Change Management
Transformational change management blending empathy, coaching, and project management with a masterful understanding of human behavior to realize success for the individual and the organization.
What Sets LEVATA Change Management Apart
Methodology-agnostic and fully customizable. Whether you have your own change management approach, leverage a common approach like Prosci, or have no defined change management approach at all, we will make it work together. We blend proven methodologies to create the most-likely-to-succeed change management approach for you.
Buy-in at all levels. We take the time to build true executive sponsorship at the top while leveraging individuals as change agents and helping them through their own change journeys. This approach equips and supports individuals in a structured way, building capability to handle current and future change for long-term organizational agility.
Integration with other disciplines. Change management is not a standalone practice, but is the connective tissue between project management, learning and development, business process, communications, and organizational design and culture. We use change management to help all transformational projects run more successfully.
The best chefs don’t follow recipes. They take the ingredients available and create the best meal possible using their knowledge of how those ingredients can work together. This is how change management works at LEVATA. While we have our own proprietary methodology, we are not obsessively prescriptive. We meet our clients where they are and work with them to roll out an approach that fits their organization.
Change management focuses structured attention on every organization’s greatest asset, its people. Having a change management approach in place—and one that is tailored to the organization’s unique culture—provides assurance the best possible outcome will be achieved for both the organization and its people. Our team’s mastery of change management grants us huge flexibility in working with clients of all experience levels to produce change management approaches and toolkits that work for their goals, people, and culture.
Engagement at Every Level – from Individual to Executive
Change management is so much more than PowerPoints and broad communications. It’s literally changing the way individuals approach their work. It requires empathy and a recognition that change happens one person at a time, entailing a collective shift in mindset and behaviors before you can call your project a success. And while all people are different, the way they go through change follows a consistent process. Understanding that process is what unlocks the ability to drive change in a supportive, collaborative, empathetic, and positive way.
At an individual level, this means helping people to see their place in the bigger picture and to develop their own change resiliency. We not only give people a voice throughout the project, we enable and empower them in the change itself. In a technology implementation, for example, this looks like giving individuals the opportunity to sandbox new functionality, provide feedback, and shape the rollout plan so that people see themselves in both the end result and how it was implemented. This approach engages individuals in “being the change” rather than forcing change upon them. We have learned that most people will buy in only after they have an opportunity to weigh in.
At an executive level, we focus on proactive communication, asking questions, listening, and modeling behavior. The biggest reason executive sponsors fail in their roles is because they don’t know what to do or how to do it. Great change management consultants help executives be great executive sponsors. We work with sponsors to help them model change, overcome personal blockers, and understand their unique role in the transformation. On especially large or complex transformational projects, we often pair executive sponsors with executive coaches to give them space to ask questions in a role that may not come naturally to them, understand how they too need to change while modeling and incenting the right behavior, and have 1:1 access to a certified professional who can help them fine-tune their performance. When implemented together, these two practices of change management and executive coaching build on each other to support the internal and external journey of continuous improvement.
The Intrinsic Link between Change Management and Project Management
Many organizations (including management consulting firms) overlook the connection between change management and project management. In reality, change management is required for project management to work; if the project is a boat, change management serves as the oars enabling its people to steer it successfully. A skilled project manager can get a project implemented on time and within budget, but the organization will miss out on ROI if the organization and its people don’t successfully transition as well. These two disciplines coming together is what turns a successful implementation into implementing success.
Change management isn’t simply a way to speed up adoption and benefits realization – it’s the right thing to do for your people.
LEVATA's Change Management Services
Change leadership development: Equipping executives and people leaders to build a vision that connects with their people going through change, and helping them role model this change and communicate effectively
Enterprise change management capability: Helping organizations create and strengthen internal change management capability
Change navigation & journey mapping: Creating a change journey then blends organizational and personal change experiences
Making it stick: Reinforcing new behaviors by keeping individuals engaged, informed, and heard
Change agent activation: Creating grassroots support by engaging individuals as change agents and building change networks
Transformational change coaching: Providing executive coaching for executive sponsors
Change program branding: Creating engaging change program campaigns with branding that speaks to impacted individuals
Employee learning and development: Embedding change management in learning solutions
Communication design and delivery: Creating compelling and sticky communications