Driving change at a company can vary depending on the size and maturity of a company. If a company is a small startup, it’s likely that change is a part of their DNA. When you are small and just starting out, you are usually more nimble and people have a higher failure rate tolerance than at a major corporation! On the other hand, if you work at a massive corporation, change will be a much more painful and arduous process. They already have documentation and onboarding procedures and best practices and HR. It will take significantly more effort to drive change in a company like that.
Great, so you want to drive change…what are the key steps to do so? Gather data and start to build an understanding of the ROI (return on investment) of the change. This will be crucial in getting your idea/change approved by the executive team. Once you have your ROI and your go ahead, it’s time to test! Pick a team or a customer or whatever small segment of the business you are planning to change and start testing your change. This step it’s important to understand if it’s working, so knowing what to measure and measuring it, will allow you to compare current state and your new proposed changes.
Your new idea works better than the current state and your bosses all agree to implement…now what? Now you get your key stakeholders within the teams or sales or account managers and you educate them on the change and rally them to be the owners of the new change. Utilizing your data gathered in the testing phase, you can help get them excited about the change, which will help ensure adoption of the change. From there, you just monitor and step in to help when things are going sideways in the process of change.
It’s not for the faint of heart, but the ability to create effectual change in a company can be the difference between the life and death of the business.
I hope this was helpful! Thanks for being here! Take care!
