The New Corporate Superheroes: Change Agents To The Rescue

You have located the influencers within your organisation. The next step is to invite them to multi-disciplinary design workshops to co-create stakeholder alignment. Listen and learn from them.

The New Corporate Superheroes: Change Agents To The Rescue

Global brands are on a mission to become more productive and efficient, and to create better products and experiences for increasingly sophisticated, fickle, and connected customers.

In an attempt to drive change, however, companies launch a barrage of disconnected initiatives onto change-weary, and increasingly resistant, employees.

The good news is that by harnessing the power of change agents, any one of these potentially damaging initiatives can be transformed into a catalyst for positive change.

In last month’s article, I explained how to discover change agents. In this one let’s look at how to harness their power once you’ve found them.

Four Steps Towards Change

In my experience, there are four steps to successful culture change.

If any one of these pillars is missing, it’s like a missing leg on a chair. It just doesn’t work.

Catalysts For Positive Culture Change

Change agents can be found anywhere at any level, in any department. There is rarely any correlation between the organisational chart and the knowledge tree of informal influence.

Once you know who your change agents are, invite them to multi-disciplinary workshops to co-create stakeholder alignment and communications plans that stand some chance of working.

If you invite influencers into a strategic design process in the right way, they will leave with better understanding of the complexity of the challenge at hand, a greater sense of ownership, and the feeling they are a valued part of the company.

If you can get the change agents on board, and respect their efforts, they will become your key advocates and drive the change from within. By growing this network of change agents, the rest of the organisation will, bit by bit, follow along.

At Kiely & Co. we call this approach “People-Powered Transformation.”

If you get it right, it works.

Cross-Functional Design Workshops

It’s crucial to get the format of these workshops exactly right. Total buy-in and understanding from the very top are absolutely essential.

Design workshops are not a chance to coerce these precious influencers. They are not an opportunity to tell, teach, and train.

They are a chance for leadership to listen and learn from the experience and knowledge of their employees.

For this approach to work, talking the talk is not enough. Many leaders struggle with this paradigm shift from command and control.

Don’t ask people for their opinions, then go ahead with what you were going to do in the first place. Better not to ask than to ask and ignore.

Building Networks Of Trust

People are at their most creative and collaborative in the “reward state.” Six conditions are key to invoking this state: certainty, empathy, connection, respect, fairness, and autonomy, as previously explored here.

These conditions are at the very core of effective innovation and change frameworks. Let’s look at how they can be applied to get the best from multi-disciplinary workshop formats.

Certainty: People do their best thinking when they feel safe and can see what’s coming. Let people know exactly what will happen as the workshop unfolds, and what will happen with all their hard work afterwards. Give a clear road map when they arrive and keep pointing out how far you’ve got.

Empathy: Participants will be from different levels, brands, departments. Each will see the world through different eyes. They have different modes of communication. Be clear about the rules of engagement. Reinforce the importance of listening and building on other people’s ideas. Nurture “yes-and” not “yes-but” behaviours. If you can’t get it right in a workshop of change agents, what chance do you have across the rest of the organisation?

Connection: Give people a chance to get to know each other before you launch into the design process: get them talking about who they are, what they care about, what motivates them, what they do at home. Connection is the first step to trust. Networks of trust breed collaborative and creative behaviours.

I find face-to-face speed networking the best way of breaking down barriers and forging fun connections. Eye-to-eye contact and impromptu conversation are psychologically powerful.

Respect: Respect their efforts and ensure you keep to your word about what will happen afterwards. Better not to ask than to ask and not listen.

Fairness: Ensure everyone feels that they have been part of inclusive, transparent, and collective decision making at all points of the design, filtering, and selection process. If some of the solutions proposed can’t go forward into production, be clear and honest about how and why decisions are made.

Autonomy: Give them the tools, framework, and key aims and let them get on with it. It’s amazing what people can achieve when you trust they can.

Tried-And-Tested Route To Change

Tapping into the knowledge of thousands of people is powerful. Involving them in the redesign process builds a different and much healthier relationship between workforce and company.

Eventually, when enough people have been involved in systems-thinking processes, when they have started to feel like part of something bigger than themselves, connected, appreciated, and recognised for their skills and experience, their energy and engagement are contagious. Eventually, as your network of change agents grows, you will reach a tipping point where these new modes of engagement become the norm in a connected learning culture that can survive the constant buffeting of change

I’d like to say we invented this approach, but not so.

Companies such as P&G, Pfizer, Ford, 3M (the list goes on … ) have been using design thinking and multifunctional cross-organisational design to solve pressing problems and harness opportunities for many years.

It is really not rocket science as it takes into account “the Ikea effect.” People place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves.

When people are listened to, have their opinions heard and harnessed, and feel part of the change, why would they resist it?