Whether you have a person in your organisation who is tasked with dealing with change management on an important project or if you have just onboarded a new change manager into the company, it is essential that this individual possesses the right skills and knowledge to really drive incremental business performance from change. Research by Prosci suggests that the key skills of an exceptional change manager can be learned and acquired. In this post we examine the critical skills you should assess if your people are to become effective change management practitioners.
As people learn at different paces and through different means we include a list of some of the best ways to skill up your change manager below. Before we get into this, let us firstly look at some key questions you can ask your change manager to help identify their strengths and also the areas which they may benefit from some further training on.
1. Are you familiar with any change management methodologies or approaches? If yes, can you please describe?
2. Have you ever supported your colleagues with communication or with training aspects of any major business project? If yes, can you please detail your role and the work you did?
3. Have you ever worked within a change management team? What type of project did you work on and how did you contribute? What were the results of the project?
4. Have you ever received any formal change management training? If yes, from whom, how long was the training and what was covered?
While the answers to these questions will help gauge the knowledge and familiarity of this person with change management they will also identify and help you select the best options to further upskill this person for your project. Below to assist we include our top training recommendations for your change managers.
1. Face to Face Training
2. Coaching and Mentoring
3. Peer to Peer Networking
Training your Change Managers
1. Face to face training
Training gives change managers the knowledge, skills and resources that they need to implement the discipline into any project they are put on. We provide courses that help good change managers become exceptional, from onsite training to public courses and workshops. We give your change managers a chance to gain knowledge, methods and tools and how to apply them to their project in a setting where experts and their peers can provide them with constructive feedback.
CMC teach and use Prosci best practices in class providing your participants the opportunity to bring their change management projects to the course. Application of relevant and scaled tools and techniques help them to design a suitable strategy and set of change management plans to aid better adoption of the solution being introduced. This more involved approach allows participants to immediately apply what they are learning in class.
2. Coaching and Mentoring
If you already have an experienced Prosci Change Manager within your operation don’t let their knowledge go to waste. Mentoring and coaching can be extremely important to help spread the success of your change management projects and help develop operational change management capabilities. By creating a formal mentoring program that partners experienced change managers with mentorees, allowing them to support and provide them with direction as and when challenges arose. CMC offers its Practitioner Plus service to provide 1:1 support after Practitioners leave class and have to put their new change management strategy into action for real.
3. Peer to Peer Networking
Our courses aren’t just a great place to develop your knowledge of the core methodologies but they are also a great way to network and have discussions with like-minded individuals. They enable you to share your successes and challenges and receive feedback and tips on how you can face these challenges in the future. Meetings can act as an excellent forum for teams to get together and share their thoughts, feelings, worries and any concern.
Upskilling and educating your change managers can be simple enough with the right resources and the right partner. By assessing the team's needs you can provide them with the right tools to suit their preferred way to learn. When you provide change managers with the knowledge they need you are investing in your company’s ability to respond to change in the future.
Up Skill your Change Managers
If you are looking to up skill your change managers why not view all of our available courses and pick the course that will help them go from good to exceptional.
Or why not register for one of our free webinars for the latest insight into the forefront of change management thinking, including our upcoming series into the Roles in Change Management.
