Push Organizational Change to the Front Lines

Our Advice

Critical Insight

• The majority of organizations fail to properly utilize their managers as change leaders. Managers and supervisors largely lack the skills, training, and tools they need to competently transition their teams through to the future state.
• Managers play a dual role in change management: they are both subject to the change and change leaders. As subjects to the change, they need to understand the change and reconcile what it means to their role before they can confidently coach and lead their teams. Statistics show that a failure to properly prepare managers for a change leads to them becoming one of the biggest sources of resistance on change initiatives.

Impact and Result

• Get managers on board with the change. Managers are both impacted by changes and they impact those changes. Before managers and supervisors can lead a change, they first need to come to terms with how change impacts them. Use the template activities in this research to help managers accept the change and lead it.
• Provide managers with the tools they need to deal with frontline resistance and communicate change progress. This research comes with a purpose-built change management tool to help frontline managers proactively think through change impacts to their teams and prepare communication and coaching plans accordingly.
• Create a symbiotic relationship between change managers and frontline managers. To reach individuals on the front lines, change management benefits from open lines of communication between change managers and people managers. The tools and templates in this research will help foster these ongoing lines of communication.