Introduction
Some of these skills you can learn by studying one of these change management courses, whilst others are more generic skills that you might already possess.
Organisational change levels
Organisational change must be addressed at three levels which are described below.
Enterprise capability
Addressing this type of change requires change managers to assess and improve an organisation’s overall ability to adapt to adverse circumstance. This entails maintaining a change management department or team, detailing a set of processes for approaching change, and formal procedures for initiating change.
Organisational change management
This type of change management happens from the top, down. Organisational change managers generally deal with staff too numerous to help at the individual level and so they identify organisation-level processes, groups, and structures that will need to change, then create plans and guides to expedite this.
Individual change management
Individual change management begins at the individual level, focusing on employee motivation, resistance to change, and office mentalities.
The skills required to successfully manage change at these levels overlap, though each function emphasizes different responsibilities. For example, organisational change management requires a strategic focus while individual change management requires excellent interpersonal and communications skills.
Change manager skills
Change managers require a mix of business, digital and people skills. While this may be a very broad generalisation, here are just a few of the key skills most would expect a proficient change manager to exhibit.
1. Communication skills
Communication skills can help to achieve the following:
- Mitigate individual resistance to change resistance
- Promote collaboration and improve productivity
- Receive useful feedback from participants.
Communication skills are a non-negotiable part of a change manager’s skill set. The role involves direct communication with dozens of different roles at various levels of seniority across an organisation.
Change managers are not just charged with relaying information to different internal audiences. Knowing how to listen and extract information is needed to contextualize and understand the requirements of a change initiative.
Good change managers know how to share change management best-practices and communicate exactly what activities need to change without being pushy or abrasive. This is more difficult than you might expect, given that people are rarely predisposed to change. Most prefer to maintain the status-quo, as change is time-consuming and often frustrating.
Most importantly, change managers must be able to truthfully communicate the ability of an organisation to effectively manage change. Doing so creates a culture of problem-solving, rather than a culture of problem-avoidance.
2. Leadership skills
Leadership skills can:
- Give those most affected by change a good example to follow
- Give the organisation a vision to follow.
If a business is large enough to warrant it, change leadership may be handled by someone other than the change manager. In smaller organisations, change managers will often be expected to fill both roles.
3. Analytic skills
Analytic skills are required to:
- Evaluate current conditions
- Develop a plan that benefits the organisation
- Create a plan for change.
Change managers must have the ability to look at information and correctly deduce what issues a business is facing and how best to correct them. This might mean pouring through documentation, or it might mean listening to feedback from employees and stakeholders.
4. Vision
Having the skills to create a vision can:
- Show employees the potential benefit of change
- Motivation those involved to support change.
Change managers must be visionaries, creating strategic change plans. They must have the ability to tailor change management methodologies to suit each unique project or change initiative. They must also be able to draw on external resources and find ways to implement them into their strategies.
Long-term change management initiatives require a lot of forethought to ensure the organisation can continuously move forward, taking advantage of every opportunity, and improving the ways change is managed.
5. Hard Skills
Change management hard skills include:
- Knowledge of change models and frameworks
- An understanding of organisational psychology
- An understanding of project management best-practices.
On top of these skills, change managers must be intimately familiar with the company they are assisting. This includes the company’s history, its culture, and its marketplace, for starters.
Effective change practitioners must have the ability to not only assess change in terms of the people side but must also have the technical know-how to ensure change is supported and delivered correctly.
They must have the necessary project management knowledge and be able to outline dependencies, outcomes, responsibilities, and resources.
6. Digital Literacy
Digital literacy is required to:
- Create business models with software tools
- Estimate timelines and costs
- Read information from databases.
Modern change managers often need to use various software tools. Change managers that know how to get the best out of these tools will experience greater success than those that do not.
