I’ve worked in change management and digital transformation for over 15 years.
An easier way to think about what that means is I’ve been responsible for making improvements related to process and technology to teams and companies – even the largest and most complicated. Much of what I had to master was figuring out how to motivate people to make improvements.
One of the bigger challenges is that people are naturally resistant to change. Learning is uncomfortable.
It’s one of the reasons so many new years resolutions fail. How many people do you know that actually stuck with learning that new language or how to play that new instrument?
So don’t feel so bad if you’ve been pushing for change at your firm and people aren’t jumping for joy. It’s a preprogramed response in their brain.
So now that you know the problem, what’s the best way to solve it so your firm can move forward?
I’d challenge you to answer one question from the perspective of each stakeholder and that question is ‘what’s in it for me?’.
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You see what I found was that even if I could push changes through, if the stakeholders weren’t internally motivated to own the new process or tools, it wouldn’t matter because those project would inevitable fail anyway. I needed a better strategy.
What you need to do instead is to better understand the problems your stakeholders are experiencing so you can map solutions from your proposed changes to their internal motivators for why they’ll want THAT improvement.
If they want to own it because they’ll see benefit from it they might just start asking you for improvements.
Talk soon,
Sean