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Hi there, I'm Ben Pearce and welcome to the Tech World Human Skills Podcast. Every episode we talk through how to thrive in the tech world, not just survive. Now, if you want me to work with your team, just give me a shout. I love to help teams be more influential, memorable and successful with their stakeholders. Head over to www.techworldhumanskills.com to book a chat.
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Human Skills Podcast. It is brilliant to have you with us again today. So in today's episode, we're going to continue talking about leadership. So this is the second in a bit of a series that I'm doing with Ben Caird on Leadership 101. So I did some work with a customer and they were asking me what are kind of the core leadership skills that we need to develop in our team. So I put together that series, which is just finished. And I thought it'd be brilliant to come and talk about that with a very seasoned leader. So today we're going to be talking about leading through change and how important it is. And also some really practical things that you can do to get better at doing it. So before we go on any further, I think we should welcome our lovely guests. So please welcome to the show the wonderful Ben Caird. Thanks. Nice to be here. It's lovely to have you back. It's like I've never been away.
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Now, for people that maybe haven't listened to this show before, do you want to introduce yourself a little bit? Yeah, very, very high level. 25 years working in technology, be that software IT and managing large global groups, doing cool stuff, really. Yeah. Yeah. And I think one of the key things that we've both been through and we used to lead together at Microsoft many, many years ago, was change. There was a lot of change then and there is probably even more change now. So being able to lead and navigate a team through change, really, really important. So maybe we start there.
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Why is it so important to be able to lead a team through change?
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Well, I think the two words are quite important, leading and change, because I would say if you're not driving change, you're probably not leading. It sort of feels like a bit like almost managing run state, if that makes sense, which I mean, that doesn't really exist anymore. I don't think everything is evolving and changing.
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And then if you if you think about effective change, that really means that the humans are bought in and doing a great job, right, with whatever the change might be. So I think leading through change, I think, means engaging people, bringing them with you and then having I always think about how many people can we all have pointing in the same direction so that we can drive that, you know, that business impact ultimately. But hopefully a business impact that people are excited about and build to the future. Yeah. And I remember when we first had a chat about doing this this episode, I remember saying to you, you know, why is why is change so important? And you had a reaction that was quite quick and quite visceral. And you went, if you ain't if you ain't leading change, you ain't leading, I think was the phrase that the phrase that you used. Something similar to that. Something like that. Like, it's that important. Like, it's a no brainer. And so I was thinking about that and sort of reflecting on that a little bit, just like where we are in the tech world at the moment, you know, and things that are changing very rapidly.
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AI is changing, you know, business models, the way tech works. So the type of tech we need to learn the type of the way we work. So, you know, that's a massive change that's happening right now. Tech has always been a fast changing, adaptive thing. Anyway, things like geopolitics, easy for you to say geopolitics. I mean, literally, you don't, you know, tariffs may be in today, they may not be in tomorrow, you don't know. And you've got to be able to do that alongside things like just your normal reorgs or just, oh, I think we could do this better, this thing that we're doing. So it feels like really now change is just so important. Yes, absolutely. And I sort of, I guess, to use some terms, I think about the continuous improvement change. And then I think about that kind of building the future, the transformation change. And so I think both of those typically happen in parallel, don't they? And that's also part of the challenge is trying to line all those things up often across the same people. Yeah. Well, so I think we should maybe dig into some practical sort of steps, maybe a framework or so that we can think about. I love a framework. I love a framework. And I love a framework because it's just something to hang my thoughts off. It doesn't mean I have to do it all the time. But it's a place to start. And if I think there's a better approach, I can. But you know, you're starting at a good place as opposed to just starting out, you know, from nowhere. So maybe we can dig into some of those sorts of bits and pieces. There's a couple of models that are quite popular. Yes. Two of the most famous, I think, are Adkar and Kota. I know Adkar a lot better. You've done a bit of work with Kota as well. Yeah, I quite like Kota. Do you maybe just want to frame at a high level what these sorts of things are?
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Very simplistically, it's a multi-step framework for chat. I love the framework as well. Right. Taking a pic, but you love it too. But I think there's the academic side, if you like, and then there's the how you apply it in real life side, isn't there? So a framework is good. The guiding principles are great. And then it's the execution in the scenario that's probably, you know, the difference.
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I would say having looked across Kota and Adkar, Kota would be it's an eight step thing. And essentially, these are the things you must do and a rough order of things. Adkar is much more about how the people really engage and then ultimately embrace the change and how they feel and how they work at different points. So actually, they're not competitive. I would say they're complementary. And quite often, I would say I've brought in various Adkar things when I've been thinking Kota. And there's a bunch of different good resources. I like the eight steps of Kota. I think we're going to talk probably a bit more about Adkar today. But both are useful. And if you want really easy listening, there's a fable, our iceberg is melting for Kota, which just talks in terms of penguins, how you might think about driving change. So there's some nice simple things out there to help you get your head around it. And it's interesting because I remember the first time I got trained on this and it was Adkar, which is part of ProSci.
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Thinking back to it, actually, you'd just left a role where you were managing like a cloud incubation team. So it was back in the days when Office 365 was first launched. And was B-Pos, I think. Yeah, B-Pos into Office 365 for the old people listening to this. And you'd finished that team and gone off to do something else. And I then picked up that team. And I remember because it was a time when Microsoft had always been selling like server software. And it was like, Microsoft, sell you this thing, cost you loads of money. Whether you're successful with it or not, doesn't matter, because you've already paid the money. And then suddenly, there was this paying per inbox or per user per month. And if they're not getting value and it's not working very well, then they're not going to pay you anymore. And suddenly, Microsoft got very invested in the fact that people were successful. Adoption is key in the cloud world, right? I suppose. And so this now is a long time ago, probably 10 years or so. Consumption economics. Consumption economics. That was another good book. Yes. So that's where I learned today. But once I had learned it, I was like, this is amazing. I needed to have learned this earlier. This is a great way to think about it. So I think this is really important, whether you're leading teams as a people manager or whether you've not got any direct reports, but you're trying to drive projects and trying to get change done. Either way, I think, or with customers. If you're a consultant trying to drive change with customers or pre-salesperson trying to drive change with customers. Understanding this, I think, is really fundamental. How does it feel if somebody suggests something to you and you're excited by it and you go after it compared to if you're told, I'm not interested, just go and do the thing. Completely different. And that's massive simplification. But that's really what we're driving at, is to try and get as many people excited and well-equipped to ultimately drive the change and feed into it and help make it as successful as possible. And this could be a change, some new technology being deployed, a new process coming out. Interestingly, you can apply this easily to things like a weight loss regime and getting fit. So it applies for everything from personal change through to new tech, through to new processes, whole range you can apply this to. Yeah, and we're talking about if you like human change management, as you say, people and technology, but it really is around how the humans adopt it typically. Compared, we're not talking about ITIL change management, which is a different thing. Right? Just for that clarity.
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So let's maybe dig into Adcar and maybe we can use these five phases of Adcar to maybe hang our thoughts and share some examples of good change, bad change, that kind of stuff. Shall I hand it over to you? Do you remember what Adcar, I'm going to really test you now. Do you remember what Adcar does? For those of you listening, as he looks at his notepad, do you want to just run through what Adcar, because it's an acronym, what does it stand for? It stands for Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and then Reinforce. And I think you prefer action to ability when we talked about this before. Yes. Yeah. But I didn't write it, so I guess they probably have credence over me. Yeah, I mean, good humility. But yeah, and I guess we'll dig into those, but that's Adcar. And so that was Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Slash, Action, Reinforce. And I think the important thing is here that that's a sequence that people go through. So you start off at A, do some work in A, get them to D. So you start off in Awareness, then get them to Desire, then get them to Knowledge, then get them to Action and Ability, then get them to Reinforce. And people can drop back. So it doesn't mean once you've got them from one stage to the next that they're always going to remain there. But there is no point doing knowledge on how to change if you've not done any awareness of the problem and you've not done any created any desire and people to change. Absolutely. You know, and if you like, I guess just to go through each really, really quick simple awareness for me is that you know about it and it's almost the why.
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So why are we doing the change and what is it? I'm aware. Desire is actually I'm brought in. So not only do I understand it, but I'm with you and I'm going to do my best.
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Knowledge is really do I understand, you know, is it written down or is it communicated in a way that I know exactly what is expected? Yeah, Ability or Action, Ability is you've got all the things you need in order to do the thing and then Reinforce is obviously often it will be recognition, it will be tuning. So generally there's an improvement loop that happens isn't there as well. And then to your point, different people in the same change will be at different points. And we often talk about a human change curve as well. So people are at different points, you know, essentially from a bit like a grief process, really, it's everything from denial to acceptance really. And then embracing, I would say as well, hopefully. So yeah, hopefully that sort of gives a real high level sense of those five things. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's not dig into them. So awareness, first phase of Adcar and maybe the first thing that you want to do with people. Talk to me about awareness. I mean, I can give you an example, like kind of a nice example. So awareness, let's assume that it's a large issue organization. Awareness isn't a what I'd call a fire and forget broadcast email. Awareness is sharing it through multiple layers of leadership in a large organization.
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So it's trying to bring it in different ways to different people over time. To give you an example, going back quite some years, I worked on a change. And we wanted to try and make it a bit fun and engaging and maybe stand out a little bit so that we could try and, you know, people had had changed before through dry emails and such. We wanted to do something different. So we used to do a bit of technology that created like a cartoon video with a character called Colin. He bounced along. There was some catchy music. And it was basically this is what we used to do. Here's all the value of why we're going to do this. And it's going to make all your lives better because we'll be more effective and you know, you'll get less, you know, cases and things that, you know, work that's repeatable and dull. It's going to make everything better. And then at the end of it, it's like be more like Colin. It's a bit cheesy. Yeah. But then we could this was pre covid when people more people were perhaps in the offices so we could have things stuck up on the wall and we could we could just make, you know, use humor as well. Yeah. And then we could kind of bridge off that and do multiple communications, different channels. So that's, I guess, maybe a good example. And I think the important thing is it's awareness of what the problem is. Yeah. What the opportunity is, isn't it? It's not aware of this yet of what you need to do differently. It's awareness going. This thing is broken. Yeah. Costing us too much money inefficient. We've lost the contract. Whatever the thing might be. This is the problem. Or it might be if you flip it around. This is the opportunity to save you time, the opportunity to save us money. Exactly. And it's often you're you're trying to answer the question, what's in it for me for your audience that you want to drive the change with. Yeah. Yeah. And so if I may be bring this to life as we're recording this in January, perhaps a lot of people in the world are thinking that they put on excess pounds over Christmas and January starts with the health drive. And so maybe if we were to put this set this in the in a bit of a fun scene of right, I'm going to do some weight and get a bit fitter this year. So awareness you go, I'm aware that there's a problem. And that could be, oh, I play football on a Tuesday and I can't run for the entire hour. I'm knackered after 30 minutes. Yes. Or that could be, oh, I've got kids now and I struggle to get down on the floor and get them up. Or it could be I've done one of those M.O.T.s and my blood pressure. Yeah. There's something that's happened that goes, oh, I'm aware that there is a bit of a problem here. Indeed.
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So then we move on to D. Can you unpack D for me? That is desire. OK. So that is about trying to get people bought in and wanting to do the change, which I think is tricky. So the way I think about that, you definitely want the so if I go back to that example, you've got a video that's come out. It's kind of fun and whatever you chat to people about. You kind of get it. It makes some sense. But you might be a little bit cynical. We have lots of healthy cynics that we work with. And actually, humans are geared a little bit to resist change generally. Right. We kind of like how things are and we don't always want to drive change by default. In this era, I always think about how you get different people involved in the change who other people would look to. So the most senior person that tells everyone to do it, that's possibly not going to always work. Right. OK. I would say something that we did in this one was we had some change champions, change agents. We called different things, but some people that really got it were excited by it. But what actually, in many cases, the other people that needed to adopt the change would listen to them far more than they would a set of senior leaders or in the middle leaders or their direct manager in some cases. Yeah. So it's often about talking about it and what it means in different settings. It can be through one on ones. It can be in team meetings. Yeah. But often the other bit of that is different characters, I think, as well. So sometimes you'll have somebody that's that's a bit of a character in the team. Yeah. Can be a bit challenging and resistant to change. Often if you can spend a bit more time one on one with them and they really buy into it, more people will follow that as well. So it's a bit nuanced and difficult to get into all of it. But I would say it's about having different levels of conversations at different layers in the organization and picking a mix of people that will help you drive that over time. Yeah. Yeah. And it's creating that desire, isn't it, which is different, different from the awareness. There's one thing to know that there's a problem and there's another thing to want to fix it. So and also how you convince people and help create that desire of people is different. So if I, my mind goes to discovery insights for, you know, some of those things that help you understand people and you go, some people are quite emotional. They like the big picture. Some people are very detail oriented and logical. And so you therefore need a bit of a blend of, hey, here's the emotional connection of why we're going there. But actually we here's our rational and logical reason that set out with some detail behind it. So as it's not all vaporware, it's something that's real and tangible. Absolutely. And you've got to convince people differently. And so to go back to that analogy of the health drive, you know, there's not being able to finish football on a Tuesday or not being able to get down on the floor to play with the kids, being aware that that's a problem. But then you go, actually, I really do want to be able to finish playing football on a Tuesday. I really do want to be able to get down on the floor and crawl around with the kids that I've just had. So actually, I do need to make a change now. And I understand that I'm now invested in that and connected to the kind of the mission, the outcome. And that's the bit where you have to understand the individuals, as you're saying, because obviously the health drive that's driven by you based on a I use the term forcing function, which might not sound. But like, you know, the forcing function is well, I broke my leg. So I've got to do it. So my forcing function in five weeks time when I can actually walk again is to get back and try and get the same level of strength back on my left leg and all of that sort of stuff. But it's it's trying to find that for all of the people you want to work change through because it will be different for people. And insights, colors is a nice way communicating in color. But sometimes it is just about having that chat. Well, actually, wouldn't it be cool if so? The example I took about earlier was actually how you code cases so that we could understand the workload so we could get rid of some of the easier work. And for technical people, that can be good. There's other technologies and AI and different things that are much more able to help in those spaces. But understanding the workload actually gives people much more opportunity to go and do more cool, difficult, interesting things. And so that resonated with some of that audience. Yeah. And also, you know, some of the examples that we talked through a little bit there are kind of top down, you know, where you're a leader and you are have an organization beneath you that you're trying to drive change. But that equally works when you're in pre-sales or consultancy and you're out there with customers. And now you've got no authority over them whatsoever. So that making various change champions aware this is the problem and creating energy that they have a desire to fix it and to be part of the solution. Really important part of getting customers on board. Yeah, absolutely.
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Awareness, desire, K. What's that stand for? Knowledge. Okay. Well done. Well done you. So tell us about that one.
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Well, I think, I mean, in very simple terms, knowledge is quite self-explanatory. So it's making sure that people have what they need. So if you were changing a process from A to B, then you would have that. So I mean, I can give an example where we moved relatively large organization across ticketing systems. And what we did there was for the majority of their processes, we mapped the before and after. And we had a quick reference guide and then a more detailed thing. And then essentially that was the knowledge. So we created artifacts, information so that people could very quickly understand before and after or from and to.
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So that's, I mean, that's probably the simplest way to think of it. The interesting thing I think with knowledge is in the tech world, us as techies, so often start there and we haven't done awareness and desire and we start with knowledge. So so often techies, and I include myself in this, something new, something shiny, something exciting, figure out how it works. Brilliant. Now let's go and tell people and that could be customers. That could be colleagues. We need to be using this thing. This is how it works. It's exciting. This is how it works. And what we don't do is go, actually, we haven't created a reason to. We haven't to coin that Simon Sinek start with why. We haven't started with why. This is the problem. And this is how we could fix it and why it's good to fix it. We start with sometimes there's this new thing. This is how it works. And we're plugging away there, but you're never going to drive any lasting change there because nobody else cares about the thing that you're talking about. So you've got to make them care. And the why, just to expand on that. So the why, sometimes the why can sound a bit soft, can't it? And I think what you're saying, both bits of this really, the why is important because you can create emotional connection on that. But the why is important because actually you want to define a business benefit in most cases. So and then that kind of comes back to what we're talking about, about I guess, SaaS and cloud and consumption, really. You really want changes to drive value and you ideally want to have a sense of where you started and what success looks like so that you can try and bridge that. And that's going to be in that awareness and that desire. This is the business reason for doing this and the personal reason for doing this. Yeah, it's multi-faceted. Yeah. And then here is the new process. Here is the new technology. And so I guess if we take that to the analogy of the health drive, you've not been able to play football on a Tuesday all the way through. You've then gone, I want to be able to play Tuesday all the way through. And then it's now you've gone to somebody at a gym who said, here is your gym plan. And you've gone to a nutritionist or you looked online and gone, and here is your nutrition plan. And if you follow that plan on exercise, that plan on nutrition and you do that for three months at the end of the three months, you're going to be. Yeah. I feel like you're trying to drive your own chain. If I say it out loud enough, then I will put the sharing bag of Doritos down on a Friday night. But I can't because they're so lovely. Well, I'm following your nutrition plan then. Exactly. So I need to go back and work on that desire a little bit more. But it's that knowledge, that recipe of how to do it, of that process. Yeah, absolutely. OK. Awareness, desire, knowledge. A. Tell me about that.
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Ability. I think that that kind of carries on from knowledge, but then it's just how you reduce friction, I think. OK. So we talked a bit about knowledge, but I'll give you an example of a change where this was this was an acquisition. It was a migration. And some of the things that we did, I talked a bit about the knowledge. But actually, there's knowledge, which is we've written it all down and you should know. Yeah. And then there's how do you actually tune the knowledge so that it's easy to adopt and understand and all of that good stuff. So quite often for technical folks, in fact, all folks, I've written all I've often written documentation, which has got the one sentence skimmable and then the detailed. Here's all the stuff you need to know. And so the first time you do your onboarding, you go through the detail, don't you? But then once you become a seasoned person at it, you've just got that one liner that's just how you refresh. And then if you make changes to that process, it's much easier to just. So that would be one way of reducing friction is by having really consumable knowledge. Yeah. And then in this particular change that went that went well, we had like floor walkers, you might call it in the old world. So we had people that were experts on this that were with the people during the switch over. And so they have the ability to have someone over their shoulder helping them where things maybe didn't work. We could feed that back in and we could respond quickly. And so for me, that that is really the action. That's where the execution happens and making sure that there's as much friction removed as possible. Yeah. And I noticed you threw in the A word action there because for me that I think so what it says in the in the official book and all of that kind of stuff is its ability. And it's about ring fencing time. It's about having those materials that are frictionless that help you.
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You've got to do something differently, which is why I like that kind of action word. You now need to use the new process. You now need to use the new technology. You now need to get to the gym and push some weights. Yeah. Or you need to stop eating. There's you can't just keep looking at the documentation. You need to take some action, which is why which it just feels like such a better word. Yeah, I think we're both we're both impacts. I mean, I do think we talk a lot about the how we do things and that's really important. But without impact, it's meaningless. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But also, as you're leading, you've got to give people the space to do that, the time to do that and the chance to maybe fail and get it wrong. And it's a safe space to try it again. And that and that's why you. Yeah, we're probably I won't go too far on this. But this is sometimes why change you do with a subset of people first, if you can, or you know, you face these things. So you can take some learnings. If you do a big bang of a change, sometimes it's required. If you do a big bang of a change and you do get some things wrong, you can lose people. Whereas if you can stage it with some people that bought in and just want to be part of making it better, you can do some early course correction. And then as you go to the masses, you've got a higher confidence level, less things go wrong. More people keep that energy buy in and get a better result. So I think, yeah, we might talk about bad change, but often we have to do change quickly. Please don't misunderstand that. But sometimes speed is the enemy of adoption. Yeah. I see people going really fast to hit a timeline, which means less people are pointing in the right direction. Yeah. And we've talked about this on the show before, but I think it's worth saying again, because it's so good. It's that efficiency versus effectiveness, isn't it? The most efficient way to get people to change is to say do this and then they do it. Right. But the problem is that's not a very effective way because most of the people that you tell to do it won't do it. And you might have actually come up with a really bad idea because you didn't include anybody anyway. So a much more effective way to do that is to get people on board to get them lined up and pointed in the right direction to take them on this. And then it's going to be an effective change as opposed to an efficient change where you've told them to execute my vision, but nobody has. And it was a bad vision anyway. Yeah. And I talk about sticky change. Right. It's about things that last as well. So some of the things like if you're changing between tools, they're kind of a sticky in that you end of life the old thing. Right. Yeah. But actually in some process and some other changes, people can choose to do it the old way. Yeah. Or behaviors. Well, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. OK. So we've got awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, slash action. Yeah. Oh, I'm an expert, although I do get to answer again. Reinforce. And I think this is like the models are good. But I think we like once you've done enough changes, you know, the order of things that you be every enforced. And I think that's, you know, it's really about making sure that the change is sticky. It's about making sure most of the time 100 percent of people aren't pointing in the same direction. So you've kind of got that bringing people with that. That's not a headlock. That's putting arms around people. Right.
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Sometimes both are required, but metaphorically speaking. But but generally, you know, you're trying to bring people with and things like open sessions where people can bring some of their challenges. They had to be well managed. You need to think about sizes and forums and all of that. But actually having sort of clinics and different ways where people can give their feedback, you know, try to make it as constructive those meetings as possible. But that's about I always think with changes, having a two way loop is important. So again, normally I would have a little bit pragmatic here. But if people are giving feedback, I track that somewhere. And as part of the change comms, I would make sure that we have this is the feedback you gave and this is what we did. So people know that their feedback is coming in and they're affecting the outcome, basically. And there's all kinds of tactics you can use. So virtuous cycles to try and get people. Yeah, I'm sort of thinking about like awards and things like that. Recognition in all different senses. Yeah. People say in right. Yeah, well done. You're the first person to use this 20 times or to almost the gamification of it a little bit is a really nice way. Yeah. I remember thinking of going back to the health thing. I remember speaking to my sister. This is a few years ago. She said this and she said she was a member of Weight Watchers.
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And she said the only reason I pay for that is because every week I have to go to a room full of strangers and get on a scale in front of everybody. And that weekly thing is the thing that makes me put the chocolate bar down.
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And there is a phrase that not everyone will write, but you get what you inspect. Right. OK. Yeah. Now, there's a wrapper around how you land that. Yeah. But actually I didn't touch on it, but the whole desire thing as well back in the change I was talking about with the video and being more like Colin, we were reporting on how many people were adopting that change. So you could see if you imagine a thousand person or because it was you could see by manager, by group and then by geography who was adopting the change. And that wasn't about making people bad and wrong, but you could see all that seems not bought in. So there's either a specific challenge to their team. Maybe we need to chat to that leader. You know, so so data is really important and inspecting that in the right way. Yeah. Really helps sort of underpin that drive the right conversations and get meaningful change. Yeah. So I've got a awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, action and then reinforce and and great way because everybody's going through their own personal sort of change journey. Yeah. So it's getting that balance of what you do as a team communication kind of level or a broad communication level and who's going to take those individuals through it. And maybe you can be both depending on if you're a consultant, sales, you know, you've got customers or if it's your team of directs beneath you, you can be more or less of that depending on the setup. Yeah. And going back to tying a little bit to that, a little bit of healthy competition as well. So, you know, if you can see like team levels of adoption, you know, teams are really good at self policing. That probably sounds a bit governing. Yeah. Although it probably is. Yeah. You know, in reality, if you can see like a leaderboard of how different teams doing adopting a change, sometimes teams will work, you know, call each other out in, you know, in a good way and drive that up. So I think that that ties in to right. Yeah. Those are the bits, I think, that we've talked the sciences ad car. Yeah. The art is listening, really understanding what's going on and putting. You can't do all the things and you won't ever bring everyone with you, I would say, but you can make a massive difference by having good listening systems. Yeah. Yeah. Across the org. Well, we've done our car. I think they're looking at the clock. There's probably just one more question that I want to go through before we before we wrap up. What we haven't talked about in this thinking about change is the importance of managing stakeholders, managing sponsors, you know, particularly if I think about most of the people that I work with, you know, in, let's say medium to medium to large organizations.
[00:35:32:08 - 00:36:03:17]
They are so matrixed. They are so complex. So it's not a little island of change that's happening. It's and maybe it's some change that you want to make a push, but it affects other departments, but maybe they're not as invested, you know, or certainly if you're working with customers, they might only a couple of them might be invested and you've got to get lots of people. So how do you think about managing stakeholders and managing sponsors when it comes to change?
[00:36:07:17 - 00:36:34:01]
There's quite a lot in that question. So if I start with sponsors, so if I think about some of the programs of change that I've owned, having the right sponsor is key. So having a sponsor is important. Having the right sponsor is even more important. And so I did, I scribbled a couple of notes down, but I think having someone that's bought in that really is behind the change is key. Sometimes they can help with resourcing.
[00:36:35:18 - 00:38:07:07]
But I would say also blockers. So having a sponsor who, you know, is well respected, that's bought in, that really gets it and has the right relationships often is key. And by that you're talking like executive sponsor, senior leader, somebody that's relatively high up that has got some chops and some clout. Yeah. That can bring it up in different meetings that can hold people, hold leadership teams accountable because I think that's really what we're talking about. Sometimes, you know, we had to change certain areas of the business, adopted it straight away. Some of the others were behind the curve and having a sponsor who can sort of hold a level of accountability as well to help you. There's one thing driving a program of work. There's another thing holding parts of the business accountable to the adoption of that change. And I think that's where a sponsor, the right sponsor, can be really valuable. I touched, yeah, really it's about that. The other thing is if you don't have a sponsor, changes can go very wayward very quickly. I would say there can be a bit of a loss of belief, you know, clarity. Is it important? Isn't it important? So I think having the right sort of figurehead and then having somebody that's prepared to go and drive accountability, they're probably the two key elements. And then it's resources and unblocking. They can be some tactical things. And what about, so I can think of lots of scenarios. So there was like the big changes. So let's say there was like the tier one changes. Right.
[00:38:08:08 - 00:39:01:07]
Let's imagine you're working in the UK. The person that's the head of the UK is driving tier one changes. So these might be like the massive things, right? We're putting a new SAP system in or whatever these really big changes are. But then there's a lot of changes that are maybe tier two, tier three, tier four changes where perhaps they need to happen. They're not up at the head of the UK that needs to, you know, that's going to sponsor them. But they affect multiple departments and you're trying to get people to buy into this thing that you want to happen. But there's going to be, there isn't going to be one person that's going to filter it all down. You're going to have to work with all those departments and they might be your peers or they might be senior to you, but in a complete, not in your reporting line. How do you approach that kind of change where it's a bit more matrix?
[00:39:02:08 - 00:39:47:15]
Yeah. I mean, that's your stakeholders, isn't it? So you, I mean, you've got multiple layers of stakeholder, but that's probably your functional owner stakeholder from how you articulated that. That's a tricky one. I would use the sponsor in many cases to help influence the stakeholders. I'd also kind of pick them off one on one. Depends on the scale of what we're talking about. But let's say there's five to 10 functional units and you need to get them on board. You're going to have to, a bit like we talked earlier, really with the awareness and the desire, you're going to have to talk to these stakeholders and work out the desire, you know, for them and how they can get brought into it.
[00:39:48:18 - 00:40:16:07]
And there's a few different ways. Of course, the proactive way, one on one, maybe you can come along and talk to them in their team meetings. There's different ways that you can go about those things. And then there's also, if you've got the right sponsorship, then I would think showing the adoption by functional area and making people know up front that you're going to drive some of that, you know, accountability and reporting is helpful.
[00:40:17:08 - 00:41:12:07]
I think, for me, I think you hit the nail on the head there when you said it's about talking to them, going back to that ad car about creating the awareness of what the problem is for them and helping them create the desire. Because what's in it for them might be very different narrative to what's in it for you. So for you, it might solve problem X and Y, but for them, it's going to solve problem A and B. And if you're talking to them in X and Y language, that's not going to land. If you're talking to them in A and B language, which is what they care about, then that's going to land. So you've got to change your narrative based on... And also the other, I call it a bit of air cut. Like I've had a scenario, I think of a specific one where a function said, it is really important to me, but I'm on fire. I've got X, Y and Z going on and I'll get to it, but I'm going to be three months behind.
[00:41:13:08 - 00:41:38:07]
Well, communicating and having that level of conversation up front allows me to put... Like when I'm sending out reports, rather than me... Sticking red next to that. If you think about it, you're kind of throwing them under the bus, aren't you? Whereas actually, if you can communicate that as part of your thing, that we've got a face roll out for these reasons and, you know, here's the ones that we've gone live with and here's the context of why we haven't.
[00:41:39:08 - 00:42:04:00]
That's much, much better, right? Because there's nothing worse than throwing people under the bus because that sort of, you know, diminishes trust with those stakeholders and you're going to be harder to work with them in the future. So I think it's a bit tricky to talk about all of the detail there, but that's... Hopefully that's a good example where it's not just everyone must do everything all at the same time and you've got to find a way.
[00:42:05:08 - 00:42:06:22]
Sometimes there's some room to maneuver.
[00:42:08:08 - 00:42:31:22]
When you've got a really... A thing that affects your team, your department a lot. Real passion thing, the area that you're really passionate about. But you can't find that way to create awareness and desire with the other stakeholders. Like, they just don't care, right? You're really passionate about this thing. They couldn't give two hoots.
[00:42:33:14 - 00:43:50:17]
What would you say if you find yourself in that sort of hurry? Very black and white. I'm not agreeing with they couldn't give two hoots. But I would say... So I've had examples of that in the last couple of places I've been where sometimes what you have to do is build it and show it. So what you can do is you can build yourself a little island. This is not what you should do. Build a little island and go off on your own. But that's not what I'm advocating for. What I'm advocating is sometimes you can build some things out, but you can build them with scale in mind. So I won't go into all of it, but I've built out the group, Service Excellence Program. And what we did was we built it out for the area of the business that we were in. But we wrote it in a way that anyone could adopt it. And then we also we said, "Look, I know you haven't got time for it right now, but have you got some great people that are, you know, your top quality people that would spend some time giving us feedback on the content?" So that as we create it, we get your input on it. And then it means that when you are ready to adopt it, if you do see the value that you're already essentially partway up the change curve, aren't you?
[00:43:51:23 - 00:45:41:07]
So that's an example. I often see that piloting some of these things, again, it's about being agile, I suppose, in many ways, is chunk something up, show the value of it. Build on that. And so I think you can do that. But that's not about not telling anyone and doing something, being the submarine disappearing, doing something and popping back up. I think you can get a level of buy in and awareness of something and then say, "I'm happy to share and involve you as we go." I think there's also something to say for picking your battles. Like we've made a bit of an assumption here that every change is a good change and a really good idea. And actually, they're not. And sometimes if you need to convince a load of people and you can't, you can't get them past desire, maybe ask yourself, "Is this a good idea? Is this what I want to put my energy in?" Because all the sponsors I need to talk about are telling me no. And I've tried that several times. Okay, let's pick another battle because that's not going to help my career. Yeah. And depending on the... This is tricky while we're sort of hypothesising with some of this, but with very real examples in our minds. But yeah, there are going to be changes where if you don't get buy in, you won't get the resources and the money and all of those things. And you've just got to go, "It's not the right time." And I've definitely seen some people kind of banging drums. "I'm right, I'm right, I'm right." Often it's not about being right though, is it? It's about how you can have an impact and the timing and how things fit together. So I think you're right. Sometimes you've just got to pause it. Sometimes you can prove it.
[00:45:42:08 - 00:45:56:23]
Sometimes it's about perseverance and tenacity. Sometimes it's... Exactly. Well, on that bombshell, I think we're coming towards the end of the episode. So let's maybe just think about key takeaways. What would be the key takeaways from this episode?
[00:45:58:12 - 00:46:15:21]
I think if we align it to some of the modelling and things that we've talked about, I think it's about effective change isn't about sending out a broadcast,
[00:46:16:22 - 00:46:49:07]
telling people to do the thing, rolling the thing out and done. I think what effective change is about is to go back to the model, it's about consumption. It's about people driving impact and value through that change. So when you think about it in that way, you understand that you need to take some time with the right people and understand some of the dynamics. And it is dynamic as well because it's over time.
[00:46:50:08 - 00:47:14:07]
And a model like Adcar, Cotter's also a useful model, but it allows you to sort of tap in and understand where people are. Do they know what's going on? Are they brought into it? Have they got what they need? And then are we recognising it and really driving the momentum? I think that's changing in a nutshell. Adcar doesn't do a terrible job of working that through.
[00:47:15:08 - 00:47:25:07]
Yeah, no, I think I'd agree with you. And I think that just one of those key things that I learnt is, and I've just seen over the years, is people constantly starting with K.
[00:47:26:08 - 00:47:45:07]
Constantly with a C, starting with K, knowledge, which is not doing that work to make people aware of the problem, why they should change and creating, persuading them in a language that resonates with them and convinces them and influences them that this is a good thing to do.
[00:47:46:08 - 00:48:01:15]
And people just come in with, this is the change you need to make, this is how you do it. And just that backing up, that's the bit that I see a lot of people forget to do. I think if we invest a bit of time in there, change is just so much more effective when you take people with you and take people on that journey.
[00:48:03:07 - 00:48:22:06]
Brilliant. Thank you so much for coming on. Because if people want to get in touch with you, how can people best get in touch with you? LinkedIn is probably the best. Absolutely. And I'll put that in the show notes so that people can see that link. So I think the only final thing for me to say is thank you so much for coming on the show. Again, it has been wonderful to have you
[00:48:24:09 - 00:48:44:12]
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