It’s that time of year, isn’t it? For many of us the volume and frequency of meetings in the work calendar is starting to reduce as the Christmas and New Year holiday periods begin. The final work-week of December and the “betwixmas” days between Christmas and New Year often present those quieter work days when we can reflect on the past 12 months and look ahead to the coming year. I have just such a week next week and will be planning my principal change management goal for 2024 and developing the activities to enable my customers to achieve their enterprise change management (ECM) capability goals.

Let’s start with my ECM customers. If you regularly engage with Prosci Europe’s blogs, articles and webinars, you’ll recall that ECM is the idea that change management is a capability everyone in the organisation can possess, with it being grounded in our organisational competence frameworks and our values. ECM becomes for us a strategic imperative by which we can gain competitive advantage and ensure our people thrive, not just survive, in our ever-changing, post-Covid workplaces. I wrote about this in my blog.

Key to securing the benefits of ECM is having a leadership cadre across the organisation who understand the value of change management – facilitating, driving, role-modelling the sustained and proficient adoption of planned organisational changes – and their role in it. For a couple of my customers, 2024 will see concerted effort to achieve the goal that leading change is well-understood and demonstrated at board level and the couple of levels below the board.

This will include having all leaders at those levels attend dedicated briefing sessions on what excellence looks like in sponsoring change and having an enterprise change management objective explicitly called-out in their personal role agreements for 2024. The goal is that each sponsor demonstrates great leadership of change for at least two high-priority transformation initiatives they have accountability for in 2024; at least two, but we’ll take more if we can achieve it!

The other ECM goal for my customers is around socialisation: working to ensure that across their organisations there is broad, consistent understanding of what is meant by the terms “change management” and “the people-side of change” and that the value of doing this thing called change management is understood.

The goal is to raise awareness that change management is not the optional extra, or, as it was once memorably described to me, the “pink and fluffy” side of a project; change management is all about ensuring ready, wide-spread and proficient adoption of new capability in organisations, whether that capability be IT systems, competency frameworks, new behaviours and attitudes, new ways of working, whatever… Having successful adoption and sustained usage of new capability drives benefits and results for our organisations and the socialisation goal for my customers is to get this understood across the whole enterprise.

Helping staff to see their roles in achieving change outcomes, celebrating successes in realising the benefits of changes, creating and talking about our case studies of where we are doing the change management well and better, showcasing excellent change management of some headline-grabbing changes will be some of the ways we achieve this socialisation of the need for and value of change management.

Standardising the organisation’s approach to change management, getting into the habit of applying it, in an intelligently-scaled way, to all our change initiatives and building competence and confidence levels in identifying and dealing with the people-impacts of changes are also important elements of my customers’ goals to build ECM. If these ideas resonate with you, or pique your interest, and you would like to know more, you would be very welcome to join us at our next public enrolment Prosci ECM Boot Camp.

For me, 2024 will bring new leadership opportunities and challenges. From January, I take up a new role in Prosci Europe (watch this space), and my ambitions for that role will only be achieved through very effective sponsorship of a series of heavily people-dependent changes.

This prompts me to say my top change management resolution for the new year will be to reengage with the Prosci research and advice for leaders and to practise, practise, practise the ABCs of sponsorship.

Take the next step!

If you want to speed up your response to change, why not allow Prosci Europe to support your organisation? We can offer you change management support and a range of virtual Prosci workshops for sponsors, managers and project managers.

If this is a direction your organisation is moving in, consider attending our Prosci Enterprise Change Management Boot Camp. In this one-day workshop, you will gain additional tools based on research findings for creating your Project ECM strategies and plans.