 Hello, good afternoon. My name is Judith Mason, and I would like to welcome you to today's webinar Express, leading and managing through change hosted by CIM Yorkshire. Before we get started, I'd just like to go over a few things so you know how the event will work and how to participate. Presentational will last for approximately 30 to 35 minutes, followed by a short 10 minute question and answer session. You'll be able to post any questions you have by typing into the Ask a question chat box in the Q&A panel, which you'll see on the right hand side of your screen. You can send in your questions at any time during the presentation and will attempt to answer as many as we can during the Q&A session at the end. If you want to share your thoughts on social media, we are using the hashtag CIM Events. The webinar is being recorded and we will share a link to the recording with you over the next few days. You'll also be emailed a short feedback survey after the event, which we'd love you to complete. It'll only take a few minutes. All survey responses are anonymous, so please do let us know your thoughts. I'd now like to hand you over to Nick Girling, who is our guest speaker today. Thank you Judith, and good afternoon everybody. Yes, my name is Nick Girling and I'm a very, very lucky guy. One of the reasons I'm so fortunate is that I've been able to deliver training and coaching and consultancy workshops on leadership and change management on five different continents over the last 17 years. I've worked with people who speak over 50 different languages and I've met people I would never have normally met and I've been to places I would never have normally been to without being in this sector. I'm a really lucky guy. The clients that I work with range from small-medium enterprises, often owner-managed businesses, sometimes 10-15 employees up to 250, right the way through to global stock market listed organisations with literally thousands of employees around the globe. What I've found over the years is that whatever the business strategy is, whatever the change in direction of business has been asked to try and achieve, whatever the objectives they're working towards are, it always comes down to one thing, and that is to people. In marketing, of course, you guys have not only got to deal with changes yourselves, and that sometimes will be whether or not you believe it's the right thing to do at the right time, and that's something for later in the presentation. You also have to get your team aligned around producing the internal and the external messaging and the campaigns, and pretty much everything to ensure that everybody is on the same page across the organisation to support a transformation or a change effort. So that's what we're going to talk about for the next 35, 40 minutes or so. I have to say, I do feel a little bit like Robin Williams' character in Good Morning Vietnam, where in the movie he's a US soldier who's also running a radio show broadcasting to the US troops in the Vietnam Peninsula, and he's in his little studio, and he actually doesn't know if anybody's listening. Now, I believe there's around 400 people signed up for this, so I hope it's some folk out there are listening, and anybody who's under the age of 35, apologies for the reference to a movie that was made in 1987. It is, however, a really good movie. So, I'm guessing most of you are here today because either you're implementing change in your organisation or your team, or you are suffering the implementation of change of your working practices by your leaders and managers. And I use the word suffering in inverted commas. And I sometimes refer to this as having change being inflicted upon us, which seems like a really harsh word inflicted. And of course, not all change is harsh, and not all change is necessarily difficult by any means. But I use the word inflicted again, advisedly, because oftentimes the change wasn't our idea, and we probably wouldn't be doing it in the new way if something or someone hadn't forced our hand. And of course, the current situation we're in at the moment, particularly when people working from home, is a really good example of that. So you see on your screen, if you're looking at your screen, a beautiful image. Of a beach, which is actually in the Bahamas. And you can imagine we're going on a 12-hour flight to this beautiful beach destination, turquoise, beautiful coloured sea, golden sands. You can almost feel the ambient temperature of about 30-35 degrees with a little breeze to take the edge off. And this is where we're headed on our vacation. And when we arrive, we find that they are building this right in the middle of the beach where we want to have our relaxing two-week holiday. And this is some huge leisure hotel complex. Now this is a classic case of our preconceived image of reality, our ideas of reality being confronted with a change that was not of our making. And sometimes our desire for the preconceived or historic, because it's experiential, we've experienced it. So our preconceived or historic image of reality, i.e. the beach, is so strong that we have difficulty in working through, I don't know, a new process, new systems, personnel change, new boss or whatever it may be in a positive and engaging manner. So over the next 30, 40 minutes or so, what we're going to talk about is firstly, what is change? Secondly, how do people react to change and why do they react in the way they do? And thirdly, how can you help yourself and your team and others around you to manage through it? And as Judy said, we will also finish with a Q&A, so please do happily send in your questions during the chat box and we'll try to work with them. Now, I'm not going to specifically relate this to COVID-19 and many of us have faced enormous emotional and physical financial structural operational changes because of this pandemic. And it's highly likely because of the numbers on the call that some of us have experienced adverse effects for our family members or our friendship groups. And if that's the case, my thoughts are with you. So I'm not going to go too deeply into the pandemic. We're going to talk about high level generic approaches to understanding change and how it affects you and your people. And then, as I said, finish with some suggestions as to how we can support you through it. You will notice top right of the screen, a tiny little picture of me. That's my LinkedIn profile picture. You can search for me on LinkedIn and I will happily accept any connection requests with pleasure. You'll also see on every slide at the bottom in the footer is my email address. So if you want any of the resources or have any further questions, please feel free to engage. I'm very happy to work with the Chartered Institute. So please feel free to dive in and ask anything that you wish in the future. So I guess the first question really is, guys, is what is changed? Well, there have been millions of words written on this topic and some of them are in depth academic studies. There is huge amounts of research done on it. And some of them are more easier to read and relatable works. So I'm recommending two for you at either ends of the spectrum. The one on the left is a Harvard Business Review document, which I can send to if you wish, by Professor John Cotter, who's widely considered to be the godfather of change management. And it's entitled, Leading Change, Why Transformation Efforts Fail. And a horrifying statistic that 70% of transformation efforts do not succeed. So he talks very carefully about that. It's just a snapshot of his work. Search him out if you don't know him already. Read his books, look at his stuff online. He's got some great stuff online. And this guy really can help you with organisational and structural change. The other one is a little bit more light-hearted, equally good though in a different sense by Dr Spencer Johnson. It's an airport read or perhaps not at the moment, but you could read it on a train in an hour and a half. And it's a wonderful story about how people approach the opportunity in different ways of a change or change management. So sticking with this then, what is it? Well, in terms of a definition, the Oxford English dictionary would say it's an act or process through which something becomes different. That's kind of simple, right? I like simple, simple really works. And I like to make it even more simple because change is really just moving from state A to state B. So for example, we don't use digital marketing in our business. State A, state B is, we do now. State A, I have a job and a career. State B, there's some redundancy consultations going around. State A, we have a CEO of the business who fully understands and supports the marketing function. State B, she leaves and the new guy comes in and we have to sort of try and break him in and bring him around to some new ways of thinking. So moving from state A to state B. And if you think about this, we can get there in two very different ways. Firstly, evolutionary, gradual change. And you'll have no doubt seen this very famous image before. So an evolutionary system is often one step at a time. So for example, the implementation of a new quality management system in a business or a new CRM system is usually implemented in incremental steps slowly over a period of time. Or we can be quite radical or revolutionary. One day there's a government, the next day men with guns come, there's no government. It's a revolution. So if we were to announce a new CRM system, CRM system, for example, and say as of tomorrow you will not be allowed to use the old system, it's shut down, that's pretty radical. And it can often get radical responses like what the heck have they done that for and how is this going to affect my workflow and what a stupid thing to do and all the expressions that we might hear when people are in the middle of a revolutionary or radical change. Now what is interesting for me is that this change is often the same changes received in a different way. So the introduction of a new CRM system, for example, maybe at the company town hall meeting on a cold Monday morning in November, could seem to everybody that didn't know it was coming as quite revolutionary. But of course the team that have been working on it for months or in some cases years, it would be evolutionary because they've got to the stage they're at in incremental stages. So what that means for you guys, if you're involved in planning of any change of working practices with your team or with a wider organisation, by the time you announce it, it could be so familiar to you that you might overlook the feelings and the behaviours of the people that were hearing it for the first time. Now a good example of this is this guy. This guy is Dick Fosbury and Dick Fosbury was an Olympic high jumper back in 1968 in the Mexico Olympics. He won the gold medal by coming into the arena and instead of straddling the bar, which all of his competitors have been doing in the past, he actually flopped over it backwards now using the Fosbury flop and it's still being used to this day. And for him, this was evolutionary change. He knew he wasn't able to be the current Olympic record with the straddle jump, so him and his coaching team worked on evolving and designing a new way of doing it. But for the watching world, it was absolutely radical. It was revolutionary. Some people even cried cheat and foul and how dare he and all these sort of great things. So, of course, a lot depends on who decides on the change. And in Fosbury's case, he did. So it was no problem for him, as you can imagine. So what I'd like you to do, I know we can't interact too well, but just for five or 10 seconds, I'd like you all to think about a couple or one significant change you've been through in your life. It may have been at home, it worked personally, it could have been at work, but it's something that was significant, but it was not of your design. So I'll just give you five or 10 seconds to think of something. OK, all got something in your mind. I'm sure you have good. So try and remember how you felt at the beginning of that change. And one of the best tools that we use, it's been around a long time, but one of the best tools we use to help coach people through change management and understand the feelings and the behaviors of their people. Is Elizabeth Kubler Ross and her morning curve. Now you will have seen this, I'm sure many of you and those of you that haven't great then welcome to the morning curve. There are different permutations of this tool, but the great thing about this is that it gives you a heads up on where people's feelings and therefore their attitudes and behaviors are as they transition through a change in working practices. And if you can think back to when you first went through this change that was imposed upon you, I'm going to take you through the curve, you see some little cartoon guys, I'm going to explain to you what's happening on the slide. And to do it, I'm going to talk about a genuine and real client of mine who is an American organization, global organization, and they have everything outside of the Americas, they call the international business and that is run from Europe. And three years ago, the general manager of the Europeans of the international business decided to move back to the America and resigned his position. He went back into the into the mothership if you like, back into the States. And when this was announced to the business, the first thing they found themselves in was absolute denial. I can't believe that he's gone back to America. We had a five year strategy. We're only barely through the year three. I cannot believe that he's done that to us. Why would he make such a decision? So all of these expressions were being articulated in the business. And then you'll see the next guy on the curve who is actually looking pretty mad. He's hopping mad with anger. And expressions began to come out about the guy and how he'd let them down and how could the company have allowed this to happen. And then what was really interesting is they got wind of who they were hiring his replacement and it was somebody from a competitor company. Now, it wasn't exactly directly competitive, but they were in the same sector. And this newcomer or this new guy and the company was coming from had a reputation for quite a lot of hard nosed get business done type of approach. So the anger spilled into why have they hired this guy? That will never work here. What kind of a decision is this? And they began to question the decision making and also the fact that they haven't used the succession plan and recruited from within to fill this general manager role. A lot of anger, a lot of denial. Now you'll notice the colour of the curve is changing from deep red through to sort of ambery, then light amber, orangey into green, then fully green at the end. And you'll see why as we go ahead. Because the next stage, the guy with the old fashioned biplane in his head, that's a metaphor and he's got some tears coming out of his eyes, is nostalgia. It's always better before and this began to manifest itself in some of the behaviours and some of the commentary in the business. People would say things like, well, it was better when the last guy was here. We didn't have to do that. We weren't asked to do that type of reporting. We were not asked to engage with the market in this type of way. So lots of looking backwards, denial, anger, nostalgia. And then of course we get to this bit, the fear. And this is fear of the future. This is the fear of the unknown. Can I do this? Am I going to be under more scrutiny under this new regime? That was one of the big fears in this business. What was going to change in a different way to the way they've been working for the last three, five years? So lots of fear. The next guy's got a picture of a euro sign. It could be a dollar or it could be a pound sign, but it's to signify bargaining. And it's not the type of bargaining where you go to the boss and say, if you're going to do this to me, I'd need more money or better conditions or a better car, whatever it is. So it's not that type of bargaining. It's the bargaining that we sit at home, maybe talking to our partner, our family, or maybe lying in bed alone and go, am I going to do this? Now, if it's a huge change, it could be something as serious as, am I going to stay with the business? If it's a smaller change, it could be something as, do I want to get on board with this? Do I actually want to do this? Am I bothered? So this type of bargaining goes on as we transition through the curves. And we hear at this stage a lot of people using that wonderful expression, yes, but. So you'll hear things like, yes, I see why they're doing it, but it would have been better if we'd have done this. So as you take people through change in your organisations, we'll talk about yes, but again in a moment, but listen out for the yes, but attitudes that you see around you. Next, finally, we're coming out into some sort of green colour and there's a, you know, a knock on the head and somebody says, right, I'm going to have to do something. I'm making a decision and I'm going to move forward with this. The rocket is a metaphor for the newer technology moving forward as opposed to the old fashioned biplane. And then finally we have some commitment to move forward. Now, whatever changes you're going through or whatever you're asking your people to go through, whether it be now or in the future, there's no doubt they will travel through a transition curve, a morning curve like this. And sometimes it's a tremendous pace that can be done in a heartbeat, particularly if the change is not too much of an issue for them. So I've got another client who has a UK based in the UK. They have a US operation about 100 people and they decided to ask all their staff to come into work through the back door of the building and no longer through the main reception, right? So for most people, this was not a problem whatsoever. I doubt there was any bargaining, any readjustment required. Most people just sort of shrug their shoulders with an OK of acceptance, no skin off my nose and they started to come in through the back door. Now there were two people that absolutely hated the idea and they continued to let themselves into the front and they justified this because the whole reason for this change was they wanted to move to a more customer centric operation, really a customer centric culture. They wanted to create in the reception area, not a thoroughfare for people coming in and out, but mainly for guests and visitors. And their justification was they got in the office so early, there were no visitors there. So these guys, there were two of them, I remember them really well. They would moan about the change in the cafeteria by the water cooler. And more importantly, they'd linked their dissatisfaction to other decisions that had recently been made as part of the wider focus on this customer enhancement, this customer experience. And if we think about the curve, they were both in the denial and anger stage. And they said so often, which was a good thing. And then you might be wondering why I say it's a good thing. Well, if you look at the slide, it's because they made it clear to their managers they were not happy, which of course presented an opportunity to find out why. And like most things in life, if people express their feelings to us, at least we know where we stand and we can try and do something about it. My worst experience when trying to help and coach people through a change management program is the ones who get to the middle of the slide bargaining and choice and either consciously or subconsciously are not able to move forward. Now these are the most difficult guys and girls to recognise because they talk about understanding it. They say all the right things in the meetings, they say all the right things in the one to one with you if you're a manager, and they continue to do the opposite in terms of their behaviour. So if it was a cultural change initiative where we're trying to enhance the speed of response, they would miss deadlines, they would fail to communicate. Now interestingly, when you challenge them, they always have an apology and they often have a justification for the reason why. And sometimes there's even an uptick in the behavioural change trend immediately because as a manager or as a colleague you say, hey guys get with the program, they're really sorry yet, sorry you're right. But that change is usually short lived. And these are the hardest ones to spot. So this is why it's so important to have engagement with everybody in your team and making sure you can check where they are and what behaviours and what attitudes they're demonstrating. So the guys in your business or your teams that are vocal about disliking a change, they can articulate it and they're good to have around for a couple of reasons. One, because by speaking to them you know where you stand, as we've said already, but the other thing is they could be right. They could have a very reasoned argument as to why the new way is not as viable as you think it is. And that's really worth the engagement. So I guess the message here, ladies and gentlemen, is dialogue. You know, even the ones who appear to be accepting of the change on the outside, they need to be spoken to. Particularly if they are early adopters and change champions, because we need to recognise them and empower them and to evangelise about the change. And they will have good ideas and they will be doing great things in the workplace. They'll have tips and tricks and methods of working that you can share or help them to share with others. And Cota refers to these as ambassadors and they're vital. So if you are going through any cultural change or organisational change at the moment, find out who these people are, engage with them and recognise them. They're vital to leading the change forward. Now, when I've explained that, usually in a workshop environment with a bunch of folk in the room, I often get a rhetorical question or a bit of a moaning question from somebody who says, oh my goodness, I see it now. Why didn't I consult more with my team before I'd started to drive a change? I can see why I should have done this. And this is a great question and there's a good reason why we don't do it. And over my leadership career, I've been completely guilty of this as well. So this is the reason why we don't do it. And it's the opposite of the morning curve. This is called the discovery curve. Now, many of you will have absolutely had some brilliant ideas through the course of your career. And even at home, you know, I know, let's do this. It's a great idea. And that sometimes gives us a certain sense of naive enthusiasm. Okay. The best example, and he's a fabulous friend of mine now as well, but I was working with a guy who's an operations director. And he was looking after three production plans for this for this company. And we were working with him in a leadership programme and he shared with us that he decided that he should have a play. He didn't change it completely, but he should play with the bonus and overtime structures across the three plans. Because they were tasked with driving some cost out of the business. And he said, I know what we can do. So we got the spreadsheets out and he had a look and it looked great on paper. And he spoke to his management team and they said, yeah, that looks good. And then he spoke to his boss and he said, yes, that looks good. And then he announced it and you'll see the image of the lady next. She's sitting up in bed rather starkedly awake with a rude awakening. Because when we then announced the decision, people are in the stage where they go, you are joking. What on earth have you done that for? And in this particular case, there was talk of unions being involved and strikes and goodness as well. So it was a pretty serious. Now that, of course, as the initiator of the change, because it's your idea, brings you to have a certain amount of doubt. You reexamine the situation, maybe look if it's a financial situation. Look at the figures again, maybe do a bit more consultation. Talk to your team more, find out what they're really feeling, which hopefully brings a revisiting of what you're trying to achieve, which gives a second wind and then some hope and confidence. And finally, we're rushing forward to achieve what we're trying to achieve. And this is why it stops us sometimes having a dialogue because we're so sure about what we want to do. But if you think about the two curves together, while we're having our fantastic, wonderful idea with lots of naive enthusiasm, somebody else is going, you're kidding. I can't believe you're even thinking of doing that. Then they say, and now I'm going to leave. I'm going to walk out. We're going to get the unions involved or whatever it is. The anger and the nostalgia comes around as we have our root awakening. As we start to reexamine it with a little bit of doubt about the reason behind why we're driving the change. We've got some fear and some bargaining going on with the team around us and so on and so forth. So you really do see how people are working through. So the key to this is to understand where they are on the change curve and how you are influencing them. Either as a good colleague or if you are in the wonderful position of managing and leading people, how do you do it as their manager leader coach? So how do we do this? Well, there are a number of things we can do up front. And the first and most importantly is to consult. I am asked and my organisation, the small team I have were asked to go talk to clients on a number of occasions. And the horse has already bolted because the consultation process about what they're trying to achieve has not been done before whatever they're trying to achieve has been announced and attempted to be implemented. So speak to your team. And if it's a wider organisation, a bigger organisation, create working parties, create focus groups, get people to discuss openly and freely in a trustful environment, how do they feel about what we're trying to achieve? What could the objectives be? Particularly if the objectives have come down from a group or from an HQ, for example. And Cotter would call this building the case for change and assembling a key set of advocates or ambassadors. And then most importantly, make sure you remember and remind people of what won't change. There is often a long and enriching list of things that are not going to be different and it's often overlooked. It's not mentioned and that's because we take the good stuff for granted and we focus on the stuff we think is going to be difficult. So find a list of things that won't change and articulate it. So a particular client that works in professional services had everybody working from home and she said to a team, she said, look, we're going to work from home on a short term, maybe long term basis. We don't know at the moment, but I promise you, my dear team, the regular one to ones you have with me as your manager will not change. We will still hold those, albeit over teams. And now that we've got to the place where we can come together in smaller groups, she's bringing them together once a month for the regular meeting. So she was able to say, we're going to continue doing this and we'll have beer and cake afterwards and whatever else they used to do in a safe and socially distanced way. But she made very clear that although a number of things about the way they were working were going to change, she made very clear what wouldn't change. It's a key problem with change management. We don't work on what's not going to change. So there are four levers and I'm conscious of the clock. So we're going to try and get through this so we have time for some questions. Four main levers to implement when we're leading and managing a change situation. The first one, understanding and conviction. It's really critical that the people around you, the people in your team fully understand why it's happening and what it means to them. It has to be meaningful. Now, if you take this on a high level, and I mean high level as in a helicopter level, how does that fit with the company or even the individual team within the company? How does that fit with their purpose, their vision, their mission, their values? How does it tie in with the objectives and strategy? How does it fit with your own team members, individual personal values, which I'm sure will be pretty much aligned to yours and the company ones? So that's quite a high level of understanding. But then on a smaller scale, can they or a lower level, can they see the reason behind the change? So the backdoor example from my client in America. Once those two guys realised that by leading by example, they were helping to really drive a cultural customer centric changing culture. They were completely up for it because they realised it's experienced and long standing members of the team. If they were to actually do this, everybody else would do it as well. So it has to fit with people in terms of understanding and conviction on a very high level in the purpose of the vision of the organisation and the understanding on a sort of day to day operational level. And that speaks very much to the second one, which is role modelling. And again, if you haven't seen that paper from Cotter, you'll hear a lot about role modelling in that paper from Cotter. If people are leading by example, you have a heck of a good chance of the change being implemented successfully. There is absolutely no place for a do as I say, not as I do culture. They have to look around themselves and see everybody else trying, and I mean trying, you don't have to succeed necessarily straight away, but trying to do the same things and the right things. And you cannot do as I say, not as I do. And we've seen in our public life some examples of that over the last few months. Thirdly, talent and skills. So if you asked me to change my modus operandi and present this to you in French, I've had a few beers in French bars after playing rugby, but I'm not that good. So I would need a lot of training, a lot of talents and tools. So it's really important that if you're going to ask people to do stuff differently, for example a change in cultural emphasis, you've got to train and coach your leaders on how to deliver that, how to bring those new skills and behaviours. If it's a new product launch, for example, invest time in training the recipients of all of your wonderful support stuff on how they can use it and why they should use it. A change of reporting methodology, another example, train the people on how to use the new systems. Train their managers on how to follow up and coach them through so they actually get implemented. The last thing that we need to do when we ask people to change their behaviour is hamstring ourselves or make them hamstrung because they're not able to do it because they don't know how. Finally, the last piece of the jigsaw is to create formal mechanisms and structures. This can be really basic. If you want your people to report metrics in a different way, ensure the process or the tool that you give them is fit for purpose. Is it automated? I've got some clients who give people three different spreadsheets to answer ostensibly the same question. So, is the tool and the mechanism that you're handing to people going to work for them? If as part of the change you need people to have a one-to-one with you at the same time every week, make sure you formally keep that process in place. Don't pull them out to do something else. I've a client and met device and we've delivered them a fabulous new sales methodology and it's gone global, it's really great. Some teams are doing better than others and the ones that are doing really well with it are the ones who've put the formal mechanisms in place to have the one-to-ones with their team to ensure it's still implemented and delivered. I've got one guy who's a lovely guy but he's a vice president of sales and he keeps pulling his people out of technical and soft skills training meetings so they can chase opportunity, which obviously we all love opportunity but if you're going to do that then it undermines by not having a formal process. I hope that makes a bit of sense. Once we're embarked on the journey and maybe some of you are already in a change journey right now, keep the dialogue open. Hold regular one-to-ones with all your key stakeholders and if it's a smaller team hold them with the whole team. If it's a bigger organisation then keep the focus groups going. Keep getting feedback from people on a wide spectrum of issues and be careful to use something that's on the slide here. It talks about emotion-based open questions. I know a lot of leaders who are quite good at asking open questions but they tend to only ask fact-based open questions. What do I mean by that? Fact-based open question gives you a fact as an answer. For example, I might say to my team, when did you roll out phase two? I'll say it was in August, Nick. How many new clients did we get? 167. What was the size of the percentage take-up? Who were the main stakeholders you've identified? You'll see that these are all open questions but they only give me facts which are useful. What we really need to do in terms of dialogue to help people come with us on change journeys is to ask questions that tap into emotions. For example, how did you feel when you first heard the news that we were all going to have to work from home for the next foreseeable future? For example, how are you coping with that? You look to me like you're doing great. What are you doing to make this go so well? I just noticed you had a fantastic success last week. What did you feel when you got that success? What was the practices that you used in order to bring that success forward? What are you enjoying about it? All of these questions are emotion-based questions which really tap into the feelings. Something a very wise man who I won't wax lyrical about but somebody I'm so pleased I met in my mid-twenties. He once said to me, Nicky said, if you're not getting good answers, you might very well not be asking very good questions which is a real reflective look in the mirror and he's absolutely right and you see that on the screen. So if you manage a small team, my advice will be checking with them regularly how they're feeling, what successes can you celebrate with them, where are the wins that you can replicate with others and also what are their fears? How can you help coach them through those fears? How can we get over them? Because the sooner you know about those, the better. Okay, so we're nearly done. The last slide is just a little reminder. I'm sure you'll have come across this before but maybe some of you have taken some notes. Maybe some of you have had some value from this little half an hour. The most important thing is what will you do with it? Because reflection without action doesn't mean much. So maybe you make yourself a little action plan. Maybe you already have. Thank you very much. I'm sure you all listened and you weren't doing a good morning Vietnam on me, so thank you very much. And I think it's over to Judith for some Q&A. Right, that's great. Thanks, many thanks Nick. We're now going to have a short 10 minute Q&A session. As a reminder, you can still submit your questions via the chat box in the Q&A panel. So obviously if you want to submit any questions and I'll ask the first question. Why does change take so long and why is it so difficult? Wow, is that a question for me? Why does it take? Well, it doesn't always, Judith. Change doesn't always take so long. It depends on what we're trying to do. If you're looking at changing people's attitudes and culture in the workplace, that can take a long time. And the reason it's so difficult is because we're all human and we all go through the change curve and the morning curve we talked about there at different paces. It makes sense to some of us immediately and to others it doesn't. And I think also one of the main reasons and I've already talked about this a little bit in the talk is we're not engaged with, we don't engage enough with people. Even if you think many of you I guess will have families and I've got 17 and 19 year old kids now and if I want to try and help them to do something differently because I think it would be better for them in the future, they've got to buy it. It's a bit of a sales job. So I think that sometimes change takes so long because we don't really think about the way we communicate and how we engage with people when we're trying to address something and make stuff move differently. So it doesn't always take long, but I mean I'm working with a client still from 2012 we're still going through a cultural leadership change. So what's that eight years and we're still working on it. People come and go and we're getting there but it's not where they want it to be just yet. OK, thank you. And then we've got a question from Natasha. Is it difficult without consultation with the team without prematurely giving away what the actual changes? That's a great question Natasha, depending on what it is of course because if you're in any sort of HR or legal space then you're not going to sit down and say OK guys we're thinking of losing five of you, which one of you is it going to be. So that would be hard. But if you were thinking about something like of changing working practices. So how do we get the best out of the situation where we're only allowed in the office at certain times? For example, sit down with the guys and say look this is this is where we're at. We have to abide by these new rules. We have to keep everybody safe. What do you think we should do? So you're actually asking for input. You're asking for ideas. So you're helping shape the future of the change because the change may have already happened and it could have been one of those that was inflicted upon us. So it was out of our hands. You may have a new method of education being passed down through the organization from head office. We're now going to do this instead of this. Particularly in a sales function. So you'd sit down with the team and say OK this is what it is so I'm going to announce the change but tell me a little bit how you think we could help implement it successfully. But if your question is leading towards things that you can't share just yet then yes of course that's more challenging and you can't share those until the change has been actually decided. Next question from anonymous. What do you do with staff that are change resistant? Any tips? Well Yeah Any tips I'm a great believer if you go back to the morning curve slider when you'll get these slides I think so there is only so long that you can work with folk to come forward with you. Now I'm assuming two ways one if you have the direct manager of this person and one if you're a colleague. So let's take the colleague first it can be extremely frustrating when people around you are not going the same way. There's something called Napoleon's Thirds which is a methodology using change management. It comes from when Napoleon used to take his armies across the plane you know 10,000 people and he'd say guys we're going over the top we're off to battle and a third of them would say yes Napoleon we're with you. And the third would say you're kidding Napoleon we're not going anywhere. And then another third would sit in the middle and just be resistant and wait to see which way the land lies and which one of the Thirds won. So one of the things you can do is really try and engender a culture around the change resistor of people who were succeeding and keep sharing the successes and the reason why they're doing so well with it and why it's a good idea. So I'm a great believer in doing that. I'm also a great believer in direct feedback. The coaching questions we talked about emotion based questions yes try and get to the bottom of it and then I'm going to be completely brutal with you Mr Ommis is anonymous. Some people are just not ready and there comes a time when you have a different conversation. If it's going to damage what you're trying to achieve as a team or trying to achieve as an organisation then there comes a time when you've given all the coaching you can give and all the explanations you can give and all the opportunity you can give there comes a time when you have to have a different conversation. And this sort of link to that question the next one is from Ashley. Could Nick suggest a couple of ways to identify those change ambassadors so the enthusiastic ones. Is it best to have a mix of enthusiastic and skeptical colleagues for instance? So no Ashley it's not. So the change ambassadors are the ones that are really winning with it. You can bring the skeptical ones in to discuss whether or not you think it's a you know is the idea solid and use them. Disney used to do this Disney corporation used to have something called the Disney triangle they would keep the creatives away from the people who go yeah that's never going to work because the poor creatives will get shot down in flames but the people who say that's never going to work are really valuable because they actually sometimes have some really valid views they're not just being negative. So what Disney is to separate them even put them in different cities. So I would yeah I would only have as change ambassadors folk who were actually really succeeding. They don't have to be gregarious and stand on a platform and and sing hallelujah but guys who were really working well with it so find out what they're doing. So if they're having a really good time with something they've figured a way through it and it then find out what it is and get them to share it with the others and praise them and reward them and recognise them publicly. Next question from Shelly how do you manage your work through lots of different changes happening at the same time? Carefully Is the short answer Shelly Carefully I wish I could speak to you because I don't know what you mean in terms of you know sometimes they're all linked to a bigger change that the organisation is trying to make so you may have six or eight different changes of working practices. One of the things that people do make the mistake of doing is giving people to do too much to do at once So there's certainly something called change weariness or change fatigue and I honestly have worked with some organisations as an advisor, as a consultant where you just want to say guys slow down you know it takes some more time so if there's multiple things going on pick the ones that are going to be the most beneficial pick the ones that really tie into the purpose and the vision and the mission of the business so that people can really hang their hat on that and try and work through them carefully. If I could talk to you I could maybe dig a little further with some questions but please feel free to email me if you wish. There's another similar question what would be the best way of keeping staff engaged when there's nothing further to tell them at the moment so in brackets they said they know there will be an announcement in November say so how do you keep people engaged in that? Right and again I don't know what the announcement in November will be but there's always something to tell them so it may not be specifically about whatever you're going to announce in November but there must be something that's going on that's good so you know keep telling them about what people are doing well keep telling them about how people are trying the hardest keep talking to them about how they're feeling because yeah to announce in what are we now 21st September to sort of say and I don't know the details so I'm not judging at all but to announce that something's going to come again in November there must be some idea about what that is so try and keep talking about whatever it is as opposed to just saying right guys see you in November sort of thing and I'm sure that isn't going to happen I'm sure that's not the case but there's always something to communicate on always if you look hard enough and then someone's asked a question why do some companies never follow through with changes Right so that's a fantastic question and on a big scale so this is when I said 70% of change transformation projects don't work they don't follow through because they're not able to create enough ambassadors who are living the change and that often is because they're not aligned at leadership level and what happens is it doesn't cascade down people are not held accountable to doing the right things on a daily basis so what then I've got so many examples I could share of this so they then just go find another new shiny toy to try and you say well okay the last one was more than good enough but we didn't implement it properly so it's to do with implementation it's often to do with real role modelling behaviour but it's also without being too sort of direct about it what gets inspected gets respected and often times managers are not strong enough to say to their teams okay we're doing this this way now let's have a catch up every Monday about X, Y and Z and then the following Monday they'll forget and then the following Monday they'll only talk about X and then the following Monday they'll forget again so the implementation, the real thorough follow through of coaching and helping them to feel comfortable with whatever the new thing is they're trying to achieve that's the key. I think we've got time for one more question this is from Thea do you have any advice for initiating change during this period of already intense change caused by the pandemic I feel people may be more resistant than usual. That's another good question it depends on what it is and if there's need then link it to everything we've talked about already in the webinar. That's all the time we have for our Q&A session today. I'd like to say thank you to Nick for today's presentation to CIM Yorkshire for organising the event and a thank you to you all for attending. We hope you found it interesting and worthwhile. Our next webinar will be entitled what the brain reveals about your marketing messages and that will be on Thursday the 8th of October at 1pm and that will be hosted by CIM South West. You'll find it listed on the events page on the CIM website where you can find out more information and register for the session. Once again you'll shortly be receiving a survey on today's event and would really appreciate it if you could provide your feedback. So on behalf of CIM thank you for joining us and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day.