The Change Leadership Team
Several years ago, I was a product manager at a small healthcare consulting company, leading the development of an internal software application. The purpose of the software was to improve internal operations by streamlining and centralizing key reporting processes. Until then, the administrative staff collected data in Excel sheets and manually refined it into printed reports for distribution at weekly staff meetings. They spent many hours each week painstakingly compiling, formatting, printing, and collating the thick reports, which were used once and thrown away.
The company leaders saw an opportunity to optimize this process and knew the data contained other valuable insights hidden from view. So they hired a small team of contractors (two developers and me, the product manager) to transform their weekly Excel-based reports into a mobile-responsive Web application. Our user base included roughly sixty senior employees—regional vice presidents, associate vice presidents, and financial analysts. In their consulting roles at the company, they guided top administrators at troubled rural hospitals. Most had been hospital CEOs or CFOs before joining the firm, with at least thirty years of experience in their field.
My previous roles had been at younger tech companies, where the employees tended to be digital natives and up-to-date on the latest technology. At this company, I learned through one-on-one interviews with several users that many had never learned how to type on a computer. “I didn’t take typing in high school forty years ago,” one regional vice president told me. “And honestly, I haven’t needed it. My admin prints my emails for me, and she types up what I handwrite or dictate.”
From these early conversations, I realized that launching a successful software product would require much more than developing solid technology and assuming our users would figure out how to use it. We had to deeply understand our users and their current processes to design a product they would adopt. We also had to help them become accustomed to a new way of working while ensuring they could continue doing their jobs without interruption.
We succeeded. Within a few months, we had transitioned the most critical reports to the new software application, saving many hours of manual labor each week. Our users, who had been skeptical initially, became highly invested in the project, providing regular feedback on new features and offering suggestions for improving the application. When it came time to pitch the CEO for a capital investment to continue development and expand the application a year later, he responded, “How much do you want?” He agreed on the spot to our full request of $1.3 million.
This was possible because we had a highly effective change leadership team working behind the scenes. The members included the leaders of each user role (three senior vice presidents), the CIO, the CFO, and me as the product manager. This team performed several essential functions:
Aligned development efforts with the company's strategic objectives.
Regularly communicated the importance of the initiative with users and stakeholders.
Ensured the needs of the users and all other stakeholders were appropriately identified, balanced, and prioritized.
Secured the material and political resources the development team needed to create valuable software, including direct user access for ongoing feedback.
Co-created user acceptance testing and pilot testing plans to ensure business continuity while users learned how to use the software.
Met regularly to discuss the project’s progress and direction.
Addressed user concerns and complaints about the technology and the business process changes in a constructive manner.
I was by far the least influential person on the team. My role was levels below the other members in the organizational hierarchy, and I was decades younger and a contractor. Regardless, the change leadership team members treated me as a trusted and valued partner, and I strove to show up as one.
I share this story to make two points. First, successful organizational change is almost always led by a team, not an individual. You need a team to get things done. Second, you do not need to be “in charge” or even at a peer level in the organizational hierarchy to build an effective change leadership team. You can do this, no matter what your role.
If you are skeptical about the first point, consider the second step in John Kotter’s well-known eight-step change framework: “Creating the guiding coalition” (Kotter 2012). As Kotter asserts, teams are needed to lead change successfully (2012). Without the support of an aligned team, even most CEOs cannot accomplish their transformational change goals. For those of us who are positioned in the middle of the organization and lack formal authority, it should be no surprise that we, too, will need a robust team collaborating with us to get things done.
