Push Organizational Change to the Front Lines

Engage managers and supervisors in organizational change management success.
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Major Business Pain Points

  • Human behavior is largely a blind spot during project planning. In IT especially, project planning tends to fixate on technology and underestimate the behavioral and cultural factors that inhibit user adoption.
  • Organizational change management can help, but it needs to be properly resourced – especially for major transformations, a single change manager can’t do it all alone. To effectively reach staff on the front lines, and mitigate their concerns and uncertainty around the transition, a strong change network is required.
  • Frontline managers and supervisors are best situated to comprise these networks and lead the change for their teams.
Push Organizational Change to the Front Lines-Pain Points

Recommendations

Key Points

  • The majority of organizations fail to properly utilize their managers as change leaders. Managers and supervisors largely lack the skills, training, and tools they need to competently transition their teams through to the future state.
  • Managers play a dual role in change management: they are both subject to the change and change leaders. As subjects to the change, they need to understand the change and reconcile what it means to their role before they can confidently coach and lead their teams. Statistics show that a failure to properly prepare managers for a change leads to them becoming one of the biggest sources of resistance on change initiatives.

Approach

Push Organizational Change to the Front Lines-Recommendations
  • Get managers on board with the change. Managers are both impacted by changes and they impact those changes. Before managers and supervisors can lead a change, they first need to come to terms with how change impacts them. Use the template activities in this research to help managers accept the change and lead it.
  • Provide managers with the tools they need to deal with frontline resistance and communicate change progress. This research comes with a purpose-built change management tool to help frontline managers proactively think through change impacts to their teams and prepare communication and coaching plans accordingly.
  • Create a symbiotic relationship between change managers and frontline managers. To reach individuals on the front lines, change management benefits from open lines of communication between change managers and people managers. The tools and templates in this research will help foster these ongoing lines of communication.
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Methodology and Tools

Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should push change management practices to the front lines, review the methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

  • Push Organizational Change to the Front Lines – Executive Brief
  • Push Organizational Change to the Front Lines Storyboard

1. Equip frontline managers for change management success

Define and configure a purpose-built change management tool, and train managers and supervisors in change management competencies.

  • Push Organizational Change to the Front Lines – Phase 1
  • Frontline Manager Coaching Plan Workbook
  • Frontline Manager Change Management Training Template
  • Change Management Role Play Scenarios

All resources on this page are provided to Cyber Leadership Hub members under license from third parties including Info-Tech Research Group Inc, a global leader in providing IT research and advice.