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In this seventh post, based on Nick Anderson's book, Focusing Change to Win, we highlight contributions from 1072 Business Leaders. This post gives some of the key findings on effective communications and how they impact resistance and ultimately change success. The following is based on 684 contributors who chose to add comments on communicating change. Unsurprisingly, contributors see their people at the heart of any successful change process. They see gaining stakeholder commitment and creating a cadre of change ambassadors as a force multiplier. Essential to creating that commitment are leaders taking their people into their confidence with honesty and courage.

In this second post, based on Nick Anderson's book, Focusing Change to Win, we highlight contributions from 1072 Business Leaders on The Why and What of Change. The post gives some of the key findings and a sample of useful tips from the book.  We take an in-depth look at how our contributors improve their chances of thriving through change, by communicating in ways that build trust and engage people. For these contributors, Communication must constantly focus and connect the What of Change with the Why of Changing.

Ideally, your approach to change would be personal!  You make sure your team members buy into it, own it, implement it, and are rewarded for it in their work relationships. Yet, today we still see many leaders using Top-Down Change as their default approach without considering the impact on productive relationships and their ability to respond to the next change.

(Abstract from Take Control of Your Project - Using Expectation Alignment to Avoid IT Project Failure by Terry Merriman, PCO Associates LLC)

Whether large or small, IT projects are complex change events. They need cross-functional collaboration between two or more departments or teams. Their success or failure reverberates throughout the organization and often impacts customers. Countless studies and papers on reasons for IT Project Failure cite two critical factors:

1. Poor interpersonal communications
2. Lack of professional project management

This document presents a framework for approaching communications around a typical change initiative, and includes some ideas and recommendations to improve the effort and results.

At a basic level, the primary objectives for communications around a business project are to…

• Create awareness/inform
• Create understanding
• Influence (gain acceptance; enlist support; engage actions/behaviors)

Perfection is great in theory but not in practice. We worked with an organization that wanted to get everything perfect before doing anything.  In practice, what we have seen works the best is to quickly learn from every move, refine your tactics, redeploy – then repeat the cycle.  No organization/person will get everything right.  We live in a very complex world with so many variables. The trick is to execute quickly, learn from that execution, and then re-execute.