Metadata
- Author: DAGWorks Inc.
- Full Title: Winning Over Hearts and Minds at Work: ADKAR My Favorite Change Management Approach
- URL: https://blog.dagworks.io/p/winning-hearts-and-minds-at-work
Highlights
- Each word is a step that models the process you need to convert someone to change; the easiest change is when an individual gets the internal motivation that’s required to change their behavior. Therefore ADKAR is meant to help you frame what to do and in what order to get someone motivated:
Awareness: Explain the need for change.
Desire: Foster a desire to participate and support the change.
Knowledge: Provide the knowledge required to change.
Ability: Ensure the capability to implement the change.
Reinforcement: Implement measures to sustain the change. (View Highlight)
- Awareness: Highlight the Need for Change I like to think there’s three things you have to do for this first step: (1) identify the problem(s), (2) find a good articulation, (3) communicate to your stakeholders! Identify the problem. To be able to highlight the need for change, you need to crisply identify the problem(s) you’re trying to address. For example, begin by clearly outlining the problems — slow code hand-off, frequent production outages, the lack of shared maintenance, and that there is Hamilton, that can be a solution to these problems. Determine how to articulate. My advice is to use real examples from your organization to illustrate how these problems are impacting efficiency and output to ground the problem(s). This makes the need for change more tangible and urgent. In our example we could reference a recent outage, or project that was impacted adversely when someone left, or teams did things in two different ways that lead to problems. Communicate to stakeholders. You then need to target the places where your stakeholders frequent to tell them, usually multiple times. So get up on your soapbox and start telling people. In my experience you frequently need to tell people multiple times that there’s a problem and a solution to it. So speak at your all-hands meetings, go to other team meetings, and set up 1-1s. In our example I would engage with senior team members, data scientists, and engineers to discuss these challenges, ensuring that the need for change is understood across the board and that Hamilton can solve them well. If you do this correctly, you should be able to ask people “have you heard about X” where X is the problem/solution, and they should nod their heads. So in our case here, we should be able to ask people “have you heard of Hamilton and the problems it’ll solve for us?” and they’ll be able to answer. (View Highlight)
- Desire: Building the Will to Change So now you’ve got people’s attention, i.e. they’re “aware”, you now need to build the “what’s in it for me” part of the story. What you say here will obviously be different based on your context and circumstances, and even the individual. So I like to think the three parts are (1) be prepared to address concerns, (2) highlight benefits if change was implemented, (3) personalize the message. Address concerns. You will likely get some push back, change is hard after all. If there are concerns, make them feel heard, and address their concerns if you can. These concerns should feed into ensuring you have the right content in later steps. With our example, we could acknowledge individual fears about job security, and the apprehensions regarding adopting new tools. (View Highlight)
- Highlight benefits. This part is important, as it will help (a) keep people thinking about the future, and (b) intrinsically motivate them to get the activation energy required to continue to have their attention for change to go through. I (View Highlight)
- Personalize the message. This one is hopefully obvious, but the benefits might not all be equal, and thus you will have to ensure you’re highlighting the right things to the right person. (View Highlight)
- Knowledge: Providing the information to be able to change So now people are motivated and know what and why they’re doing something, we now need to give them the knowledge they need to do it. Naturally this step is pretty tied into the next one - ability - so you might combine the two when planning things. The core part of this step is to make sure you have the knowledge resources required. Knowledge resources. These are your reference materials/resources to, for example to use for training sessions (next section), that you’ll use to help get people up to speed on what to do, to implement your change. How much, and what you do will depend on your context and circumstances. For example, with data and technical work, this should include documentation, tutorials, hands-on sessions, case studies, examples etc. In the context of our example, we would have: (View Highlight)
- Ability: Empowering one with the skills and resources required Okay great, you’ve got motivated people, they have the knowledge, and now you need to make sure they have the space/time/ability to implement the change. For example, if you aren’t aligned with management to actually get time to (a) hold a training session, (b) carve out time within your project planning process then it’s unlikely change will happen. Similarly, if there aren’t the computational resources, or if people don’t have the active skill set required, you’ll need to ensure people can get what they need. So I like to think about this part as (1) time, (2) skill development, (3) support. Time. Change takes time. You need to ensure that you have the time to impart the knowledge required, and then also the time for them to make the change. (View Highlight)
- Skill development. If you’re trying to change how people do something by using a tool/new methodology, etc. then they’ll feel more comfortable and confident with it the better their skills are with it. So ensure that you can provide the right training sessions, content, and align it to make them master what you need to do. (View Highlight)
- Support. People will have questions and need help. Make sure you have a process or means to hear and understand what people’s needs are so you can quickly iterate and fill in any gaps you might have missed. Knowing what’s hard early will help ensure you can mitigate this for other folks if you can (View Highlight)
- Reinforcement: Ensuring Long-term Adoption So to make things stick, people need some sort of reinforcement/reward for implementing the change! The way that I like to think about this step is (1) monitor, (2) celebrate, (3) reward. Monitor. There’s a thing called the Hawthorne effect, which basically means that if you observe someone, they’ll change their behavior because they’re being observed. So with respect to trying to implement a change, if people know that progress is being monitored and reported on, they’ll in all likelihood pay more attention to it. Since you monitor it, you can then use gamification to, for example, create a leaderboard or a weekly report etc. (View Highlight)
- Celebrate. Most people like to be celebrated, so you should do a song and dance about people progressing/achieving/meeting the change required. In our example we could then dedicate some time in a weekly or bi-weekly meeting to report and praise/congratulate those that have implemented the change/moved things forward. For an introvert this step might be uncomfortable, but take it as a growth opportunity to channel your inner cheerleader here. Otherwise by celebrating it’ll hopefully create some fear of missing out (FOMO) for those that have not yet completed the change and thus encourages them to do so. (View Highlight)
- Reward. This should ideally be linked to the earlier step “desire” and reinforce it, e.g. reducing outages, and therefore better quality of life for folks. If you’re in management linking change to performance is a strong motivator 😉, but we don’t all have that carrot. For some, the reward might not be immediate, like faster iteration cycles (which might take a month+ to realize), in which case other rewards might be necessary to continue to motivate folks (View Highlight)