Moving to the Next Change Management Maturity Level

It is not unusual for organisations to experience an imbalance with maturity across Strategy & Leadership, Business Readiness & Adoption and Change Management Delivery. We know that project change management capability is the easiest of the three change management capability focus areas to develop.

Once organisations have defined change management capability they often start to stagnate. This can be due to that fact they often invest heavily in their project management capability focussing on processes and governance, and miss key change management principles and practices that support the adoption of new ways of working; typically because they miss developing strong change leadership and investing in business readiness capability.

When creating your capability development plans, it’s important to consider tactics to support capability within your Strategy & Leadership and engaging your business areas not just project change management which is typically the more obvious of the tactics.

Effective Change Management Capability is supported by four key components—People, Process, Structure and Tools & Technology. These need to be present across all three focus areas of change maturity—Strategy & Leadership, Business Readiness & Adoption and Change Management Delivery.

At this point in the game, if your organisation doesn’t have a Change Management Office function, it’s time to set one up to support the growth of change management capability across the organisation.

Growing your Strategy & Leadership Capability

Change Management principles and practices are embedded in executive governance and there are accurate and consistent business readiness measures in place.

Quality conversations are a normal part of how the organisation communicates. Regular feedback loops are proactively facilitated by senior leaders and executives. Leaders champion a culture of innovation the embraces learning from ‘failure’, creating a safe place for honest and accurate feedback and giving their organisation the ability to react and adapt.

High maturity in the Strategy & Leadership is demonstrated by Executive Governance and Boards guiding change across the organisation, and their ability to prioritise, recalibrate and adjust the change portfolio based on feedback from their customers and employees.

Senior Leaders and Executive are receiving change management training as part of their professional development and are being formally inducted into project sponsors roles. Opportunities to formally develop change management skills are formalised through their professional development plans and supplemented through mentoring supporting as well as coaching from appropriately skilled change management practitioners.

Change Management is part of the organisation’s overall reward and recognition programs. formal competency measures in place for Senior Leaders and Executives and change management outcomes are linked to their individual and business performance targets.