In the last article, in our deeper dive review of the findings from our Boss Quality survey we looked at having and positively communicating a compelling vision for success: Read part 1: Key principle # 1
This time, let’s focus on stakeholder engagement and change management tools and techniques which underpin our Key Principle # 2.
In some transformation journey stories we can see how, in the rush to deliver a project outcome or achieve a task milestone, taking the time to fully engage with the team and clients has not been a priority for the shared services leader. Those stories never turn out to be success stories.
That’s because the shared services leader has not led the change but has only responded or reacted to the brief of others. He has not invested time to ensure that the team, the clients, and other key stakeholders are fully involved in creating the solution. He may have driven the project plan for change but when did he actually engage the imagination of the team to create true followship?
As Peter Drucker observed we use our left brain (logic, facts, sequential plans) to manage tasks, plan, analyse, and control; and we lead people effectively with our right brain (imagination, feeling) – promoting a vision of success which gets them onboard and wanting to help bring our aspirations and goals to life as "the way we work."
To get every one on board we need both management and leadership. And leadership centres around both team and client engagement. We spoke, last time, about team engagement through story telling and drawing a Big Picture vision of success together. In previous articles I’ve also focussed on energising your team.
Now lets look more closely at how we can schmooze with our clients through practical on-the-ground Stakeholder engagement.
A change management programme I recommend and used extensively at Coca-Cola over three years is called "Enabling fast change". This focuses on:
- Establishing your vision and your brand for change
- Identifying each stakeholder – business and functional leaders, managers and employees, own function members, and external partners
- Developing "what’s in it for them," thus opening the dialogue statements
- Auditing where each stakeholder is currently at, on the change journey, and mapping (using a six-stage scale) versus where we want them to be, to create the gap analysis or Delta to Address.
So far, it’s all about planning and analysis of the current situation, and establishing targets and proposals for action – Deming’s classic S-T-P for problem analysis.
So what are the six stages of stakeholder engagement as they develop over time through the change process? These are outlined in Figure 1 – Engagement Scorecard on a progression of scores from 1-6 (awareness to institutionalization), together with personal statements:
Full engagement only arrives when the stakeholder reaches level 6,and the new way of working becomes the norm … how we do things around here.
A great way to engage your shared services team as it forms is to encourage the team to actively score their clients after each intervention, each conversation, to raise the score.
I found this very useful when I led a shared services team at Coca-Cola, as it was both a way to build and bond our team with a common purpose as we reviewed our progress, as well as score with our stakeholders every 2-4 weeks. So it also brought out the best in our collective and individual achievement motives as we sought to honestly raise the scores of our individual stakeholders and thus the overall average stakeholder engagement score.
It does take time and effort to move stakeholder scores up the engagement scale, particularly from 1. Awareness, through 2. Understanding, to 3. Acceptance.
Don’t underestimate the need for getting down and dirty in fierce conversations with your stakeholders. This is the "storming" stage, which you need to go though if you want true engagement beyond the superficial level. Being polite and skirting round the surface gets you nowhere.
What do they understand and expect? What are their wants? Your wants? And what can you offer each other to move this forward into a working partnership?
Who is Who?
Change Champions are those individuals with influence and power in the organisation who have reached level 4 Engagement – commitment to help advance the change – and are becoming active role models in leading by example to apply the change in their daily business. For example, they can be relied upon to demonstrate that they use Tier 0 Self-Service; and contact the service desk in Tier 1, rather than going back to HR generalist ways by walking down the corridor and asking the local HR department to do it all for them. Recruiting Senior HR leaders and Senior Line Managers from the business to show their profile and speak up as change champions definitely helps to accelerate the transformation in my experience.
Gate Keepers are those whose agreement you need to get before you can move through the gateway from the old field-of-play to the pastures of the new green field. Sometimes known as blockers, these individuals, who exist in every organisation, have the power and influence to stop things happening, to hold back progress on the journey. Seek them out and engage them in conversations to open the gate. Don’t just ignore them and hope they will go away. I have learned that without a conversation, no progress can be made.
When looking at your stakeholders. Ask yourself this question: Where is the energy?
Active Energy:
This is found, and can be leveraged, in Change Champions as we have discussed above.
But there are also Change Terrorists. Powerful or outspoken people who will overtly challenge your every move, seeking to undermine your progress and maintain the status quo with which they are most comfortable, and where their power resides.
Worst case scenario is that you find Change Terrorists in your HR leadership team. It can take six months longer to transform HR if you are in this situation, unless you can turn their negative energy into positive energy. Or unless they are removed from the organisation. After all, Traditional Generalist Turkeys aren’t always going to vote for a Shared Services Christmas.
Passive Energy:
This is harder to discover but can be found in those stakeholders we classify as Yes People. In open meetings they nod their heads in mock agreement, are politically correct, never disagree, often say yes – but then do nothing. Unless you can get them to level 4 Commitment to actively help advance the change they are a low energy blocker.
Silent Assassins
Do you recognise these four types in your organisation?
As a reality check, I have found from my experience with HR transformation A-Z in many companies, over the last 15 years, that it is the HR community that is often more resistant to change at the beginning of the HRT journey and shared services implementation than the managers and employees - who are more interested in the outputs they get from "One Team HR". My Finance Shared Services Director colleagues have agreed with me that the same is true in the Finance Function at the start of the transformation journey.