Building and maintaining strong relationships with people (both customers and friends) is a passion of mine. As such, I thought it would be valuable to share some best practices that help get companies to the next level in organizational health and ultimately enable healthy change management.
The goal is to augment existing company strengths with human relational skills that can open the door to lasting changes. People must respect you and believe that you care about their problems before they will listen to you and eventually trust you. Said another way, if your customers believe you are the smartest person in the room but they do not respect and trust you, they will not listen to you and will be highly change resistant.
Stepping back, it’s important to realize that something has happened with your client that has caused them to reach out and pay you to help them. Often clients and partners are in a (real or perceived) crisis situation, brought upon, perhaps, by falling sales, executive board mandates, or perceived competitive disadvantages. They are on the Change Continuum (see figure below) somewhere and our objective is to move each organization further to the right along the Change Continuum.
So, they know they need to change something.
However, change is hard.
Companies that ask for help and hire me are often very successful in their industries already. They have developed internal processes and hired people based upon some understanding of their market and history - and their processes have worked until they suddenly they don’t. Long term change starts by first understanding how the company has arrived at its current state and where each key stakeholder fits (or doesn’t) into the current system.
Please notice that I said “long term change” - the key here is that the company both changes today and learned the right practices to enable change in the future when the people, product or processes have to change again.
Please continue reading to learn the basic steps to follow for effective change management.