The Key To Your Team Adopting New Ways of Working

“Organizations do not change; people do.”

~ PROSCI, Change Manaagement experts

If you are making changes in your business, big or small, there are a few things your team needs to do to make the shift to the new way of working.

It should be simple, right? It’s a no-brainer for you, so why are they not on board yet?

If you are ‘telling’ them what to do and aren’t ‘doing it’, stop doing that right now.

Your team is a collective of individuals; to help the team adopt the changes you want to make, you need to allow them to find their ‘why’. Every teammate will set the pace on the speed at which they will ‘change’. Your job here is to inform, educate and observe what they need to find it.

If you have any detractors in your team, you might find it takes longer to jump on the bus. While our instinct is to write off the negative nelly or nellies in the team, seek to understand what drives them and engage them as part of your change army to provide a practical voice on what’s needed to assess the risk, integrate and sustain the changes. Assess whether they need to be heard vs. being a destructive force.

As a coach and a change management professional, one of the tools I use to help build awareness with their teams is the ADKAR model.

ADKAR was created by change management experts PROSCI who describe the change as “a process, not an event”. It is about the shift an individual makes from the current state to the future state, enabling a transitional period.

However, it’s not as simple as switching on a light; it takes an investment of your time and effort to enable it to happen, which should be factored into your project plan.

Foundational to the shift is good communication with solid engagement.

What does ADKAR mean?

Awareness (the need for change / the ‘why’)

Desire (the desire to support the change)

Knowledge (the knowledge of how to change)

Ability (to demonstrate the skills and behaviours)

Reinforcement (to make the change stick)

Using this framework will create the space to help you understand what your people need right now to embrace the changes you want and need to make. Remember, you can’t do it alone.

Would you like to learn how this could help you?

Jump on a call with me to learn how you can use this to support your team’s shift from the old way to the new way. Book a call here.

Download a copy of the 5 building blocks of transformational change infographic now.