Stakeholder Engagement and Change Management Insights

Change management is a delicate blend of art and science, requiring curiosity in both organisational dynamics and human behaviour.

Consider the last time you experienced a major unwanted change in your personal life—a neighbour blocking your view with a new building, a difficult breakup, a health scare, or an unexpected move. These events are deeply emotional and challenging. Unwanted change in the workplace is no different. A sudden shift in responsibilities or a major company restructure can feel as profound as a personal upheaval.

As leaders, our primary responsibility is to grow our business through nurturing and empowering our teams to reach their full potential. There is rarely growth without change. By embracing change as an opportunity for growth and development, we can pave the way for organisational success and cultivate a culture of resilience and innovation.

In order to flex into an agile environment, change managers can provide support in four main ways.

Coaches are people who've gone before and have substantial experience. They know things. It may have taken you long hours across several weekends to locate and fix a noise in your car engine, but now you know how to do it - it seems easy. Imagine if your neighbour had known how to fix your engine and you could have just learned it from them? What would it have been worth to you?

Change management is a dynamic field that plays a pivotal role in navigating organisational transformations. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting out, honing your skills and pursuing a career in change management offers a rewarding opportunity to drive positive change and foster productive organisational cultures.

To build change maturity at an enterprise level, organisations need to move through their paces. From having change management scattered around isolated projects, organisations need to build standards, build competency and ensure that change management is a requirement for new projects.

The role of a Change Sponsor can be a challenging one, as is having a Change Sponsor understand why their active involvement is essential in bringing about effective change. We look at why just hiring a Change Manager is not enough to get the job done and why the involvement of the Change Sponsor is essential. It all comes down to roles.

One of the most resistant cultures I've worked with was also where I had one of the most satisfying conversations about sustainability. It was a rainmaker culture.

Gaining support from managers and supervisors during change is a fundamental role of a change manager. We need people at all levels of the change to accept it, engage with it and adopt it. But we need more from leaders. We're really asking people leaders to model their acceptance publicly of something they don't have a great deal of control over. For some leaders this can feel like over-promising and is a risk they may shy away from taking.

Large-scale change management inevitably involves technology implementations. The technical teams are very often resourced with expert...

Most of us accept that the world of work is constantly changing. But I was thinking about how the wider world is also constantly in flux,...

When a new change manager begins an engagement, it's common for business leaders to immediately jump to discussions about training. It's an instinctive response, an attempt to grab hold of a tangible solution to an abstract problem. This is the change training myth: the belief that a complex organisational change can be solved by simply providing a training course.

The Real Job of a Change Manager When asked, "What do you do?", the role of a Change Manager is often misunderstood. Many people think...

When organisations push change too far, their employees may start to show specific signs of distress. What was once enthusiasm for a new initiative may be replaced by indifference, apathy, and disengagement. Debates about a workplace change can give way to weariness, cynicism, and complaints, signalling that your organisation has hit a point of change saturation.

In business, understanding and delighting customers is an ongoing challenge. A positive customer experience (CX) has become a primary differentiator for businesses. Effective change management is the key to navigating this challenge, allowing organisations to adapt and improve smoothly while consistently delivering an exceptional CX.

Understanding that the success of one stakeholder contributes to the success of all is a paradigm shift that benefits everyone. A rising tide lifts all boats, and by fostering an environment of shared success, we amplify the impact of our efforts. Becoming an advocate means creating a culture of support. This culture encourages open communication, collaboration, and genuine concern for the well-being of each stakeholder, which leads to increased morale and productivity.

The size and make up of your change management team is an important consideration for getting the change work done smoothly.

Communications is a discipline and profession in its own right, but many projects combine the two functions. This makes it crucial to keep focusing on and improving the key area of overlap: change communications.

Are you looking to improve the success of your next project? If you've ever found yourself asking, "What would we do differently next time?" after a project wraps up, you're not alone. Common wisdom and wide-scale studies repeatedly point to the same key areas for improvement in post-implementation reviews.