Involving Others in Change

Where are you in your change journey?

• You do not know what you don’t know
• You cannot do it alone — you need help
• You lack validation from others that you are on the right track

The Essentials — How to Involve Others

Involving people in the organizational change initiative is often an afterthought — after the change plan is ready for implementation. However, this assumes that you can engage people whenever you desire, and the outcome will be the same. Wrong!

There are five levels of involvement that can occur at different times when planning and implementing the change initiative. Choosing when to involve stakeholders may depend on confidentiality and sensitivity, but the decision is often a reactive choice made without much thought.

The five levels of involvement are:

• Telling — mandate the change (good luck!)
• Selling — convince them of the benefit to them and organization (traditional approach)
• Testing — bounce ideas off them to get their reaction
• Consulting — bring them into the planning process by asking for their advice
• Co-creating — make them part of the planning team — full buy-in[i]

Too often, change managers would like to shortcut the process by using #1 — telling. However, they know they will get immediate push-back, so they undertake #2 — selling. An entire communication plan is built around raising awareness of the problem and pushing for a decision-balance in favor of the planned change and the change process already put in place. Both #1 and #2 are initiated after the change plan is prepared and ready for implementation. You can expect better engagement with selling than telling, but it is still a hard job because most people will be at Stage 1 (unaware of the problem) or 2 (uncertain of the costs and potential benefit) of the Stages of Change.

If there is already some fear of resistance, some change managers will test ideas (#3) on those impacted to understand the degree of probable resistance so a mitigation plan can be prepared. This testing would be done part way through the change planning process when the change objective is already established, after the stakeholder analysis raises some worries about the degree of impact on certain groups of people.

Involvement level 4 — consulting — starts to bring people into the planning process but not with full membership. The key is learning from those most impacted by any changes, and better still, learning what you do not know, that you need to know (before you learn it the hard way). One way of thinking about involvement at this level and the next is — Go slow early to go fast later. Time spent working with stakeholders early will save time later with quicker implementation and less resistance.

Best of all is Level 5 — co-creating where those impacted by the change take control over their situation and play key roles in setting the change objective and deciding on the best change process to employ. While the change sponsor may not be in control, the result can be shepherded by clarifying the problem situation and articulating any constraints the organization may be facing. One challenge using this level of involvement occurs when confidentiality or some degree of secrecy is required. If this is the case, there may be a need to back off a level or two, knowing that some efficiency may be sacrificed for feasibility.

Reflection

How you involve people in the change process is a choice — that often leads to how successful the change initiative will be.

[i] Senge, et. al. (1999) has these five levels as “decision styles” that address how management involves people in decision-making (i.e., engaging them). See Senge, P., Kleiner, A., Roberts, C., Ross, R., Roth, G., & Smith, B. (1999). The dance of change: The challenges to sustaining momentum in learning organizations. New York: Doubleday Currency.

This article is from a forthcoming book, “Leading New Era Organizations”.