Our friend Denise La Mere is back with another guest blog, this time on the importance of sponsorship. If you would like to hear more from Denise, she is leading a workshop on February 23 on how to deal with difficult people. You can learn more about the workshop here.
I’m not a magician or a wizard. I don’t have a cloak, a wand, or a crystal ball. If I could predict the future, I’d be buying lottery tickets. While I don’t have ESP, experience has given me the uncanny ability to predict the likelihood of success or failure on change efforts – at the individual, team, and organizational level.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I like to get a positive return on my investments – whether I’m talking about my 401(k) or the $100 I somehow spend on toilet paper and diet soda at my friendly local discount store every other week. Not surprisingly, companies and their shareholders operate under a similar point of view. If they spend a big chunk of change (often in the millions of dollars) on a new IT system, process improvement initiative, or even on facility improvements, companies aren’t going to write the check if they haven’t been convinced that this investment is going to pay off.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The leading cause of “change failure” isn’t lousy technology, rotten training, or change-resistant employees. In his 2008 book, A Sense of Urgency, Harvard Business School professor and author John Kotter writes about why organizational transformation efforts fail. He cites eight major errors that cause transformation efforts to derail – and the common denominator in all eight critical errors is sponsorship.
Now, it’s hard to argue that sponsorship is a critical success factor. And yet, in my experience, most large-scale change efforts devote the majority of their change efforts – communication, training, readiness/measurement, and organizational design – not on sponsors but on the end users. We fret and worry so much about end-user adoption that we often miss the boat on sponsorship.
Sponsorship is a big word, first of all, and it smells a little bit like corporate mumbo jumbo. It’s not a term I bandy about at cocktail parties, for example. In change management vernacular, sponsorship and leadership are sometimes used synonymously to refer to people whose names occupy boxes on the top of the org charts. Sponsors are the people who gave you the approval to start whatever change it is you’re working on, and they are usually the folks who foot the bill. Sponsorship goes beyond executive row, though. From a change management perspective, I consider a sponsor to be anyone who manages employees who will be directly affected by the change . . . all the way up to the very tippy top of the org chart.
Why are sponsors so critical to the change effort? Consider this. All those employees who are directly impacted by what’s changing probably don’t report to you. Their day jobs and their performance are managed by someone else – and most employees try to keep the boss happy at all costs. These managers can undermine a change effort in what they say, do and reinforce on a daily basis. Let me give you a real-life example.
A major retail company recently launched new tools to streamline their merchandising process. Simply put, they want to be able to identify customer preferences and then use this information to create differentiated, customer-appropriate and profitable assortments in their stores. If customers in Minneapolis like to buy mittens and customers in St. Cloud prefer gloves, this tool will help make sure that Minneapolis stores carry the right selection of mittens while St. Cloud stores carry the right selection of gloves.
The project team did their change management homework. They talked about the business case for change. They provided end-user training. They created job aids and held open computer lab sessions to help employees work through problems. They held brown-bag lunches, solicited employee feedback and guess what? Three weeks post-go live, employees were continuing to do their jobs exactly the way they did before the company spent umpteen thousand dollars on a new assortment planning tool.
The project team was flummoxed. They couldn’t figure out where they’d gone wrong. And when they stopped being confused, they started to get really, really angry. (Side note: there is nothing more dangerous than a project team that begins to hate the end-user. ) In a fit of desperation, they stormed my office and said, “Where did we go wrong?”
This project team did an excellent job preparing end users to use the new system, and I give them high marks for the training and communication they developed. I went out and talked to end-users and asked them if they were using the new system and if not, why. Guess what? The number one reason employees weren’t using the new system wasn’t because they didn’t know how. They weren’t using the new system because their direct managers were asking them to do things the old way – not to be subversive, not to waste time and money, but because their managers didn’t understand how the new system worked or what was required from them as sponsors to support it.
When implementing a major change effort, it’s important that you know who your sponsors are. Once you’ve identified them, it’s critical that you engage sponsors early and often. Not only do sponsors need to understand the change you’re implementing, they also need to understand how to lead and manage others through a change. They need to say the right things, do the right things, and reinforce the right things. Sponsors have different needs than end-users – and they can make or break your change effort. If you aren’t spending 50% of your change management time and effort on sponsorship engagement and measurement . . . you may be setting yourself up for disappointment. If you devote the time and energy to sponsors, you’ll be able to pull a rabbit out of your hat in the shape of improved end-user adoption and return on investment.
Denise La Mere is a certified Strengths Coach with 15 years of human resources, executive coaching, process improvement, mergers & acquisitions, and organizational change experience, Denise has worked with Fortune 1000 companies in the hospitality, transportation, retail and manufacturing sectors. She believes that people are the key to sustained business success and is passionate about improving employee engagement through systems, processes, and leadership efforts.
