In today’s business environment, with the rapid speed of business advancements, economic and political change, the ability to effectively deliver change cannot be underestimated.
Nine Feet Tall were delighted to attend the 2017 Cranfield University Alumni Conference, and we are pleased to share with you our key takeaways from the conference, particularly inspired by Baroness Barbara Young’s keynote presentation ‘Up for Change’.
We took three key lessons from the conference. These were all regarding how to successfully lead change and promote change as an opportunity, and not a threat.
- Bottom up strategy development
There is great value to be harnessed in developing and building your strategy from the bottom up, and getting wider investment from your organisation. You should avoid presenting the strategy to your organisation, and selling or imposing the strategy onto your team. Instead you should collaboratively work together to build a strategy, resulting in empowered and aligned teams.
At Nine Feet Tall we are certainly proponents of this approach, as we annually hold a strategy day where we develop and fine tune our organisational strategy as an entire team.
- Manage the cynics and protect your champions
Human enthusiasm is a powerful tool for change. In order to utilise this tool, you must be proactive and engage with your organisation by both managing the cynics and empowering your champions. A priority for achieving successful change should be to critically identify how to hold onto, and motivate, champions of change. Cynics pose a threat and should be identified early on. By monitoring them closely, you should hopefully ensure their negative attitude is isolated and does not influence the wider organisation’s attitude towards change.
- The ‘sheep dip’ approach to support effective change
Regardless of the organisation’s size, you should always establish a set of common values and language, ensuring that all your team go through this process. This is the cultural baseline upon which you can set people free to implement change. You should not solely rely on this approach however. Make sure you take the time to develop a customised training and development programme for each member of your organisation, which will run alongside other change initiatives.
