Once you’ve reached the go-live stage of a big transition project, you’ll be greeted with both good news and bad news.
On the good news front, go-live is an opportunity to look back and admire all the hard work your people put into planning and design for implementation and execution. You can also look forward to all the new and exciting benefits your initiative is going to accrue.
The bad news is that go-live is also the moment when things can start to unravel, with pushback from employees, unforeseen technical glitches, and blind spots in the original design. This undeniable reality reveals a fundamental truth about change initiatives.
Launching change isn’t the same as the adoption of change.
Even though there are lots of cautionary anecdotes about the problems change projects suffer after go-live, far too many organizations are shocked when everything doesn’t go quite according to plan and find they have no idea how to get things back on track.
How do these organizations get caught off guard?
In some instances, the pressure to show an ROI can create unreasonable expectations around results. Given the enormous amount of time and money invested in these projects, organizations want to see results as soon as possible.
However, change initiatives are ultimately about changing the behaviors of your employees, and this kind of change takes time. Once a project has reached go-live, far too many organizations only focus on results and ignore the time and effort needed to produce the behaviors required to get there.
Notwithstanding those expectations, most change initiatives suffer from a myriad of blind spots and hurdles.
The most common risks to adoption
Overload from the complexity of the change: You might think of it as one change initiative, but every transformation project is actually comprised of hundreds of individual changes. And there could be more than one change initiative running concurrently. For example, along with the introduction of new technology, the organization could be doing a culture reboot. If steps aren’t taken to deal with change overload, leaders and their teams can easily lose focus on core business priorities.
Organizational misalignment: When change goes live, leaders tend to rely too much on communications while ignoring the need for alignment on behavior change. In other words, leaders will be saying one thing, but employees could be doing something very different. Left unchecked, misalignment leads to confusion and inefficiencies, as leaders are forced to constantly re-explain the goals of change, and employees become stuck in an endless cycle of re-doing and re-working elementary tasks.
Protest by returning to old ways: Within your workforce, there will be people who embrace change immediately and other groups that will push back hard against the adoption of new tools or behaviors. In some instances, these change laggards will regress and start doing things the old way as a form of protest. Leaders need nuanced skills to reinforce critical new behaviors to prevent this kind of backsliding.
Fortunately, there are ways to mitigate these challenges and accelerate the adoption of the changes:
- Narrow the focus: Identify and stop work on lower-priority tasks to prevent distractions from top priorities. Make sure your people aren’t getting lost in the weeds/fine details of change.
- Flag and address misalignment: When there are problems, don’t let the elephant in the room go unaddressed. Encourage people to voice concerns and then identify blind spots. Leaders need to actively search for misalignment rather than assume everyone is getting with the program.
- Reinforce the new path of choice: Assist leaders with practical strategies for supporting their teams when new ways of working are being imposed. Prepare leaders to respond with course-correcting measures when they see old ways of working happening. Above all, delay your gratification when it comes to change and give your people adequate time to learn new approaches and tools.
Conclusion
At the point of go-live, most organizations have in place the strategies and plans to execute a change initiative. However, what most organizations learn quickly is that there’s a clear and profound difference between execution and adoption.
Planning and execution are all about the technical elements of change: processes, systems, and technology. Adoption, however, is a very human endeavor. No change initiative—no matter how well designed or enunciated—can escape the need to engage meaningfully with your people and dig deep into their behaviors.
Change has the potential to unlock new heights of business success, but only if your people are prepared to embrace meaningful and lasting behavior change.
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