CASE STUDY
Utility Radically Up-Levels Its Change Management Skills to Deliver Extraordinary Impact
Challenge
The senior officers of a large utility recognized the need to up-level their Change Leadership capability across the organization. They launched a new function to oversee this effort and organize and develop the company’s change management resources to better support its major projects and deliver greater results from change. They hired a senior director for this function who was tasked with finding the best vendor of Change Leadership development services and creating a strategy to pilot the new approach, including training the company’s existing senior change consultants.
The leaders had a limited understanding of what was required to succeed at their complex change initiatives beyond the classic change management services of communications, training and stakeholder management plans bolted onto their project plans. Their CM consultants were often marginalized on projects. If this effort were to succeed, they needed to alter the perception of what these consultants could provide to projects from the point of launch. Mindset, culture, competencies, services, and project protocols would need to be changed.
Solution
In partnership with the senior director of change, we created an initial strategy to introduce change leadership to a first round of consultants through a project-based training. Given its success, we then ran an Executive Change Lab to introduce the senior officers to the concepts and models that were being taught, customized and applied. Most of the officers ran this same executive program for their Line of business leadership teams. The company licensed Being First’s Change Leader’s Roadmap (CLR) methodology so they could brand and tailor resources from it to fit their culture and approaches.
Over the course of 3 years, we trained hundreds of consultants and contractors, project management and continuous improvement practitioners, and line project leaders and their teams, using their live projects as their learning platform. We presented at their annual Change Leadership Forum, a recognition event for the successes they were having in their projects.
We ran three annual in-house offerings of Being First’s Advanced Change Leadership Development Program, 4Sight, for hand-selected change consultants and line leaders responsible for major change projects. The graduates of the program created their own community to continue supporting each other’s work and personal changes.
Results
- Internal consultants guided dozens of struggling change efforts to successful outcomes
- Built change leadership competencies across the organization
- Trained over 675 change practitioners and leaders in the CLR change navigation system
- Raised consultants’ thinking to be more strategic and able to design an integrated change process to deliver desired results from change
- Defined organization-specific best change practices and tools to launch, support and monitor projects
- Created new ways for change consultants to access and influence their change sponsors to lead their projects
- Deepened change consultants' awareness and success factors for sponsor engagement
- Established rapid course correction as a standard strategy and process to ensure the success of their transformational change initiatives
