What would your first 4 weeks in a Change role look like?

A few of my Leading Successful Change students once asked me: if you were starting out in a Change Management role and coming into a new company and environment, what would your first four weeks look like? And it was a great question, so I thought I’d share my thoughts here. 

Week 1: Make the most of onboarding and induction

The first thing to consider is that it really depends on the maturity of the company. For most corporates and certain industries such as Financial Services and Government, they might have you needing to do some formal onboarding and induction. Particularly if it’s a highly regulated industry such as Aviation, or department such as Supply Chain, there may be several compliance modules and e-Learnings you might need to sit and do, even if you’re a contractor. Occasionally if you’re an independent consultant you may need to do some minimum mandatory modules too depending on how regulated the industry is and what level of system access and security you may receive. But if you’re an employee or a contractor, it’s highly likely you’ll have a raft of induction modules and potentially even onboarding activities set up for you for the organisation (for example, in one contract I moved to an organisation that used Google Suite so IT-led trainings to learn to use this software efficiently were mandatory) or by the team (it might be expected that you’ll do meet and greets with representatives from key functions, even if they are not impacted or involved in the change). Make sure you use this time and these opportunities. Doing the eLearning and onboardings, meet-and-greets and briefings are a great way to familiarise yourself with the culture, language, operating model and reporting lines, policies and regulations that can help you draft better communications, create more on point training, align with corporate brand guidelines, speak the language of stakeholders more easily, understand where change impacts might hit or change support might be found, and obviously help you do your work with internal tools and avoid breaching any policy or legal risks. As well as onboarding and induction, I would always spend the first week just meeting as many people as possible. Sit in whatever project meetings there are and just absorb things in (it's the best time because you're not expected to deliver anything yet but just enjoy it) and just go for coffee with people. And get all your tech stuff set up. That'll likely be your first week, regardless of how you've been hired.

Week 2: Understand the project and the change

The second week is when I'd probably start speaking more intentionally with the project team and scheduling meetings with members to understand what the project is and what it’s about. I may have received a briefing from my leader / client, or the Program / Project Manager, or a fellow / previous Change professional, so Week 2 is where I’d start to go broader and start speaking with other people involved in the project. This would help me gauge where the project is at, what priorities I’d have, and allow me to start setting up the Change Management tools and templates I plan to use (because the way I lead and teach change is practical and fit-for-purpose, I select and tailor tools and templates by change rather than having standard mandatory set). I like to add value really quickly and understand the change as fast as possible. This could be a Change on a Page. But by this stage you'll already have a gauge, especially when you've done a few changes, as to what the Change Roadmap and Change Plan will look like, so I can pull that together within the second week usually. Which is good - whatever quick wins you can offer to just give a high-level overview. Change Roadmap is a nice one too because you can plan out what you think you'll need to do along the journey, given you’ll have when the project delivery dates are. You can be like, “Here's when I can do Change Impact Assessment. Here's when I can do Training Needs Analysis. Here's when I can do x, y, z etc.” That gives them a good view and also sets you up as an expert that, “Already in Week 2 they've already given me a draft Change Roadmap.” Giving value early, even just high value, reinforces they made a good decision not just to hire you specifically, but to have Change Management support on their project. 

Week 3: Start stakeholder engagement

If it’s appropriate, Week 3 is when I'd start talking more widely with business stakeholders. It might not be an impact assessment yet, it might just be meet-and-greet coffees with stakeholders and starting to shape up your Change Management tools and templates.

Week 4: Run your first workshop

It might take you until a Week 4 to get a Change Roadmap up and running and that's okay as well. Sometimes you'll walk into a project and it's just not as far along as you thought it was, because it’s perhaps not as well-run as you expected it to be. It's just a lot of exploratory stuff. So if by Week 4 you could be doing either a Change Risk Workshop or a Change Plan Workshop, you're doing pretty well. Obviously as an independent consultant, I work really fast. But even when I was a contractor, on say a 6-month contract, by Week 4 I’m usually running a Change Workshop or at least booked it in. Because you already met the stakeholders, you can get everybody together and engaged. If it's appropriate, you can do a Future State Workshop with Change Vision Setting and Benefits Mapping using the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Coaching exercises I share in my Leading Successful Change program. If a project's already in flight that might not be appropriate. But if you haven't started the project at all yet, that could be something that you do - schedule it in Week 2 or Week 3 and run it in Week 4. 

Fit-for-purpose = flexibility

So you can see that your first 4 weeks is really fit-for-purpose and what feels right to you, how far along the project is, how mature they are in delivery. But if you can start to at least frame up what you plan to do by the end of Week 4, that's pretty good. And if you can have a Change Planning workshop either scheduled or completed, or even just started (it might be in two parts) and the first half is done by Week 4, that’s pretty good because Change Management often gets hired late. You are usually behind the eight ball by the time you've already walked in the door. There have been projects that I’ve worked on where they were planning their go live to be within a month of me starting my contract. I could see from the moment I started that the technology wouldn’t be ready, even though I could rally to get the change delivery done in time. So in Week 2,  I’ve run a Change Planning workshop asking them to share their technology lead times and gently suggesting, “Heads up - I don't think you’re going to be ready.” And then they were like, “How dare you! … But yes, you're right.” And then they’ve pushed their planned go live out by another month so I didn’t waste time trying to scramble to create a Change Plan that was doomed from the beginning. There's been other projects where I’d been hired just two months before a go live that would affect 100,000 people's pay, on a project without a Project Manager. So I ran a risk workshop very quickly to get remediating activities and built the Change Plan off the remediating activities, explaining we didn’t have time to do the full end-to-end change process. That's the beauty of Leading Successful Change. You'll learn all the tools that are available and then you'll build the confidence as to which tool to use when with how much time you've got available and what the project's doing and where it's at.

And it’s the ability to ask career questions like this that makes my Leading Successful Change program so powerful for not just change leadership confidence, but career and life confidence too!

There’s 1 week left to register for my Leading Successful Change Live training in Sydney on 18-19 August.

Register your spot on LSC Live here before the deadline

I’d love to have you join us and answer your questions on career and leadership over the 2 days. 

Lata xx