The transformational journey to helping leaders clarify their change impacts

Sometimes when you’re leading change and meeting with your stakeholders to map out the change impacts, team leaders don’t always have a clear idea of the future state. Hell, sometimes team leaders don’t even really have a clear idea of the current state. And sometimes they do, but are reluctant to share it with you, the Change Manager, for fear you’ll document the discussion. So how do you help them understand and clarify their change impacts for both themselves and you so you can help them lead this change effectively? How do you assure them any information provided is just a starting point not a signed-and-sealed contract, and will continue to be updated along the course of the change? And how do you put them at ease so they feel comfortable sharing how their team currently does things and might do things in the future once the change is implemented?

I think there's four aspects to this.

#1 - Build rapport

The first is to get a little better at building rapport and exuding confidence. When you build that trust in the conversation and the relationship upfront, in my experience, stakeholders are often happy to disclose lots! In Neuro-Linguistic Programming, rapport is the process of building unconscious trust. It’s based on the premise that when people are like each other, they like each other! You can easily build rapport extremely quickly with stakeholders, such as by matching their body language, tone or preferred words they use, by respecting and aligning to their personality type, by providing information in a format and style that most resonates for their leadership level of the organisation, and even by communicating in line with their preferred representational style. I cover in-depth how to build rapport in Module 3 and Module 4 of my Leading Successful Change program.

#2 - Hand-write over typing

I’ll often try to go paperless when working on contracts or with consulting clients. But usually an impact assessment will be done at the start and I may have to suck it up and hand-write the notes from initial meetings with stakeholders. I absolutely need to write notes - my mind is like a sieve and it's in one ear and out the other if I just *hear* information but the process of writing actually helps me retain details permanently because I have a photographic memory. Plus obviously I then have the notes to refer back to. Even though the Change Impact Assessment Template I use and provide my students in my Leading Successful Change program is a digital spreadsheet, if I’m meeting a stakeholder in person, I’ll always hand-write the notes of our conversation and type it into the spreadsheet later. Hand-writing notes from a discussion is way less confronting for the other party than typing clickety-clack in front of them (and I’m short so I absolutely don’t want a laptop screen shielding my face and breaking all the rapport I’ve just worked hard to build!!). If you’re meeting with the stakeholder virtually, you could technically type as you go but even sometimes then I'll hand-write as it's less invasive than typing as we talk.

#3 - Do confirm the purpose of any notes

Often when meeting a stakeholder for the first time to understand their change impacts, I’ll let them know I’ll be taking some notes and simply state upfront that it’s for my purposes only, to understand the change and how to best help them and their team get ready and prepared for it. I’m not lying - I really don't share my Impact Assessment, not even with the Project Manager usually. I treat an Impact Assessment as just fuel and fodder for workshopping the Change Plan, preparing communications and training, and having a starting point for business readiness items. If a stakeholder is super cagey about how they do things today or what they think their team will do in future and it’s important to a stakeholder to keep what they're sharing confidential, you could even lock down the file or not document any particularly sensitive information. However, if you've built trust properly this shouldn't be necessary.

#4 - It’s ok to be confused

Lastly, it might be perfectly valid that the team leader doesn't know much about the change *yet*. I mean, you yourself might not even know that much about it, depending on how early you joined the project. You can position it with "Based on what you know about the change..." or "If you could choose/decide, what would you like to see from the change?" Then you can let them know more information will be shared over time and you'd love to meet with them again when there's more known about what the change will mean. 

Changes evolve over time, information is often disclosed in cascades, so the important thing is opening the lines of communication early and keeping them active throughout. They may have had poor experiences of change in the past, or their own reasons for wanting to be discreet, so your job as a Change Manager is simply to build the relationship, build the trust and support them as best you can with the information you have at the time. Sometimes - that’s enough to completely transform their experience and journey with your change!

If you’d like to learn how to build rapport with your stakeholders, complete impact assessments, and lead change delivery end-to-end, I’ll be running my Leading Successful Change Live program in Sydney on 10-11 March.

>> Find out more and register for LSC Live here

Lata xx

P.S. Can’t make it to Sydney for Leading Successful Change Live on 10-11 March? Join Leading Successful Change online today for instant access to the global program.