What is Change Management?
Change is something all businesses need to embrace at some point, it helps to drive success by keeping up to date with industry best practice. However, to achieve this adaptability, an organisation’s employees need to be able to change their habitual working processes. Change management is the process of supporting individuals or a team to successfully change the way they work by creating a structured approach rather than undermining past processes.
Three Different Levels of Change Management
There are many different approaches to change management but generally three different levels that are implemented at different levels of the corporate structure.
Individual Change Management
Many find change difficult to accommodate so individual change management is specifically designed to support individuals to learn new habits with positive reinforcement and optimised timing for further training.
Organisational Change Management
Organisational change management helps to enact change on a larger scale. Although change is effective on an individual basis, it is more efficient to enact change on an entire team or organisation. Organisational team management helps entire teams and departments adapt to new processes by creating customised plans to train, support and enable tens, hundreds or even thousands of individuals. It starts by identifying the ways in which processes need to change then allocating new processes to different teams or individuals. It requires lots of ‘big picture’ thinking as well as a real understanding of the minutiae.
Enterprise Change Management Capability
Enterprise change management provides companies with the ability to quickly adapt to any market changes or technology advancements. An enterprise change management capability means that all leaders within an organisation are able to effectively lead any change management schemes and keep their team and colleagues constantly adapting to changes in technology or equipment, strategic initiatives or new structures with a minimal impact on productivity.
What kind of skills do you need to work in Change Management?
Any role within change management needs to be accompanied by a mixture of leadership skills, and in-depth technical knowledge of the company and industry. Some skills include:
Change management technical skills:
- Experience in complex project management
- Ability to administer change management coaching
- Ability to conduct change impact analysis
- Ability to turn data into strategy
- Knowledge of risk assessment, development requirements and operations
Change management soft skills:
- Good communication
- Good teamwork skills and the ability to motivate
- Good strategic planning and analysis
- Thorough understanding of change management principles and best practice
- Good at problem solving
What Change Management roles are there?
Although change management can be enacted by any leader within an organisation and is often overseen by senior manager-level employees, there are also dedicated roles for change management:
- Change Manager
- Change Agent
- Change Management Consultant
- Head of Change
