How do you make sure your stakeholders are really on board with what you are proposing, not just making the right noises?

This week in my Bikram Yoga class (Yoga in a room heated to 40 degrees for those who haven’t had the pleasure…) the teacher said two things that made me think about the parallels between organisational change and the changes coming from yoga.
Firstly she said:
In yoga, the changes are slow and deep. You may notice [...]

During any change initiative there are two processes at work – the process the organisation is going through, and the process each individual will go through
At any time a leader should be able to ascertain where their team members are in terms of stages of their personal change, and the stage the organisation is at [...]

Making a change is easy. Working through the transition is the hard part.

We can distinguish the change itself from transition required to make the change effective and embed it:

The change itself is the day the new activity commences or the change event takes place.
Transition encompasses all the people, process, system and customer impacts that need [...]

If you needed any more convincing that doing a job that only mildly holds your interest is a waste of your precious time, then here it is….
Boredom shortens your lifespan.

After studing 7000 British civil servants over 25 years, scientists concluded:

people who complain of boredom were more likely to die young
those with high levels of tedium [...]

Middle tier managers have the worst of both worlds when it comes to organisational change: maximum expectations from above (with insufficient support), and maximum chaos from below if the change is not widely understood, poorly managed, and impacts people’s worlds (doesn’t it always?). More needs to be invested so they can do better than cope with change

Meanginful work is a right not a luxury. Companies can do plenty to improve the work experience for their employees. Individuals can do a lot to improve their own working lives. Just do it I say.

How many times do we expect our people to understand or be across a change because they were sent the details in an explanatory email.
Sure – email is a convenient form of communication. Its fast, we can reach a lot of people,  and we can attach content like there’s no tomorrow. And once we hit the [...]

If you haven’t discovered www.slideshare.net yet I recommend you take a look.
For any users or facilitators of The 6-Hat thinking process, this one page mind map is a treasure.  I’ll share more as I find them.
6-Hats Mindmap

As business professionals, we spend lots of our time interacting with all sorts of people – clients, suppliers, consultants etc. Our interactions can be in person, on the telephone, by email or even these days, by sms.
If you do some reading on the subject, you’ll quickly find the predominant school of thought is that all [...]