How Do I Create Meaningful Engagement?

February 15, 2018Change Leadership, Engagement, Executing ChangeGary Frank

This is the third post in my series on meaningful engagement. You can check out the other two posts in the series here:

Meaningful engagement and the co-creation of change can produce much more commitment than simple buy-in can.

Organizations that settle for buy-in, rather than aspire to meaningful engagement, miss out on the opportunity to:

Deepen commitment to the change process
Stimulate co-creation of solutions
Build business literacy and other important business skills, and
Accelerate the pace of change.

I define meaningful engagement as:

“Any authentic involvement that allows people to make consequential contributions to the process and the outcome of a change and deepens their understanding of it, their commitment to it, and their ownership of it.”

As I wrote in Meaningful Engagement vs. Buy-In: What's the Difference and Why Should I Care?, leader commitment – including the belief that ordinary people can make extraordinary contributions and the willingness to commit time, effort, and resources to enable them to do so – is the pivotal difference between enabling meaningful engagement and settling for buy-in.

Without a leader’s resolute commitment to authentic involvement, the full measure of meaningful engagement will not be realized.

If we know that meaningful engagement is what we want and need in our organizations, how do we go about creating it?

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What’s the Driving Force Behind Engagement?

June 28, 2017Change Leadership, Foundations for Changebuy-in, change, change leadership, change management, engagement, leading change, meaningful engagement, organization change, organizational changeGary Frank

In my previous post Meaningful Engagement vs. Buy-In: What's the Difference and Why Should I Care?, I posed two questions.

“… why do we continue to manage change in ways that do not truly engage people and foster conditions where “meaningful engagement” can occur commonly?
Why do we continue to settle for “buy-in” when we want and actually need much more?"

I suggested five reasons why many organizations settle for buy-in rather than aspire to meaningful engagement. I refer you to the previous post for the specifics (Buy-In vs. Engagement: What’s the Difference and Why Should I Care?). Briefly, though, I argued that buy-in more often triumphs as the objective of change management because it doesn’t require the same level of leader or manager commitment that meaningful engagement does. Aiming for buy-in just doesn’t demand as much time and effort and, in the end, expediency wins.

BUT, and it’s a big but, I argued that tacit buy-in doesn’t produce nearly as much commitment as meaningful engagement and the co-creation of change can. Done right, meaningful engagement in organizational change has the potential to:

Strengthen everyone’s understanding of the need for and direction of change
Deepen commitment to the change process and objectives
Stimulate co-creation of solutions
Build business literacy and other important business skills
Accelerate the pace of change, and
Propel the change beyond the envisioned outcome

In this post, we’ll continue this exploration of meaningful engagement and pose two additional questions.

How does meaningful engagement produce more than simple buy-in?
What are the dynamics at work?

Continue reading →

Leading Change in the Middle

April 6, 2016Change Leadershipbecoming an effective change leader, change leadership, change management, communication, leading change, organizational changeGary Frank

Leading change is challenging enough even when your job title is President or Chief Executive Officer. However, when your title isn’t President or Chief anything and you lead in the mid-level of your organization, leading change is even more challenging. That’s because:

YOU didn’t get to decide on the change
YOU didn’t get to set the vision
YOU may or may not have been involved in developing the change plan or the messaging
But YOU ARE expected to execute the change for the unit you lead

What can you do to lead change effectively in the middle? Continue reading →

Impacts of Organizational Change

January 4, 2016Foundations for Changechange impacts, change management, impact of change, organizational changeGary Frank

People prefer stability. It may seem odd to read that as the opening sentence of a blog on the subject of organizational change, but let me say that again. People prefer stability. It’s part of the human condition. For all of the inevitability and necessity of change that we talk about, we actually prefer things to be stable and predictable.

When change occurs – and it always does - we find it disruptive. Exactly how disruptive a change may be is highly individual. The amount of disruption we experience is a function of how much the change affects our individual construct of reality – the routines, preferences, habits, patterns, and ways we understand things. As we all know, this disruption can range from minor inconvenience to the “sky is falling.”

It is axiomatic that the level of change management that must be applied to a change effort is directly proportional to the amount of change people will experience. If this is true, how do you assess the impact of change in order to plan for the level of support? Where do you look and what do you examine?

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Leading Change: The Special Case of the Middle Manager

September 29, 2015Change Leadershipchange, leading change, middle manager, organizational changeGary Frank

Leading change is too difficult and complicated to accomplish alone. It requires a support network to augment your personal sponsorship and direct leadership. Much has been written about building an effective sponsor network and it’s all relevant and true. However, there is a significant resource at your disposal that is often over-looked and untapped.

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What Does It Take to Lead Change?

September 4, 2015Change Leadershipalignment, change leadership, communicating change, impact of change, leadership, leading change, organizational change, urgency, visionGary Frank

In today’s world, the pace of organizational change has increased dramatically and there’s no end in sight. This pace is being driven by escalating competition, globalization (including emerging economies like BRICS), the pace of technical innovation, and the demand for ever-increasing improvement in performance. Ultimately, this means that leaders have to execute change in timeframes that are increasingly shorter.

Given this challenging set of circumstances, what’s a leader to do?

Continue reading →