you need to bring to the table, you’re ready to delve into some common hindrances to change projects.

Handling common hindrances

The following list describes some hindrances you may come across — but don’t worry; we also provide some advice for how to turn them into helpers for lasting change:

Lack of high-level buy-in: If executives are feeling burdened by the amount of work related to the change or have lost interest in it, you can be sure some employees have, too. Use this opportunity to clarify the vision or objectives of the change. Consider asking executives to speak honestly to other employees about their concerns and challenges with the change and find specific ways for people to re-engage.

Inconsistent communication: Communication is a big part of change. If you worry that the communication you’re sending isn’t doing its job, then take a closer look at what’s working and what’s not. Go back and evaluate the value of communication efforts; determine which ones led to greater attention and action and which ones fell into a black hole. Do more of what works.

Scope creep: An expanding field of change can slow down the completion of your project. Especially if you do a wonderful job on the change project, the unintended consequence may be an expanded scope. This is the case when every change seems to bleed into another one. Use this hindrance to acknowledge all the great work to date, complete the after-change review (more on that later), and recruit a new team to take on the next phase of work with the benefit of lessons learned from the current change.

Inadequate training/resources: Insufficient preparation for change can often lead to a slow adoption. If the training you’ve provided seems to be falling flat or if you can’t seem to get the right resources (financial or people) to make the change happen, speak up and revisit your risk mitigation strategy (see Chapter 6). You may need to break down the project into manageable segments or step back to recognize and better address cultural impact.

Of course, these examples are just a few of many possible deterrents you may face when change is underway. But no matter what is stopping the success (or slowing it down), you can convert the hindrance to an element of support for the change (and future changes). Here are some ideas:

Seek help from a real live person. You can easily blame technology, communication, or a process for being a hindrance to change, but those factors alone cannot stop change. People who make decisions about these possible deterrents matter. So identify the obstacle and then reach out to the person responsible for it and ask for help.

Learn why hindrances still exist. Avoid the mistake of believing everyone shares your motives. Talk with people, especially those who may be hindering the change, and ask them about their ideal outcomes. Just keep in mind that people rarely express their true motivations the first time around, so exercise that consistency and patience we mention earlier in this chapter.

Request specific action. Leave no room for misunderstanding. Explicitly state the goals of the change (again) and be clear about what specific action(s) the individual needs to do (or stop doing) to get on board.

Lead with a stronger hand. After you’ve worked at facilitating the change with process suggestions, inviting ideas, and encouraging discussion with hindrances, establish a more concrete plan. Show empathy for the opposing position and then agree on specific actions that will happen according to a timeline. Leading with a strong hand also means explicitly rewarding positive behavior and being consistent with the consequences of poor behavior towards the change.

Roadblocks to change usually boil down to a lack of knowledge, insufficient resources, or fear of what will happen if change is successful. With this in mind, be sure to show empathy when addressing hindrances. Take a look at the ideas on conflict resolution in Chapter 9 for help with expressing an understanding of another person’s point of view.

Coaching stragglers and naysayers

During change, there are always stragglers (people who will eventually come along but seem to take pride in dragging their feet) and naysayers (people who never have uttered a positive word about the change). No matter what you do, some people just do not want to jump on board with the change. Employee attitudes affect the sustainability of a change, so if these stragglers and naysayers have strong influence in the organization, you and your team may have some coaching work to do.

As a coach, be ready to dig into your toolkit for communication (remember listening and addressing conflict in Chapter 8). Also prepare to take your conflict-resolution skills to an entirely new level.

The game plan with the naysayers is to dig out the roots of resistance. What is holding these people so tightly in the old way of doing business? Allow objections to air and listen to opinions that may differ from yours. The dialogue — getting to the core of the disagreement — may require every one of your conflict-resolution skills, but only after you get to the real issue(s) can you address them and get everyone on board.

Here are some ideas to help motivate naysayers and stragglers:

Identify short-term and long-term issues. Although your change likely focuses on strategic, long-term goals of the company, naysayers and stragglers may be facing some very real short-term issues. For example, your change may be merging two cultures after an acquisition or merger, but some day-to-day problems (like integrating two payroll systems or combining different ways of launching new products) do not have clear or immediate solutions. You can alleviate some of the pain points by revisiting the stated goals in context of individual situations.

Be honest about intentions. You may be the most honest and open-book person in the history of world, but some people out there may doubt the change (and you) because they don’t trust your intentions. Respond with a two-step process:

1. Take a deep look at your real intentions for the change.

2. Communicate your intentions in a genuine way. Hopefully your message is something along the lines of wanting the change for the improvement of the company with no hidden agenda.

Listen. When someone has an idea, part of his ego is attached to that idea. People tend to disengage if their ideas aren’t accepted or taken seriously. So make sure that you take time to listen to people. Every idea won’t be implemented in the current change, but people want to know their solutions and opinions may be considered for future changes. Therefore, you may want to document stakeholder ideas and concerns in the after-change review to formally validate this input to the group.

Escalate issues with respect. Sometimes issues are brought to your attention that you simply do not have the authority to address. When a former boss got an uncomfortable question, he’d say, “Oh, that decision is above my pay grade” (chuckle, chuckle). We do not encourage readers to use that excuse, but if you do need to escalate issues to someone above your pay grade, do so with respect toward all the parties involved. You can do this by getting the two sides to agree on how you will escalate the process through other channels, documenting what has been done already, and maintaining confidentiality throughout the process.

See if you can task the naysayers with addressing their own concerns. For instance, if someone is concerned that a new report will not give her the information she needs, ask her to create a new one that can potentially be used. Or, if the naysayer does not like a new information system, ask him to list some ideas for what can be done to fix the problems. Putting naysayers to work in support of the change can help solve persistent issues and convert them to helpers.

At some point in time, people who don’t get on board with the change may have to make a decision to either get on the change bus or leave the company. This choice isn’t the first step in minimizing the impact of people in the hindrance camp, but it may be the end result. Work with your human resources department to help manage these negative performers, and read up on how to give performance evaluations and terminate employees in Managing For Dummies, by Bob Nelson and Peter Economy (Wiley).

Leveraging your helpers

Individuals who embrace change and business processes that complement a specific change can make your life as a change leader much simpler. Harness these gifts and allow them to move your change project forward. Often, other employees are your best motivational experts for future change. If employees have been exposed to change and have had a positive reaction, having them talk to other people about the change can help less-eager employees embrace the new way of business as well. Enlist these helpers as part of the success story and encourage them to communicate what happened and how life is better now that the change is complete. You may even give these helpers the title of change ambassador to recognize the value these employees bring to the organization.

Here are some other ways to keep your new change ambassadors (the helpers) energized and moving the organization forward:

Make them trainers. Let these employees show other employees first-hand how the change will make life and the company better.

Give them the stage. Let change ambassadors speak to the entire company with how the change has helped them and film it. Post these videos on the company intranet.

Provide visibility. Giving them the stage is a great way to have the entire organization see their support, and giving helpers visibility and exposure to top decision makers can help cement their role in making change last.

Promote them. Are you still looking for that process owner we talked about earlier in the chapter? Helpers may be willing to step up to the plate and take ownership for the change in the long run.

Tell them they’re special. No, you do not need to give them a dozen roses, but simply letting people know you appreciate their positive attitude goes a long way.

For more ideas on how to motivate your helpers (who may also be your MVPs), check out Chapter 20.

Leading the After-Change Review

Before you ride off into the sunset, be sure to deliver a meaningful after-change review. Great changes provide ample ideas to leverage during future changes; changes that hit a few potholes along the way can show you what to do differently in later projects. The process of the after-change review is much more than a one-hour meeting to say “thanks and good-bye.” As you finalize the change, think of this review as a cycle that begins as soon as the initial changes start happening and continues until you integrate the learnings into the way of doing business. The after-change review process is outlined in Figure 11-1.

Figure 11-1: Keeping the ball rolling with an after-change review.

So now the change has begun to happen, and you are seeing results. The new way of doing business is understood, adopted, and in full swing. Using some of the ideas outlined in Chapter 10, you may have also begun to recognize and reward the team for desired behaviors and outcomes. Seeing these changes happening is a good indicator that the time is right to begin formally closing your change project. Here are the steps you can use to make the change review be part of integrating all the lessons learned into the new way of doing business.

1. Conduct the after-change review: Invite people who had direct experience with the change successes and failures to an after-change review session. At this meeting, lead the team in discovering what worked and what did not during the process of developing and implementing the change, plan out what to do with this information, and then decide how and when the change may need to be adapted.

We recommend that you use an experienced facilitator to manage the meeting. Otherwise, if politics come into play or if naysayers are in the room, an after-change review can devolve into a complaining session or finger-pointing activity.

Questioning change

To help your after-change review team uncover the things the change team did right and where it lagged, answer these questions in your change-review session:

What were the key successes? Don’t stop at “The project was a success because everyone did their job.” Dig deeper. Why did everyone do their job? Was it a result of clear roles and responsibilities? Was it due to well-communicated expectations? If things went well, go ahead and brag. This meeting is your chance to create organizational best practices to follow for years to come.

What where some unexpected barriers? Even with the best planning, there are challenges with change. Maybe getting the executive team to approve a change took a month longer than planned because of schedules. Document barriers for the benefit of the next change team.

What would you do differently if you had to do it over again? What would you want to do exactly the same? There are probably things you’d like to do over. By documenting them, you can avoid making the same mistakes again. On the other hand, pat yourself on the back for things you did well. Make sure these successes are documented and shared throughout the organization.

The review session is a good opportunity to offer recognition to employees who helped make the change successful. Use some ideas outlined in Chapter 10 to recognize and reward the team for desired behaviors and outcomes.

2. Discover, plan, and decide: During the after-change review, analyze where you’ve been and where you’re going with your team of stakeholders. Here’s what we mean by this:

a. Discover: Take some time to document what parts of the change process worked and what parts didn’t. See the “Questioning change” sidebar for ideas on how to draw out relevant information about the change process.

b. Plan: Focus on how to solve the project’s problems and how to leverage its strengths. Many kinds of business change apply to more than one area of the organization, so identify small modifications that can help the change benefit the larger organization.

c. Decide: Figure out what to do with the recommendations to make the change even better. Some ideas may need to be postponed; others need to happen right away. Break down your list of modifications into time-based categories: short term (under 90 days), long term (over 90 days), and future (not applicable to current change but helpful for how change happens in the future).

3. Revise, focus, and identify future change goals: After the change review is complete, the ongoing process owners have an opportunity to step up and revise the changes as needed to keep the change alive. This part can be difficult for the change team because many team members have moved on from implementing the change and are busy with exciting new projects.

4. Identify additional/new team members: Selecting new team members is all about aligning resources to make the change sustainable. While you and your project team may always be living and breathing the change (and moving on to new projects), new individuals can help make practical modifications with new energy and perspective.

5. Integrate learning into the way of doing business: The real benefit of the after-change review is sharing it with others in the organization. Don’t keep those lessons locked up! Communicate what you learned from the process and share information openly and honestly. A change leader never really stops communicating, but you knew that already, right?

Change takes time, so be sure to not skip over some of the more important parts of change: reflecting on the results (through an after-change review) and then integrating these results as the organization continually refines strategic objectives, metrics, and initiatives. Successful change projects can help an organization grow into a more adaptable organization if they end by reflecting on what went well and where they need to focus more energy.

Three principles of sustainable change

Wouldn’t you like to have a perfect formula to know if your change is sustainable? Well, if you can answer yes to the following questions, you know that the change has a high chance of sticking:

If people move in and out of the organization, will the change last? Although talented people certainly impact the strength and longevity of certain changes, change should be based on the organization and its processes, not just on a really great person or team.

Is the change adaptable? If the change can endure shifts in the market, the economy, or even organizational structure, then it has a good chance of lasting long term.

Is sustaining the change pretty easy (or at least not overly difficult)? Considering the effort required to develop control plans, establish measures, and align resources, there should be no major setbacks in the short term. Just make sure that the training and tools are easy to access and easy to use. Aside from that, if the change requires much work to sustain, then you can probably guess what will happen.