How to Be Direct and Explicit When Reframing Others
(2) CommentsIn this series, I’ve been describing the skills required (there are five of them) to reframe a person’s mindset during a change initiative. In this post, I’ll talk about the final skill.
Reframing Skill #5: The Willingness to Confront
For many change facilitators, this final skill is the most difficult part of the reframing process. Being direct and explicit with other people by challenging their way of looking at the world is risky, both personally and professionally. People can become trapped in their existing perspectives and lose their ability to adapt to important changes. Most people tend to believe only what they see, but see only what they believe exists.
Sometimes, the only way to effect movement from the status quo is to “confront” people more
ChangeThinking.net
©2011 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
Making Commitments—Do You Know Your Limits?
“The good fellow to everyone is a good friend to no one.” ~Jewish Proverb
Transformational change generates an exhilarating, fast-paced environment where key people seek, and are often asked to take on, many demanding tasks. The sum of these tasks can sometimes push everyone past their capacity to meet commitments. The result is failure to deliver what was agreed to. This often means realization does not materialize, which is unacceptable for business-imperative initiatives.
This is no less true for us as professional change facilitators than it is for sponsors, targets, or advocates. In fact, given that our role is often to serve at the epicenter of an initiative’s activity, we are particularly vulnerable more
ChangeThinking.net
©2011 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
The Eight Stages of Building Commitment
(2) CommentsIn the early ’80s, while involved in research to identify patterns of change-related success and failure, I learned that the winners and losers in this arena demonstrated very different levels of resolve. As a result, I developed the following model, which describes how and when people become committed to major new organizational requirements. (Click here to download a printable worksheet of the Commitment Model to help you identify a person’s or group’s level of commitment.) more
ChangeThinking.net
©2011 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
Momentum and Critical Mass
In my last post, I talked about redirecting energy during a transformational change from protecting “the way things are” toward addressing the ambiguities and confusion that occur in the shift. In this context, momentum refers to the forward motion of energy through the role sequence (advocate to initiating sponsor to primary sustaining sponsors to local sustaining sponsors to targets) toward realization of the change. Regardless of which roles are involved in the energy transfer at any given time, the presence of strong momentum dramatically increases the chances for realization results. Alternatively, transfers that produce no more than moderate momentum can stall initiatives or compromise installation outcomes.
Energy transfers can result in a strong, moderate, or weak momentum exchange, which means that merely passing energy through the role sequence is not enough. Momentum must reach a certain magnitude within each person in the chain to provide the level of energy needed to ultimately achieve true realization results. When we achieve this degree of energy strength, it means the person on the receiving end of the transfer has become fully committed to the endeavor’s success. more
ChangeThinking.net
©2011 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
Are We There Yet?
“When you’re that successful, things have a momentum, and at a certain point you can’t really tell whether you have created the momentum or it’s creating you.” ~ Annie Lennox
Some of the questions we are asked by clients are so straightforward (Is resistance a bad thing? Can we realize our objectives despite lousy sponsorship?) that there isn’t much room for insightful responses. But some questions provide opportunities to take clients into more sophisticated space. Of course, we have to be prepared for these deeper dives. Based on the questions being posed, some of us are primed and ready to go, some not. more
ChangeThinking.net
©2011 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
Use Mindset and Behavior Patterns to Your Advantage
(2) Comments
Once you understand that a specific mindset and its associated behaviors can either facilitate or impede success, you have a level of insight that can be truly invaluable to a sponsor who is less familiar with these kinds of change dynamics.
Mindsets are made up of frames of reference (the ways individuals make sense of situations) that lead to the formation of priorities (the relative importance of various options). Shared mindsets within an organization serve as the foundations of culture and ultimately lead to common patterns of behavior.
Successful change requires a specific mindset that is shared among key players as they perform their respective roles. This “success mindset” reflects the more
ChangeThinking.net
©2010 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
How Influential Can a Change Agent Be?
“Our distrust is very expensive.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sponsor-agent relationship is so important that just about everything we can hope to accomplish hinges on it. Without that relationship, our knowledge and skills are underutilized, poorly allocated, or worse, not called on at all.
It’s true that we work with and support the targets of change initiatives. We also work with advocates who want change but don’t have the ability to make it happen on their own, as well as with other internal or external agents. While our relationships with people in these roles are necessary and valuable, our key function is more
ChangeThinking.net
©2010 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
Understanding the Key Roles in Significant Change
(1) CommentI hope you had a chance to read the series I just finished on the characteristics of resilient people and teams. Resilience is crucial for individuals and groups dealing with the stresses of change.
Now I’m going to pick up again with the sponsor-agent relationship, building on two previous series, sponsorship and agents. First, though, more
ChangeThinking.net
©2010 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
Ways Change Agents Can Help Sponsors
As I wrote in my last post, even sponsors with lots of experience leading difficult transitions need the help of skilled change practitioners.
Sponsors are most effective when we help them:
Have a clear definition of the change. Effective sponsors must see the desired state clearly and understand the overall intent.
Recognize and express their dissatisfaction with the present state. Successful sponsors need to be keenly aware that the organization cannot afford to fail at the change; they have to be tenacious about fully realizing the initiative’s objectives and communicate effectively to the organization. more
ChangeThinking.net
©2010 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
When You Need to Confront a Sponsor
So here we are with all this knowledge (see my three previous posts) about what sponsorship is, its crucial role in realizing change objectives, and how it can be effectively applied and yet we find ourselves sometimes not utilizing what we know.
How is it possible that seasoned practitioners, well versed in the theory of sponsorship and its practical application, are reluctant to leverage this information?
Here are some examples of situations when sponsors (or agents and advocates) need to be confronted by us as change practitioners: more
ChangeThinking.net
©2009 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
