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Is Your Leadership Team Dedicating Resources for Change? 4 Lessons Every Executive Should Consider. (Part 2 of 4)

August 12, 2016 By Alex Kosnik Leave a Comment

The link between Change Sponsor and Change Management Team…Part 2 of 4 in my blog series about Change Leadership Team Readiness.

Welcome to Part 2 of my 4-part blog on Change Leadership Team Readiness. I’m focusing here on that link between a motivated change sponsor and her or his team of drivers. It can easily be taken for granted that functional leaders know how to manage change.  So how can a sponsor, who has invested budget, time, effort and credibility into the change, be assured that the team is capable?

Chnge Implementation hoursBig Lesson 2: Resources…Gauge
your change leaders’
willingness to dedicate hours and budget for change implementation. 

 

Best practice has shown that functional leaders need to allocate adequate people power onto change teams, with appropriate budgeting to cover their efforts. They also need to plan for contingencies.

It’s far easier for a function leaders to commit resources to a change initiative when enabling supports have been provided from above, or have been sanctioned for use by the top change sponsor.  This enabling can take the form of an actual budget allowance to cover hours dedicated to the change project (if applicable), or a relaxation of normal metrics that could allow a change leader to dedicate all or a portion of employees hours that might be needed, to the change project.Change Implementation budget

Sometimes, the decision belongs to the functional leader on whether to dedicate staff to the effort. In this instance, a change sponsor can learn a lot by just watching, and then asking. What the functional leader does can be very telltale and could signal a strength, or a risk.

Change Team QuestionsHere are a set of questions the sponsor should ask the change team leader at this point in implementation planning:

If the change leader (function leader) chose not to dedicate significant change team employee hours (>50% FTE) to the change:

  • Have you conducted a realistic evaluation of the effort required to make your population ready for the change? Have you also evaluated what effort will be needed to support the change during and after implementation?
  • Have you compared your findings with those of your change leader peers on my team? How do they stack up?
  • Have you identified the change implementation risks in your function?
  • What contingencies have you put in place to address these potential risks?

And finally…

  • Do you claim full responsibility for the initiative’s outcomes in your area?

If the change leader (function leader) did in fact dedicate >50% of change team members’ time to the project, the questions are fewer:

  • Did you base your allocation on a good assessment of the effort needed to accomplish the change?
  • Have you identified the change implementation risks in your function?
  • What contingencies have you put in place to address these potential risks?

While the nature of these questions may seem counter to effective delegation – and perhaps even intrusive – they represent key insight moments for both the sponsor and the functional leader. Of course, the sponsor always retains the right to mandate the dedication of resources to help avoid risk. But if she or he – and the organization – can stomach the risks, holding back and just asking questions brings a ton of value.

Look out for part 3 of this 4-part blog series, on Sustaining Change.

AlexKosnik1About Alexander Kosnik of Onward Executive Coaching LLC: Alexander Kosnik is the Principal and Founder of Onward Executive Coaching, a coaching practice dedicated to supporting leaders and their teams with career, growth and development, and change management-related initiatives. He brings twenty years of experience with leaders and change in five continents. Visit OnwardExecutiveCoaching.com for more information.

Filed Under: Change Management Coaching, Leadership Team Coaching Tagged With: change coaching, change implementation, change implementation pitfalls, change leaders, change leadership, change management coaching, change management team, change program office, change sponsor, change team, change team coaching, coaching for change, coaching for leadership, coaching leaders, consulting coaching, executive coaching consultancy, leadership alignment, leadership coaches, leadership coaching, making change work

Is Your Leadership Team Ready to Drive Major Change? 4 Lessons Every Executive Should Consider. (Part 1 of 4)

August 11, 2016 By Alex Kosnik Leave a Comment

Change LeadersIn the twenty years I’ve been involved in change management and team coaching, I’ve seen great transformation successes and dismal failures.  Almost anyone in the change business has seen them, and they depend on a variety of factors. I always took time to analyze and process what I saw, and the exercise has brought me some useful insights.

I focus a great deal on leadership teams and how they approach certain goals, including business transformation and change programs. For a critical change program to be launched, the sponsoring executive needs not only a well-placed leadership team (role and visibility in the company), but also needs clarity on their capabilities, understanding and alignment around the change.

A change leadership team often comprises VP or director-level leaders who oversee functions and key corporate processes.  At this driver level, one can expect to see deep skill and deep experience, but it’s not always in the area of leading change. Furthermore, the very human trait of overconfidence can act to mask important gaps in what I refer to as the Optimal Change Leader Profile, which will be the subject of a separate blog entry.

The link between Change Sponsor and Change Management TeamChange Sponsor

I’m focusing here on that link between a motivated change sponsor and her or his team of drivers. It can easily be taken for granted that functional leaders know how to manage change.  So how can a sponsor, who has invested budget, time, effort and credibility into the change, be assured that the team is capable?

There are four big lessons in leading change teams that I’ve derived from my experience.

Big Lesson 1: Uncover any gaps in the change team’s understanding and alignment around the change.

If the change leaders themselves cannot demonstrate knowledge depth, how can they demand it from – and model it for – their change teams?

A Change Program Office in charge of the effort, or some sort of centralized change team, will have (should have) already established a set of criteria for effective change championship among middle managers. These criteria can be generalized upward a notch for use at the senior leader level. They include things like level of fluency in the change methodology being used, ability to spot and deal with resistance, and ability to communicate convincingly with stakeholders about change in a  realistic way.

Change Team Questions  To gauge change leader understanding, ask these questions:

  1. Can my leaders clearly relate what the reason and benefit of the change program are, with enthusiasm?
  2. Can they describe the change approach being used, not just a high level, but with examples that make sense to employees at the line level? And can they explain why it works?
  3. Can they share major milestones in the plan?
  4. Can they name key risks in the plan?
  5. Can they clearly describe the desired future state, again at a level that line folks will relate to?

Each leader should be able to answer these to the satisfaction of the key sponsor and the change program office.

Stay tuned for my next blog about Leadership Teams and Change – Big Lesson 2: Resources.

 

Executive Team Coach

About Alexander Kosnik of Onward Executive Coaching LLC: Alexander Kosnik is the Principal and Founder of Onward Executive Coaching, a coaching practice dedicated to supporting leaders and their teams with career, growth and development, and change management-related initiatives. He brings twenty years of experience with leaders and change in five continents. Visit OnwardExecutiveCoaching.com for more information.

Filed Under: Change Management Coaching, Leadership Team Coaching Tagged With: change coaching, change implementation, change implementation pitfalls, change leaders, change leadership, change management coaching, change management team, change program office, change sponsor, change team, change team coaching, coaching for change, coaching for leadership, coaching leaders, consulting coaching, e, ecutive coaching consultancy, leadership alignment, leadership coaches, leadership coaching, making change work

What’s in a useful Executive Coaching Blog?

June 22, 2016 By Alex Kosnik Leave a Comment

How would you determine the value of executive coaching blogs? Onward Executive Coaching crop

When a new coaching firm publishes its initial blog you might expect to read about how the firm came to be, about a client experience, or even about the principal coach. These are all quite typical – believe us, we’ve done the research. This one aims to be different however. Our opening topic is something even more basic

Executive Coaching BLOGS, in general.

We’d like to start with a distinction between what coaching website audiences may be used to, and what they really deserve. We’ve discussed what’s commonly out there. Our plan is to deliver something different from the start: value to our visitors, not filler.  Too many coaching firms blog just to increase name recognition and to get picked up by search engines. These are sound business practices, but in the course of gaining the reader’s mindshare, a lot can be overlooked.

Too often a blog entry communicates: “Hey – I like this article. You should read it,” or “In my humble opinion, this is what I think about topic X”.  When drivel gets blogged, readers end up sifting and pecking to find the kernels they can actually use, unsure of how far they’ll need to dig, or how many clicks and articles away they are from reliable stats, facts, and useful data.

   Executive Coaching Blog hand  The content behind the headline has to be worth the click.

There should be something useful and within easy reach for the reader when opened…not just an opinion on someone else’s work or a series of other links. I want you to be rewarded for your click so you keep coming back.

What can you expect from the Onward Executive Coaching Blog?

  • Research. You’ll be pointed to good, peer-reviewed research. It’s everywhere, in journals, business publications and independent studies.
  • Facts. We’ll share hard data with you on the workplace and how coaching relates to it.
  • Trends. Industries, and the services and competencies that cater to them, are constantly evolving. We’ll bring them to you as best we can.
  • Reliable insight. Not off the cuff opinions or untested claims. Expect support for the insights we share.
  • Information you can USE. Period.

The goal of an executive coach should be to bring value. And if you feel one of our blog posts doesn’t deliver that, we want to hear about it. Further, we invite you to let me know what interests you about executive coaching and how it relates to your job role, your industry or your professional career, so we can publish even more useful entries, not drivel.

The value of executive coaching blogs is in provoking insight, and we aim to do that here!

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Filed Under: Cross-industry general coaching

Blogs Entries You Can Use! Coming Soon

April 19, 2016 By

Come back soon for new blog posts!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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