Step 5: Building the team
The irony with technology solutions is that more often than not, success or failure doesn’t come down just to the technology. If you’re buying a solution to make a material impact on your business, the odds are it will mean changing how people work, and how they are measured. It might mean creating new roles or modifying existing ones. It’ll take some discomfort at first and maybe even a failure or two along the way. In short, it’s a people challenge as much as a technology challenge. So getting the right team built and motivated to help the initiative succeed is crucial.
Start early
Don’t want until you’ve selected a solution to get the teams on board. Change management takes time so start involving your teams early. Help them buy into the problems statements you're trying to address and make sure some of those problems are ones that impact the people who will be using the solution. Nobody really likes doing more work themselves to make work easier for some other function they don’t even know, so make sure they know how the solutions you’re looking at will make their life easier, right away or over time.
Make sure you’re thinking broadly about the team.
If it’s a technology solution then will you need IT involved? Will they have requirements (such as a security audit) that you want to get after early in the process? Do they have experience in buying or rolling out similar solutions that you can leverage? If you have to justify the expense then have finance help define what success looks like so you can avoid getting blocked at the eleventh hour by someone up the chain wanting to know ‘why are we spending this money and what do we get for it?”
Give the team the tools to help make the right decision.
If it's in a technology area you don't know much about ask one or more of the vendors for a presentation on the category in general and what the ‘basics’ are of the solution’ Terms like ‘AI’ or ‘Machine Learning’ can sound scary or confusing, so get some help in making sure your team knows how the solutions work at a basic level so they can be confident in helping make a decision or implement a solution. They don’t need to be AI experts but a bit of education can take out the risk and make them feel smarter and more involved.
Find your culture leaders and get them on your side.
Change management involves perceptions of risk. Who are the people everyone goes to to ask ‘what do you think of this new thing?”. Often the culture leaders are not the manager: they might be the grizzled veteran who’s been around forever, or somebody who’s known for speaking their mind to management and standing up for the team. Enlist those leaders and make sure they feel they are part of the process and the solution. Many great projects that could have a big impact on the business have died in the breakroom or around the water cooler, when somebody everyone trusts says “Beats me: just sounds like another hairbrained idea from corporate.”
Make sure it’s a win for the team members.
Build time into their days so work on the project isn’t just interruptive to their ‘day job’. Give them some recognition and make sure they see their involvement as something they can put on a resume or help prepare them for their next role. Make sure they know that their work will help shape the outcome so it’s better for them and their teammates.
Educate along the way so nothing feels like a surprise to the team on the project or the people that will use it.
Any solution that seems to fall out of the sky onto the team with no context or warning will be met with resentment and suspicion. Give the team time to get used to the idea of something new and embrace the need for change and the benefits that can come. Make sure their issues are addressed on things like training and measurement. Change management, like grief, has stages people need to go through, so give them the time to do it. For example, having the team ask hard questions about the need for the solution before you buy might seem frustrating because you want to move fast, but it’s way better than having them ask those questions in the training sessions once you’re rolling out the new tool.
Comments
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Great post Bryan! No matter the change, be it roles, technology, or methods, I have found it more about the people than the object of change. Your call out on enlisting culture leaders is spot on. In many cases, those culture leaders that drive, communicate and facilitate systems, process or organizational changes may not be the same people for technology changes.
Early on in my Augury rollouts I made sure to communicate clearly to Augury that my insistence on conducting a pilot was not just to prove out their technology and service (although very important) but to pilot my people and understand how the bigger part of their roles and responsibilities would adapt to these new inputs, insights and relationships. We needed to understand what we needed to start, stop or change in the world of asset and capacity management, materials and spare parts inventory controls, potential focus in adjacent maintenance reliability training programs, tribology initiatives, etc.. These are but a few of the touch points that can create obstacles and trust issues as part achieving adoption. As with any relationship, being able to objectively communicate up, down and sideways is paramount. Oh, and then there's the listening part. Many times the listening success is not about what's being said, but what's not being said. This requires a finely tunded ear.
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