On Wednesday 22 April Annapurna Change hosted its second Thought Leadership Round Table event at the iconic Hamyard Hotel.
Hosted by Derek Gannon, COO of Comic Relief, 19 Professionals representing Senior Change leadership in the UK came together to discuss the topic
Where should a central change team sit and how does the organisational structure impact this?
Discussion points included:
• Culture changes
• Customer Experience changes
• Central team vs Regional teams
• Sponsorship – who are the sponsors?
• How do you change the leadership?
• Continuous improvement
Below are thoughts that came out of this highly informative and thought provoking event
Sponsorship:
Where does it come from?
• Evolution of power –> accepting & understanding the change
• The culture change will then follow
• Need strong leadership from the beginning in order to ensure sustainable change
• The change team should evolve
• Empower the business to change itself
• Sponsorship should come from a number of different areas
• It is important to understand how decisions are made and how those tasks are then put into action
• Look at the business needs vs. IT needs
• Culture of why changes are occurring and who owns the change
• The company must adopt a philosophy in full- for example: does everything relate back to the original goal, example was the engineers at British Airways understand that they’re work impacts the customer experience and do they ensure that they are doing the best to provide best customer satisfaction
Where does change originate?
• Should it relate to strategy or operations?
• Differs across different organisations as most have varying structures
• Look at where it has worked before –> come from choosing the appropriate sponsor and understanding who the change will affect
• Should always be agreements between strategy & operations
2 major stories when a company is changing
• People who are leaving- having complete integrity in the process, the person must understand why there is change
• People who are staying- describe the change to take the remaining employees on a journey
How to measure success?
• Customer satisfaction
• Donations/Increased revenue
• Deliver original outcome
• The change is sustainable after embedding
• Sustained organisation
• Changed the operations –> long term approach- COO/CEO/CFO should all have a buy-in
• Product strategy is sustainable
