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You probably have a question buzzing in your head: why a Penguin? I promise you’ll find out in 3 minutes of reading.
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I realized it’s nice when something you learnt on your skin is actually confirmed by books and content you hadn’t heard of before. That’s what happened to me with Change Management: all the mistakes I did, all the learnings that came from those ones, are nicely described in a brilliant approach I discovered years later…
THE STEPS FOR CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO:
The Heart: Belief in the Change - create a climate for change, meaning creating a Sense of Urgency and building a Transformation team
The Head: Understand the Logic for change, demonstrate that it is possible with short term wins - engage and enable: pay attention to Communicating the Vision and Realize Quick Wins.
The Hands: Change the Habit by having people do it and practising the change until it becomes the “new Normal”.
Follow those steps (which you can eventually crumble in the 8 smallest ones, the chart below) and you’ll be more likely to successfully navigate your team through challenging the Status Quo.
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SO WHAT ABOUT THE PENGUIN?
The approach above is well described in “Our Iceberg is Melting”, by Kotter, using a brilliant story involving populations of penguins whose iceberg is melting.
What is funny is that I found out the same through my trial and error process, either with small or big Change Management implementations (from tactical Kaizens, to Strategic Projects, to wider Business Transformations).
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SO…READY TO GO???? BUILD TRUST FIRST!
Well, you would still probably be missing a piece: I was actually taught something more by my mistakes. In step 0, start by listening, and start by creating trust with people.
Here’s an example from my past: years ago I was tasked to facilitate the transformation of planning processes at an Aftermarket Service Workshop in France, as at that time I worked for an Industrial Goods Manufacturer. I had never been there, nor met the local manager before. And he was “my man”, the process owner for the process improvement to come.
As I felt out of sync with him, I jumped on a plane and got there. That day a technician of his crew was out for sickness: his team of 7 people was really short, the manager was so busy we didn’t even have time to talk about the initiative!
I abruptly felt the mess when the phone rung: an angry customer shouted his spare parts hadn’t been delivered yet that morning.
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I offered to drive the van and deliver the spares: covering for crew shortage, that would have been a pressure release for the team and a patch for a Customer complaint.
That task wasn’t probably on my job description, and neither it was planned.
But that was the Game Changer for the process transformation next to come!
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