A thorough Change Management concept and team will decide the success or failure of any change.
Change Management is responsible for strengthening the willingness and ability of employees and managers to accept changes, and for reacting immediately and constructively to any resistance. The following four factors are the core for any successful Change Management:
- Change Leadership: Acceptance of change as a management task
Managers are usually directly unaffected by transformation activities. Instead, they often do not understand importance of and reason for these activities. Where such misunderstandings exist, the chance of successful transformation is minimal.
As change facilitators, M2P support your managers to assume their role as a change leaders and encourage them to unite to form a strong change coalition.
To do this we ensure your top managers understand the current and target situations and appreciate how the transformation affects each individual level within your team.
Furthermore, we will teach your managers how to assess and address the emotions and resistance your employees may present. Managers will learn how to apply different methods for specific issues, in turn increasing employee willingness to change by ensuring concerns are heard and dealt with. We will discuss solutions for optimal stakeholder communication to decipher how we can efficiently and appropriately communicate with different groups and determine how best to integrate them regularly into the change process.
- Change Design: Development of change
The need for change measures and activities often only becomes truly visible once the implementation of transformation projects is underway. Resistance becomes increasingly noticeable requiring far more effort to successfully complete implementation than originally expected.
As change facilitators, M2P will support you to actively and proactively implement appropriate change measures before such resistance can arise. These measures will be meticulously planned to ensure they are available at the appropriate time and are in suitable formats for the affected stakeholders.
By applying proven methods (e.g. stakeholder and change impact analysis), we will identify specific areas where action will be necessary, derive the appropriate change measures, and translate these measures into a structured change plan or “Change Design”. This Change Design will be continuously reviewed, adapted, and implemented accordingly to ensure it remains relevant for the current situation and can tackle any new challenges that your project may face.
- Change Story: Presentation of change
All transformation projects have triggers and goals, both of which are rarely communicated in a coherent, understandable manner. Instead, they are overcomplicated by confusing facts to which individual target groups cannot relate. Consequently the need for change is not understood, causing massive, often irreconcilable, resistance amongst employees, ultimately causing projects to fail.
To ensure your project is understood by all stakeholders, M2P develops a change story that provides the relevant facts whilst taking into account the varying emotions of individual target groups. We ensure all critical points, concerns, and achievements are addressed and communicated to make individuals feel a part of the development.
We work in close cooperation with your transformation project team, managers, and selected employees to contemplate the “why”, “where to”, and “how” of change that may be posed by individual target groups. Based on this, we can develop core messages tailored to individual needs to ensure the change is unanimously understood and experienced as both meaningful and necessary.
- Communicate & Participate:
Transformation of concept into a tangible change
Transformation projects often fail due to a lack of employee and manager acceptance.
To gain the support of every individual, we use the conclusive change story and stakeholder-oriented change design to create and actively implement an effective communication and participation concept.
M2P use various information, communication, and participation formats depending on how important the effect of a change measure is. The stakeholders who are most impacted by the transformation project will require a highly effective change measure to support implementation. These groups will require maximum communication and direct participation compared to other groups where the impact may be less.
Together, we will develop and execute a thorough and tailored communication and participation concept. In doing so, we will design appropriate formats, plan and prepare forums, and moderate events including workshops and training. These tailored actions will ensure no individual falls behind and your company embraces transformation as a unit.
These four factors form the basis of our consulting service; we act as change facilitators to guide you through the inevitable changes that will arise during your transformation project. By exploiting our many years of methodological Change Management experience alongside our proven expertise in the transport sector, we know how to establish a successful Change Management strategy tailored to your organisation to ensure your project does not fall at the last hurdle.
