Learn to Fish: How to Build Change Capability

You know the old proverb: give someone a fish, feed them for a day. Teach them to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime.

Well, just like that person is going to need to eat tomorrow, for business leaders, change is going to keep coming. Despite this, many leaders view their change project in isolation, and they often have a similar short-term outlook for any support they bring in, using change partners solely to help get their current project over the line.

But in such a challenging business landscape, getting the most value from your partnerships is crucial to keeping your organisation shipshape. And the best way maximise value from external support is to enhance your own change capability, enabling your people to deliver and adopt change better not just today, but for years to come.

In other words, you should try to develop a whole crew of fishermen.

To borrow another famous phrase, no man is an island; if you’re implementing a major change programme, you need the help of your team to truly deliver it. If you don’t engage impacted colleagues around your change, they’re never going to embrace and adopt it.

The best way to engage people is to align fellow leaders with the purpose, vision and objectives of your change. They can then help cascade this key messaging to their teams across functions and geographies.

That all sounds simple, but articulating your vision and aligning others to it requires a highly specialised skillset. That’s where specialist change partners come in, augmenting the skills of internal change teams with their own expertise and experience.

Together, you, your leadership peers and your change partner can effectively cascade your change and see it fully embedded. But without developing change management skills in your organisation, you’re going to need to repeatedly lean on external support when the next change inevitably comes along.

That’s the difference between run-of-the-mill consultants and true change partners: the former will pop by to give you a fish, but the latter will take the time to teach you and your team how to fish.

Why would any consultant teach their client how to do what they do and decrease their dependence on the service provided? There are several reasons.                                                                                                                        

The first is that good change consultants are genuinely passionate about change, seeing it done well and helping their clients do it better. Ultimately, consultants can’t adopt change on behalf of an organisation; therefore, putting people at the heart is the only way consultants can truly deliver, and as mentioned above, aligning leaders and providing them with their own change capability is a surefire way of engaging people.

To put it another way, we don’t change the organisation; we help the organisation’s people to drive the change.

Secondly, business change is often met with resistance, but when it’s done well, that resistance dissipates and creates appetite for change. That’s when an organisation really starts to innovate, transform and thrive, which is a real pleasure to see.

Don’t look at your external support as external; see them as part of your own team.

True change partners should integrate, taking time to understand your culture, people and ways of working, adjusting their style to fit rather than prescribing a cookie-cutter approach.

This includes being transparent and adaptable with planning, ensuring alignment on scope and expectations.

Inverse to the above, your change partner should include your people as part of their team. Seeking your input in planning and delivery ensures buy-in and creates a sense of accountability within your organisation.

This also leads to richer outcomes, because change partners can combine their technical expertise with your unique organisational knowledge, bringing the change to life for your people more vividly.

And of course, this builds your change capability because the exposure helps your people to understand what good looks like.

As well as skills, your change partner should leave you with frameworks, templates and assets to deliver effective change interventions, teaching you how to use these.

Change isn’t delivered overnight, and messaging might need to be reinforced for months or even years. A good change partner will equip you with the toolkit to do this yourself for as long as you need to, and show you how to apply these tools for any future programmes as well.

At the end of the day, it’s the change leaders who deliver the change, not the consultant.

The consultant’s role is to empower the leader to drive change, and therefore consultants should coach leaders on how to be good sponsors and confidently cascade messaging, now and for future initiatives.

In business change, if people lack the skills to operate in the new state, they’ll refuse to move from the existing one.

An effective change partner can not only support your people with the skills they need to adopt the change, but they can evaluate your internal team’s change-related skills and recommend specific objectives and actions to develop strengths and close gaps. This will enhance their change capability and that of the wider organisation as a result.

Through all of these techniques, your people will become enthused and engaged with delivering your change, helping to foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Employees will feel empowered to seek out new knowledge and skills that will further bolster change capability, influencing future successful innovation and transformation.

Business change consultants bring specialised expertise, experience and external perspective to your project in order to help you deliver it. True change partners will take this one step further, working with you to enhance your internal change capability, so the next time you set sail to tackle change, you’ll have a whole crew of skilled fishermen aboard with you.

Afiniti intentionally builds internal capability to ensure greater certainty of achieving your desired outcomes, all while embedding a culture of continuous improvement.

If you want the support of a true change partner for your next change project, and one who will enhance your change capability to equip you for years to come, please feel free to get in touch with our team today. We’d love to learn about your change.