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.

“The new frontier is in trust and referrals,”  he reflects, and finding these key resources falls on systems, using a combination of tools and talents to locate the right person for the job. He claims in this world of social media, “people go to people they know,” in what he refers to as “a trusted economic network.”

We’ve worked very hard to make the Collaborative Network a valuable resource for both our clients and consultants, and this video gives us some better terminology to put our arms around what we’ve built.

We’d like to think that we do a good job of finding the “purple squirrels” as Grainger discusses in this attached video.

What do you think?

Reducing Hiring Risks With Social Networks

Please share with your network!

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Resume Writing Event Dec. 22 from 6 – 9 PM. Hosted by Gina Kellogg-Soleil, Founder and CEO of Monarch Leadership.

Gina has been writing resumes and cover letters for over 10 years, and has a great deal of professional experience that is a fantastic resource for those looking for work (see bio below). There are so many talented professionals out in the marketplace right now, and often times getting help with your resume is just what you need to land that next job.

During the event you will:

- See examples of great resumes that got results.

- Learn how to highlight your most marketable strengths.

- Write a great resume and cover letter using the buzz words employers look for.

Cost is $25 Event location: Monarch Leadership, 8120 Penn Ave. S, Bloomington Contact Gina at (612) 578-2750 to register.

Bio for Gina Kellogg-Soleil: Gina is the co-owner of Monarch Leadership – A training and development company. Gina has spent 14 years in leadership roles within organizations that include Caribou Coffee Company and Best Buy. She has led teams in training and development, business development, sales and retail operations, and serves on the Board of Directors of a non-profit organization. Gina has her BA in Communications and MA in Organizational Leadership. She is certified in Applied Leadership Studies, Supervisory Leadership Skills, Training Facilitation and Women in Leadership.

As consultants and small business owners, it’s really easy to get behind on a lot of the administrative pieces of our businesses; finances, marketing, operations, etc.   Once we reach that nirvana of regular projects and heaps of billable hours, the time we need to manage our own business seems to shrink into nothingness.

What’s a busy entrepreneur to do?

Here are some tools that will not only get your day-to-day operations back on track, but will give you invaluable data for planning and goal setting for years to come.

If you’re like me, you’re not exactly brimming with glee to balance your checkbook, track expenses, and manage a regular budget for both your home and business.  With Mint.com, I’ve actually come to enjoy these tasks.  Mint’s ability to track all your loans, bank accounts, credit cards, debts, and assets in one location takes a lot of the time and effort out of managing finances.  That, and its interactive graphs and tools provide you with a clear view of the current state, as well as the past and future trends of your finances.

Tracking project hours can be a real pain, but Paymo makes it easy.  Up to three people can use a single account for free to track all their tasks and hours spent on all of their projects.  All you need to do is setup your project tasks and hit the stop and start button as you work.  Tracking my time in this way has been immensely helpful for estimating and budgeting project time.

Find out how many people visit your site, where they come from, how long they stay, what they’re interested in on your site, what they’re not, how they found you, and a myriad of other things.  Google Analytics is a fast, easy, visual, and free way to gain insights about your customers and your marketing initiatives.

HootSuite is a one-stop-shop for social media management and tracking.  Who has time to login to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and their blog separately to send updates and posts?  HootSuite not only allows you to manage all these applications in one location, but also allows you to schedule future posts to be released at a later date – an extremely handy feature for social media management.

Regular use of these tools, and others, has enabled me to not only keep up with my day-to-day business operations, but has given me critical data for how to best invest my business’s time and money.

There’s much more that could be said and shared about these tools, but that’s all the space we should use for a humble blog post.  If you have any questions or would like to learn more, feel free to contact me at dustin@thelearningsmith.com.

Cheers,

-Dustin.

Dustin Ellison is a tech/internet entrepreneur who specializes in marrying practical business application to internet tools, processes, and innovations.  He owns and operates TheLearningSmith, Inc., a Twin Cities-based company which provides internet marketing and elearning services to a variety of Fortune 100s, non-profits, and small businesses.

If you’re interested in hearing more of his yammering, you can subscribe to his blog @ TheLearnyBin.com, or follow him on one of his social media accounts below.

Twitter – eLearningSmith

Facebook – TheLearningSmith

LinkedIn – Dustin Ellison

Continuing our series of guest blogs from our cool, smart friends, here’s another posting from Denise La Mere! She’s a change management guru, and has a strong point of view on how to make your project stick!

Ready?  Set?  Are You Sure?

Change will happen, whether you deliberately manage it or not.  Change management as a discipline isn’t a single person, a silver bullet, or me waving a magic wand over your employees saying, “You will love this change!  Now go forth and sustain.” As someone who gets paid to help organizations manage change better, smarter, and faster, I spend as much time educating people on what change management is and isn’t as I do assessing their progress  and implementing tools, systems, and processes to help people adopt and adapt to change in the least painful way possible.

Change management isn’t just something you apply to large, transformational programs.  The principles apply whether you’re talking about implementing new systems/technology (like an ERP); whether you’re talking about reorganizing your company; or whether you’re talking about getting people to finally show up on time for a meeting.  Bottom line is this: once you know how to manage change, you can apply these tools and techniques in just about any situation.

There are five levers of organizational change: business readiness; sponsorship and audience engagement; organizational design; communication; and training.   When I talk to most people about what change management is, they quickly recognize communication and training as key levers.  While I agree that it is nearly impossible to get people to adopt new behaviors if they don’t know what’s expected of them and if they lack the necessary skills, experience has taught me that communication and training are the price of admission to the change show.  Can you make change stick if you only communicate and train?  Sure!   (This is especially true if you don’t mind confusing your audience and re-doing your work.)

Today, I want to talk about business readiness.  Remember track and field day in physical education class?  Before we’d all take off on the 50 yard dash, the coach would make sure that we were ready and set before he’d allow us to go.  Frankly, most companies could take a lesson from Coach.  When you go before you check to make sure you’re ready and set, there will be casualties.  Best case scenario, you’ll have a bunch of confused people bumping into each other.  Worst case scenario, you’ll waste time and money trying to get people to adopt changes they don’t understand or accept and ultimately, your project could die on the vine.

Business readiness is the foundation of effective change management. This is where we pause, ask, “Are we ready?” and determine our path. While a lot of the business readiness work falls into the category of common sense, I continue to be surprised at how often organizations skip over these critical steps.  Project managers – listen up.  Business readiness should be occurring in the scoping or defining phase of your project.  It’s here that we focus on things like:

1. Identifying what is changing and for whom.
   1. How big is this change?
   2. How many people will be impacted by it?  What functions, roles, departments?
   3. What’s changing?
   4. How will we know when the change is successful?
2. Defining who the key stakeholders are.
   1. Who is sponsoring this change?  Sponsors typically fund the program and are responsible for key strategy decisions in the program/project.  They are frequently located at the top of the organization chart and are members of the executive team.
   2. Who will be responsible for reinforcing this change?  These are your reinforcing leaders.  These are formal leaders in the org chart and people who manage others.  They have responsibility for making sure the change is adopted in their own department or team.
   3. Who are those informal leaders who are going to be critical to the success of this change?  These are your change agents and typically represent a mix of people specifically recruited to the cause and people who volunteer themselves.   I recommend that you select at least a few change agents who aren’t turning cartwheels about this project or initiative.  If you can convert the resistance, they become great members of your change army.
   4. Who has to live with this change?  This is often what we refer to as your “impacted audience”.  These are your end-users who are ultimately and directly impacted by what you’re doing and they are accountable for adopting the change.
3. Getting a 20,000 foot view of how this change fits into the company’s goals and objectives.
   1. Your project, although clearly the most important thing in the world to you, isn’t the only change these people are going to be asked to make at work this year.  To stack the deck in your favor, take a look to see what else is going on.
   2. If possible, schedule your go-live at a time when your sponsors, reinforcing leaders, and impacted audience have the capacity to focus on a change.  For example, if you’re talking about implementing changes in a retail organization, don’t schedule your go-live between November and January.  Your audience will be so focused on their day jobs, they won’t have the capacity to do much more than that.
   3. If there are many projects impacting the same audience group, look for ways to join forces.  Can you combine communication efforts and reinforce key messages for one another, for example?

Business readiness is the first step to successfully implementing change.  If you can’t define what’s changing and for whom, you’ll be hard pressed to deliver results.  Remember track and field day and make sure that you’re not hitting go before you’re sure that you and your organization are ready.

Denise La Mere is a Star Collaborative consultant who is currently deployed as the change lead for a retail supply chain transformation program.  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.

The official Minneapolis party starts at 6:30 at Chino Latino … and since we’re always eager to get together with cool people passionate about social media, we’re hosting a warm-up party at the frankosphere – headquarters of our good friends at frank.

Consider this your official invite and join us at the frankosphere on June 30th starting at 4 pm!

We’ll have beverages on hand (bring your own favorite flavors, too!) and we’re working on some local prizes to celebrate the local vibe of our warm-up party.

Let’s get vocal & viral about showing the world the size of our Minneapolis social media community!

Right now, we’re #35 on the global list of Social Media Day parties. Not bad, but c’mon – Hamilton, Ontario is #15 (have you been there? it’s a steel town, not a hip tech town like we are!) NYC’s #1 right now, but heck, everyone knows New Yorker’s are lame at keeping commitments.

So mark your calendars, check back with this blog for pre-party & prize updates … and most importantly, help prove that Minneapolis is one kick-@$$ social media community – by joining the party and sharing this invite with friends, colleagues and your mom.

Here are a few places to do that:

Mashable Minneapolis Meetup site: http://www.meetup.com/Mashable/7485

Official Social Media Day Tweet stream: http://twitter.com/mashsmday

Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=123671887672313&index=1

See you June 30th!

– your pre-party partners from frank & STAR Collaborative

Once again, we are excited to present another of our cool and smart friends as a guest blogger: Denise La Mere. We’ve had the pleasure of working with her on and off over the last 6 years, and are very proud that she’s part of the STAR Collaborative consultant team!

One of my biggest pet peeves is the assumption that change is hard and that people generally resist it.  If that were true, I’d still be sporting acid washed jeans and enough hair spray to raise the earth’s temperature by five degrees permanently.  We change every day.  We change our socks and underwear, our hair, channels on the TV, and what we eat for lunch.  I never learned any formal methodology to officially “manage” these day-to-day changes and yet I somehow manage to get dressed and leave the house every day.

Let me give you an example. I’ve been on a diet since 1986 in an effort to lose the same 15 pounds, so I know what works and what doesn’t. In change management terminology, we measure whether or not our audiences are aware of the need to change; whether they understand what the change means to them personally; whether they’ve accepted personal responsibility for the change and its success; and whether or not they have adopted the right behaviors to sustain the change. All too often, we focus the majority of our time and energy trying to overcome perceived resistance at the awareness and understanding level.  I think that’s a mistake.

Here’s why.  I’m fully aware when I’m overweight.  When the “fat pants” come into heavy rotation in my wardrobe – and worse, when they start to feel tight – I am aware that something has to give.  Making someone aware of the need to change isn’t the hardest part of our jobs.  Neither is getting them to understand what it means.   I understand that in order to lose weight, I need to eat less and exercise more.   I also know that there are many benefits to getting myself to a healthy weight.  My pants will fit.  My blood pressure will improve.  My life expectancy will increase.  I get the “what’s in it for me”.

Acceptance is a little more challenging.  When I accept the need to change, I am taking personal accountability.  I am signing up to do things differently.  I’m running on the treadmill instead of using it as auxiliary closet space.  I prepare my lunches at home instead of “super-sizing” it at McDonald’s. I show up and I participate.  In order to accept change, I have to overcome inertia and do something.

Acceptance is tough, but what I find to be the most challenging part of any change effort are the adopt and sustain phases.  Because guess what?  I gained weight because lying on the couch watching “Love Boat” reruns and eating pizza is more fun than going to spin class and eating broccoli.  After a few weeks of consciously accepting change and trying on new behaviors, I need some encouragement.  I need to see results.  If I eat less and exercise more and don’t lose a pound on the scale, guess what?  I’m quitting this change.  I didn’t get what I thought I signed up for and I’m over it.  Although I know it’s good for me, I’m going to go back to my old ways, and I’ll keep waiting for a silver bullet solution.

If it’s that hard for me to manage my own sustained behavioral change, imagine what it’s like when you’re trying to implement large-scale change across a department or company.  Each individual will move through the change curve at their own pace, and each person will have their own unique motivations to change . . . or not.  Unfortunately, in many organizations, change management is either an afterthought (usually, this thought comes after a crisis of some sort) or it’s handled in a one-size-fits-all manner.

People aren’t one-size-fits-all.  While we all need to move through the change curve at our own pace, our roles dictate the level of commitment and time investment required.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that change isn’t hard.  It is.  But by debunking the myth that people don’t want to change and instead, focusing our energies on what’s getting in the way of making change stick, we increase our odds of success.  It’s the difference between going on a diet and changing your life.

Denise La Mere is a Star Collaborative consultant who is currently deployed as the change lead for a retail supply chain transformation program.  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.

If they asked me, I’d say my job is not to help organizations communicate better.  It’s to help them become better organizations.  But that’s not what I used to say.

I used to tell companies to create a “communications plan.”  This is a document outlining all of the audiences, their “key messages,” what media to use, and when.  Today those media can include social utilities and blogs and such.  It’s important to have a Plan.  But if communication is still treated like sanitation, like the clean-up you do after big changes have already been made, then the most sophisticated communication plan is still just a really awesome garbage truck.

An opportunity for positive culture change

Companies are never going to master respect, forethought, and authenticity in employee communication (the desired goals in my opinion) unless they go through some therapy.  They have to change the culture, as well as make some actual organizational changes.  Good news, if your company is already going through change, you can build a communications capability into your newly formed organization.

(1). Make a business case for communication

It’s not that much of a stretch.  Great leaders are usually great communicators.  Even the quiet ones.  So the first step, (1) making a business case for leadership support of better communication, is not that hard.

First you schedule a meeting with leadership and you make it a very short meeting.  You will have to reschedule it three or four times.  When it finally happens you get the leaders’ attention in your own way (I use jokes, snacks, and coffee that is better than the office coffee) and you press them to talk about what they value as an organization.  If you’re quick, you’ll see ways that communication supports those values and you’ll bring that up.

(Example: I worked with a large, big-box retail organization in which many of the corporate leaders had originally worked in its stores.  Those leaders valued retail employees and remembered what it was like to have big changes dropped on them by Corporate at the last minute.  They also remembered working on the sales floor in a team environment where nothing got done without constant communication.  No hiding behind desks sending cryptic emails.  It wasn’t hard to remind those leaders to keep their employees informed.  They wanted to anyway.  They just forgot).

Most importantly, to make the business case for better communication, you have to do your homework.  Be prepared with some actual examples where communication affects financial performance.

(2). Identify communication leaders

If you’ve successfully won the ear of leadership on the importance of communication it is wise to now suggest some organizational changes (2).  (In this post I’m only talking about leadership changes.  I will devote an entire post later to the role of employees and the importance of two-way communication).

The company will have to create new roles or parts of roles.  But I don’t suggest creating a “VP of Communication.”  Frankly, that person is not likely to be taken seriously at the executive level.  (I have authority to say this.  I am frequently not taken seriously).  Find someone in what is seen as a more “important” role — marketing, operations — who is a strong communicator.  In the least, this person can champion the cause of communication.  At best, they can provide broad, strategic oversight of this cause.

The ideal steward of organizational communication doesn’t need to be a recovering English Major carrying around a dog-eared AP Stylebook.  Better if not, in fact.  He or she simply has to value communication and be updated, at a high level, on what a communication group does and the skills people need to have.  (If you watch 30 Rock, this person is more of a Jack Donahey than a Liz Lemon).  Sometimes it’s better for these leaders to know less, vs. more, about the specifics of writing employee newsletters or making training videos.  The less they know, the higher their expectations will be.  They will challenge and frustrate the team in a good way.  These leaders will see no practical limit to what communication can do, because to them it’s all magic.

-Eric Hayward works with STAR Collaborative as an advisor on change communication.  STAR offers presentations, seminars, and workshops about boosting results through strategic communication.

We recently had an opportunity to share our point of view with a national news organization regarding the changing state of the workforce and job market. Our response provides a good overview of what we do, what type of person works well with our clients, and how we are doing at this point in our company’s journey.

STAR Collaborative is building a niche with Fortune 100 retailers in the Twin Cities area, providing resources for the ‘Gig Economy’ – the new face of the workplace where catalytic freelancers jump into a project, drive it to completion, and move on to the next thing. These chief-of-staff consultants work well in ambiguity, have a strong leadership presence, and possess superior organizational agility and communication skills to provide the temporary brain power and arms and legs to get the job done.

Companies are looking to these transitory workers to accelerate projects lasting from three months in duration to more than a year and-a-half. While budgets are still being freed up from the shell shock of the economic collapse, these companies are finding that there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done, and they are reticent to add full time head counts.

STAR Collaborative speaks from experience: we have grown from two consultants placed last June to more than forty today. Our growth continues unfettered, and we expect to have close to eighty placed by year end.
Ed Lefkow, President and co-founder of STAR Collaborative reports that many of their clients like STAR’s ability to provide ‘variable resource management.’ “We provide a deep talent pool of trusted advisors that can start and stop as projects deem necessary. Most of our consultants have prior work experience with our clients, so their organizational knowledge and skills are a great force multiplier in getting work done.”

“Plus, there are enough companies with thawing budgets,” continues STAR co-founder and Vice President, Dan Olson, “to keep a consultant busy, if not fully engaged, throughout the year. This works well for the market overall – there’s a good pool of top talent who is flexible and creative in redefining what it means to work.”

Lefkow concludes, “It’s a win-win-win: the consultants find exciting and challenging projects, the clients get flexible and talented workers, and we help play match-maker between all!”

STAR Collaborative is sponsoring a private event with bestselling author Harvey Mackay. We have reserved a block of seats for this upcoming event, and we’d like you to be our guest!

When: May 11, 2010 5:00PM to 7:00PM
PRIVATE EVENT AT THE SOUTHERN THEATER

Learn the job secrets that make getting a job and successfully managing a career easier. Harvey Mackay, New York Times #1 Bestselling Author of Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive and Founder of MackayMitchell Envelope Company, shares his insights and wisdom from his newest book ‘Use Your Head To Get Your Foot In The Door: Job Search Secrets No One Else Will Tell You.’

In this new keynote, Mackay will share new ideas, tips and insights:
- nuggets from his newest A-Z career resource
- ideas about interviewing
- using the tried and true Mackay 66 to win business and build relationships
- the role of volunteering to build skills
- and networking!!!

Doors open at 4:45 for networking. Keynote starts at 5:15 on Tuesday, May 11, 2010.

The Southern Theater is at 1420 Washington Ave N, Minneapolis. Parking across street and at Holiday Inn.

If you are interested in attending this event, please RSVP to info@starcollaborative.comimmediately! Seats are limited, and tickets will be distributed on a first come, first serve basis.

Don’t miss this incredible opportunity to jump-start your career or job search!

Ed and Dan
STAR Collaborative

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If you are interested in learning more about STAR Collaborative and the clients we serve, call at763-515-7838 or send an e-mail to info@starcollaborative.com.

Follow us on Facebook: http://goo.gl/by6u or LinkedIn: http://ht.ly/1Gx9b
Read our blog: http://ow.ly/1eTJv, Twitter: @STARCollab, @STARcolllabNET,
@starcollab2 and @karmaofficehour