Implementing changes to your business can bring in successful upgrades, making your business more profitable or for social enterprise, create more impact on your community. But how do you start a successful change for your business to make it stronger?
Understanding the Theory of Change and the strategies to implement change successfully in your organization or company is going to be paramount to your success. These strategies will alleviate the fiction usually caused when change is ushered into an already established institution.
One way to start is by applying essential steps about successful change. What are these steps? Allow us to enumerate and explain each one of them. We will explore the 5 Steps of Successful Change.
1. Understand and Embrace the Fact that Change is Complex
Applying changes is not easy. It is very complex and must be done bit by bit. It’s not something that you can apply in a snap of your finger. You need to understand that some people are not very keen to change. Some of them do not really want to change.
Just because you think that something is not working, and you decided to apply a certain change to it, doesn’t mean that your employee will immediately adapt to it in a blink. They might start thinking that they are already doing a lot of things, and now you want to add more. They will not be accepting these changes with open arms, because you are asking them to step outside their comfort zone.
But just because there are some hesitancies in doing or applying the change that you want doesn’t mean that it cannot be done. You just need to make your employees understand your plans and let them embrace these changes slowly, adapt to them and implement them.
A proper approach to the application of these changes is the first step that you need to apply.
2. Building Trust
Trust is a very important thing. You need to build your trust in the people that you want to apply these changes. Remember, they need to KNOW, LIKE, and TRUST you. It’s like building your credibility with them. You need to show them that you are a person of your word.
You need to assure them that you are with them, every single step, no matter what happens. If they have concerns or grievances, they can always come to you for help or clarifications. No Judgement, but plain understanding that change can sometimes be difficult, and that you will do this together.
Building trust is done through small steps, developing that connection between you and your team, to implement the bigger change for a better result.
3. Create – Converge – Coordinate
Start by creating a plan. What do you want to change? What is your goal for the change? You need to have a reason for why you want to do this change as well as a goal that you want to achieve by doing this change.
Next is Converge. Find the key people in your company, preferably people from the managerial position for each department, and create a team with them to help you discuss the best course of action for you to implement this change.
And when it comes to rolling out these changes, you need to do it step by step. Therefore, you will need to coordinate these changes on how you want to implement these changes and how long it will need you to take to fully apply these changes.
4. Engage the Stakeholders in your plans
As mentioned above, you need to converge with the key people of your business. Not just your employee, but also the people who invested interest in the company. It can be the shareholders, board of directors, advisory boards, or investors. You need to let them know about your plan and make them understand the reason for these changes. Your plan on how to implement it, and the result that you are expecting to achieve. This is important because these people are directly involved in the company and thus, they will also be affected by these changes. That Is why you need to keep them involved.
5. Shift Systems with Human Capital
Human Capital is the people that are working for your company. As mentioned, you need to keep your employees involve in your plans for change. Asking them better ways on how to implement these changes.
Why is this important? Sometimes, you might find things are not working for a particular field or department, but you are not an expert on that aspect either. This is where the key people in your company come in. They can help you implement this change more effectively by getting their inputs about those fields or departments.
You might also start to consider using technology in your systems, but sometimes, this might not work for the best as well because there are things that a computer can and cannot do. Investing in Human Capital is still the best approach for your business.
Now that you understand the 5 steps that you need to do to apply or create successful changes to your business, you can start thinking and evaluating your plans for changes, and the goals that you want to achieve from it.
If you need help in evaluating and analyzing your business to make it more successful, visit our website and send us a message! We will be happy to take on the challenge of helping you plan, discuss and apply the necessary changes to help you make your business become successful!