A Change Management Plan that only takes five minute, I have to see that!

In the next five minutes, you will find out how easy it is to focus your employees on your chosen communication messages and in doing so create passion for your vision.

The good news is that you have just identified your business priorities; it is now time to get serious about your leadership goals, take five minutes to build a change management plan from your strategy and start creating employee passion.

Read on to discover how easy it is to add leadership to your Management by Walking Around, start by choosing the right messages for the right people, and you will build credibility with your people.

How to develop a Change Management Plan in 5 Minutes

Using this guide, follow the 3 proven steps and develop a plan for your Management by Walking Around aligned to your business priorities.

Our 3 Proven Steps

• Target one business priority
• Identify the power structures in your business
• Build your Plan

Getting started

Picking a communication priority and sub priority

Remember you need to be persistent, so you may want to select a business priority that you can stick with. This may not be the “noisiest issue” in your business today – your business may have had an incident where a staff member gave poor service to a customer, this incident does not make it a priority to focus your Management by Walking Around on customer service.

You should now have a set of business priorities developed from your strategy. (Click here if you don’t) 

It is also worth checking that your employees will benefit from you regularly reinforcing the priority with them before choosing one to start with.

For example:

Say one of your business priorities is improving quality, however your business has a newly appointed quality manager who is highly visible in your business. You may find that your employees are already getting regular messages on quality and, although improving quality is a priority, there is not a lot of benefit you can add. In this case don’t ignore quality just don’t make it your primary message.

How do you get the right message?

• What plans do you have for the next twelve months to action this priority?
• Do you have enough knowledge on the priority to speak knowledgeably on it?
• How big a difference will it make to your business to focus on this priority now?
• Are there others who are speaking to this priority in your business now?
• What is the culture of your business like currently?
• Do you have legislative issues associated with the priority?
  Example Occupational Health and Safety

You could use a matrix prioritisation system by applying weighting to each identified priority based on a range of criteria and calculating the most important activity to start with, however I have never seen anyone actually follow through and make a difference using this technique. You are better off selecting the priority that you are most passionate about.

Don’t fret too much over the starting point, if you don’t currently have a Management by Walking About plan then pick something you can stick with and read on.

Identifying the power structures in your business

Imagine you are going for a floor walk through your business and talk to people, are you going to make the mistake of talking to the people you like or get on with the most or are you going to talk to the people with the most influence?

Like it or not, (I don’t, however I have to accept it), if you are in a management position, the more senior you are the more your employees will value time with you and to some extent will consider time with you as recognition. This is true for when you are doing your Management by Walking Around and you should consider this in your change management plan.

Essentially, it is of upmost importance for you to talk to all employees about the same amount; however, the following people should get extra attention

• Occupational health and safety representatives
• Union representatives
• Employee’s who also carry training responsibilities
• Employees with influence
• Other special role?

Now you can put your change management plan together

Over the next twelve months you are going to add leadership to your Management by Walking Around and you are going to focus on (Here is an example for a sales environment)

Enter Your Key Priority