What’s the best way to manage large-scale change?
When you’re responsible for a change programme or business transformation, you can’t have all the answers yourself. One of the secrets of success is to ensure you bring your people along with you, in a co-creative and emotionally engaging approach.
The Padfield Partnership has developed a six-stage methodology for large-scale change, with a unique focus on knowing yourself and knowing/supporting others.
Our methodology is underpinned by three core philosophies:
- Leadership Agility (consciously choosing the style that works for the situation)
- Transactional Analysis (staying in ‘adult’ mode when emotions are high)
- Appreciative Inquiry (learning from what works and building on that)
Our six stages encompass:
- Understand your personal values, drivers, mindset and beliefs, as well as those of your people. Define the purpose you are trying to achieve, and be able to explain it succinctly. Help your stakeholders link it to their own personal purpose, values and aspirations.
- Do a gap analysis to identify the size and complexity of your change challenge. Identify who your stakeholders are, and their level of engagement. Make sure you’ve got enough stakeholders with enough clout who really want the change to work.
- Make a plan that’s broken down into different streams or categories. Include major milestones, metrics and measures of success. Create a simple visual to help people see how everything connects.
- Ensure your people are prepared before you move to implementation (this is a very important phase that is unique to our change framework). Support your team members to move through the different stages of the ‘change curve’ by making time to understand the emotions that people are going through, and what they are afraid of. Listen to the other person’s perspective, and advocate your own. Create a safe environment that helps people to experiment with the new.
- Implement the plan, tracking your metrics and milestones, and celebrating early wins, no matter how small they seem. Learn from and communicate your successes – and learn from anything that doesn’t go as well as you’d hoped by discussing it and adapting the plan.
- Build in some thoughts about how to sustain the change. Continue to show the metrics and share success stories of stakeholders. Make sure that common themes and patterns are embedded in your core processes, not just add-ons.
Discover more about the 6 stages of change management
Read our Large-scale change case study
Contact us to discuss diagnosing and writing a bespoke change methodology for your organisation, with training for your leadership team and staff how to use it.