jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #115 on 26 Mar 2022 and has tags Strategy: Change Management
Make changes easy for your team - Jade Rubick
Miscommunication Plan - Aviv Ben-Yosef
Rubick has a plan for making changes manageable for your team:
and Ben-Yosef emphasizes the importance of bookending the change with lots of communication, which too often we deeply specialized people tend to forget. “The old way was bad, this way’s clearly better, what more is there to say?”
As managers we’re all always keeping an eye out for potential problems, as Rubick suggests, but keeping a management backlog is a terrific idea. Keeping track of apparent problems is an excellent way to guide further listening and evidence gathering. That’s how you figure out which problems continue to make themselves apparent, and which were transitory or imaginary, and so hone your mental model of what’s going on with the team.
One thing I’d change with Rubick’s approach is to start communicating about the problem and diagnosis first, to see if people agree. That also gives you an opportunity to solicit possible remedies maybe you haven’t thought of. Even if you have a remedy in your back pocket, and end up going with it, having people contribute to the change process will make everything easier.
Both authors talk about the huge challenge in actually pre-communicating the change and then following through. Even if people didn’t like the problem, change is uncomfortable. It takes a lot of talking and people-work to make process changes. (A google search for “change management” in quotes returns 113 million results)
