Creating Change Champions

A little while ago I did some work with a major high street retailer. The business really needed to change the way it did things if it was to remain even more competitive in the retail business. At that time the company employed in excess of 12,000 permanent staff which doubled at peak trading time. It was accepted that everyone within the business needed to know what was going to change and why and most importantly of all how it was going to change.

Trying to get to everyone in the business was going to be difficult and so we embarked on the change agent route. The change agents' role was to influence anybody and everybody about the what, why and how.
We called them “Team 90”, because we started out with the objective of creating 90 Change Agents (this number subsequently grew, but that's another story)

The Board had already created a Vision for the Organisation and had created some Company Values

I facilitated a number of two-day workshops for this group, with about 12-20 delegates attending each one. The objectives of these workshops were:

• To understand the direction the Company is now taking
• To appreciate why we need to change
• To achieve buy-in from everyone to support the changes and make them happen
• To fully understand what change means to me as an individual
• To appreciate the importance of having Company values

The workshops were very, very practical and constantly forced them to look at the impact of change on their place of work

We gave them some tips, help and advice about what to do when they experienced any resistance to change. We endeavoured to get them to talk about change in a positive way, as so frequently it is viewed in a negative way. We gave loads of information for them to use.

We also used some of the people who attended the earlier workshops to come back and share their experiences with later groups.

It was a fantastic success although not without its frustrations.
If increased turnover and profits for the Business are measures of success since going through the change programme, then that just proves what a success it was, because both have rocketed.

I was so chuffed with the process that I now work extensively helping other organisations to use similar processes for change