Large organizational changes can often have ripples throughout all areas of operations, impacting employees, customers, and the community. To avoid pitfalls and ensure success, it’s vital to form a Change Management (CM) team. This team can serve as ambassadors to impacted stakeholder groups, identifying potential pain points from the change, and facilitating communication across all levels.
To form a CM team, you’ll need to determine the purpose and objectives of the team, develop your criteria for selecting team members, assess the time commitment and then recruit people to fill the necessary CM roles. This article covers important considerations for each of these steps.
Defining Team Purpose and Objectives
Start out with a clear idea of the purpose and objectives of your CM team before you invite anyone to join. It may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this step gets overlooked! Setting your purpose and objectives at the start will help you choose the best people for the CM roles, and allow potential team members to know what is needed of them. Leaving objectives hazy can lead to problems down the line, as the team is confused by what they’re meant to accomplish, or resentful when the project turns out to be a bigger commitment than they expected.
Consider what you see as the role of this team. Is it primarily to facilitate communication and raise concerns? Or will the team have a certain amount of authority to influence the direction of the change and how it is implemented?
Developing Criteria for Change Management Team Members
Just like with any position your organization would hire for, you want to think about the ideal candidate for the roles on your CM team. What skills, traits, and lived experiences will be most beneficial to ensure that you understand the potential impact of the change and can work towards a smooth implementation?
The members of your team should be representative of your organization and external stakeholders. While it may not be practical to include external stakeholders in all of the team’s activities, inviting them to participate in discussions and provide feedback may help the team have a broader view of the impact of the change.
You’ll want to fill your change management roles with creative thinkers with strong emotional intelligence and communication skills. Considering how best to implement a change and what impact it will have requires a lot of envisioning, planning, imagination, and empathy. Members of the CM team must be able to work together collaboratively. They must be willing to set aside their own personal goals for the project in order to focus on the overall success of the change.
Members of the team will need to be comfortable not only expressing their own ideas, but speaking to others in the company (and possibly community members). Change management requires a lot of two-way communication, and the CM team will be a primary conduit for this. Often, they will have to communicate other peoples’ ideas clearly, serving as a spokesperson for teams or communities that are impacted by the change. They will need to be confident in their ability to share concerns, speak difficult truths, and both give and receive feedback.
Estimating Time Commitment
It’s important to give potential team members an accurate idea of the time commitment needed to participate. Ideally, your organization will work with the team members and their managers in order to shift their work load and/or deadlines in order to allow them to participate without working overtime.
When estimating the time commitment for the CM team, consider the following elements:
- The timeline for the project.
- How often the team will need to meet, and how long those meetings will be.
- Time spent researching, gathering information, meeting with external stakeholders or consultants, analyzing data, and other “homework”.
- Time spent preparing presentations and giving them at meetings.
- Additional time that may be needed for issues that arise unexpectedly.
- Whether group membership will change at different stages of the project.
Inviting and Selecting Members
It’s up to you whether to invite specific employees to participate in your CM team or to treat it more like a job opening and allow anyone in your organization to volunteer. Each of these approaches has its benefits and drawbacks. Making it a more open process may feel more inclusive to employees, however it is more time consuming to manage. Sometimes a combination approach can be effective where you have a call for applications and talk to specific people that you feel are ideal candidates about applying.
Your invitation should provide clear information on how to join the team. At a minimum include:
- The purpose and objectives of the team
- Criteria for membership
- Expected time commitment, including expected hours on a monthly basis and planned duration of project
If you opt to invite specific team members who you already identified as ideal candidates, you can ask them to simply respond with a yes or no. Don’t forget to coordinate with their managers too!
If you opt to open it up for anyone within the company (or within certain roles) to apply, consider setting up a website or survey-style form for applications. When reviewing applications, keep in mind the requirements that you set earlier. Ensure that you recruit a team with the diversity, creativity, and emotional intelligence necessary for a successful change management team. Including a section for manager sign-off may also allow you to streamline the process.
Whether using an application or direct invitation process, be sure to provide a clear timeline on next steps. This will allow everyone to know whether they need to change their schedule in order to participate.
Selecting the Team is Only the Beginning
Once you’ve selected and established your CM team, the work has only begun. Over the next months, we’ll continue to share our tried-and-true tips for managing change. Follow us to make sure you never miss a relevant update.