Essential Change Management Skills

Where are you on your career journey? Just starting out in your first role? A few years in, aiming for promotion or your first management position? Or deepening expertise in a specialist field?

Wherever you are, one thing is clear, careers today are no longer linear. Roles evolve quickly, and expectations shift rapidly driven by things that we can no longer predict or often truly understand. The global impact of the Corona Virus and the arrival of AI being two major examples. This brings a new level of uncertainty and ambiguity to life as we know it.

If you are like me, planning was a useful tool for containing any anxiety about the unknown. But what I have learned over the recent years since the pandemic is that while planning remains important, planning alone is no longer enough. Change now arrives faster, and often from unexpected directions. Many people I speak to feel too are also feeling anxious, and in some cases overwhelmed, about what the next 3, 6, or 12 months might bring, let alone the next 2 to 5 years. How do to start to prepare yourself for a career in these circumstances.

For me my experience helping others through organisational change has been really helpful over the last few years for my own comfort with uncertainty. That’s why I’ve been sharing key principles I lean on from Change Management; a field built on helping people transition through change.

Change Management is primarily focused on helping individuals prepare for, and transition through, changes they are impacted by. A Change manager does so by identifying and addressing their concerns and providing tools and support to ease the transition. While the role requires mastery of many different skills, proficiency in a few key ones can make anyone have a much better experience from changes they face, one such example being your career journey.

The single thing underpinning the work we do in Change Management is helping people deal with the feelings of uncertainty that change triggers for them. The more comfortable individuals can be with their feelings toward and management of uncertainty, the more capable they will be to deal with change. Be that in a work project, a career change or a life event.

I didn’t become comfortable with uncertainty overnight. It came from being persistently exposed to chaotic projects that came with tight deadlines and minimal information. To get better at it, I had to confront my own feelings about uncertainty and find ways to get through. That’s the reality of our work and why Change Managers tend to be quite comfortable in uncertainty.  

It also came from challenging myself to continually adapt what it meant to do change management at an organisation. As the profession is still in its early years, many people have different views and expectations on what they will get from it. As a result, I often found myself needing to adapt and flex around what others understood of the job. To make sense of what I know and what others knew and try to come to some common understanding.

My work in change management has taught me how to manage my own feelings of uncertainty and help me build the skills to adapt to changes wherever they come from.

Many articles list critical skills like strategic thinking, communication, and leadership. All valid. But few talk about pragmatism, expectation management, relationship building or humour, and yet these are the behaviours I have noticed have been useful when plans fall apart and anxiety creeps in.

In my experience as a Change Manager, it is building comfort with these four that has helped me thrive amid change.

Think of a change you weren’t expecting. Train delayed on your way to an important meeting? Moving house? Starting a new job. Whatever it is, change will trigger you to think of what might come. Depending on your life experiences, different changes will mean this response to change will be different. What will be the same, is that everyone of us will worry about the unknown, particularly in situations where the outcomes are important to us.

Pragmatism helps us not dwell too long on what we could have done different to avoid the change we now have to deal with.

Managing expectations ensures that we stay grounded in the reality of what is possible where it might be easy just to imagine things to be easy or to go the way we need or want.

Relationship building helps ensure we have people around us that we can rely on to be there where things are tough, help us set the right expectations and keep us focused on being pragmatic.

Humour is a trigger for the release of endorphins, the hormone that is the body’s natural feel-good switch. When the body produces endorphins, it helps reduce the production of cortisol – the hormone triggered when we feel stressed. Humour, while needing to be appropriate in context, is a really good way to help reduce anxiety of stressful situations giving you the space for pragmatic thinking, reality-based expectation setting and calling upon your friends for support you might need.

Leading any change, be it organisational or one to your personal career path, isn’t just about making plans to deal with uncertainty. It's about how you show up and deal with the tension between that apparent certainty and the reality of the unknown.

Uncertainty is now a career constant. And while we can't eliminate it, we can develop the behaviours that help us respond more effectively. Here are some tips on how to build the behaviours for leading change well.

Developing it:

Pragmatism focuses on solutions. It puts on hold the concerns of what went wrong or why it went wrong and focuses on what do I do now. It is rational and calm. When you are confronted with a change you weren’t expecting, pause. Focus on determining the desired outcome and think about actions that get you closer.

Here’s an example:

During a recent workshop, I had to travel out of town. Instead of staying the night before, I choose to get the first train. Unfortunately, the morning train was cancelled, and I was straight into panic because I wasn’t going to get there for the start to open a up the session.

That option was gone. Of course, I wished I had stayed the night before but wishing wouldn't change anything. Instead, I had to message a colleague and ask them to set up a video call for the morning session and then prepare to deliver the opening remotely. I also then reorganised the rest of my time with the team so I could arrive a little later. I was fortunate I had colleagues that stepped in to support but no doubt my pragmatic approach and facing the problem head on also ensured others didn’t panic too.  

Developing it:

This is as much about a behaviour as it is undertaking a process. As we communicate it is important that we are explicit about what we won’t do as much what we will. Set out actions and outcomes and any assumptions you are making. This will help encourage to others to question things they might have expected. The behaviour element here is not to treat this as a one off. Persistency is key.  

Here’s an example:

In a recent project, a senior project manager quite regularly confused whether I (the Change Manager) or a colleague (the Business Analyst) should be responsible for a piece of work. Working closely with my Business Analysis colleague we made it explicit in every project meeting who was doing what between us and backed each other up if it was questioned. We also made sure others in the project were clear and corrected the PM if they happen to hear the incorrect expectation. While the confusion did still happen, the work got done without any major issues.

Develop it:

Showing curiosity and interest in how and why things work the way they do has always been crucial to how I have developed close relationships. I show the same interest in how people show up, what motivates them and what things we might have in common but also what things that make us different. Reserving judgement will allow you to be curious.

Here’s an example:

In my career as a freelance change consultant, I have met many wonderful practitioners. The trouble is unless our work overlaps, you can sometimes not speak for a long time. To avoid that happening, I established various WhatsApp groups and ran several informal events to allow me the time meet up reconnect.

Developing It:

Perhaps counterintuitively, the way I have developed the ability to bring some humour to situations is to not take everything so seriously. While I take the work I do very seriously and want to do a good job, I equally know that seriousness can erode joy and increase pressure so instead I have learned to balance quality with joy.

Here’s an example:

When I led a volunteer team, I would often find people were coming from a long day in work to then run an event. There was a lot of administration involved and a need to network and welcome people which was often tiring. To reduce the strain, the group might find time for a social afterwards or indeed on another day. We would regularly swap round roles and create little games to keep us amused. Balancing fun with the work was crucial to keep morale high and people motivated.

Wherever your career path takes you, know that for everyone I have spoken to – it is rarely a straight line. Build your network, be on the lookout for new opportunities – even ones you don't think you are ready for. Go into them with and open mind and whatever knowledge and resources you have, use them pragmatically to the best of your ability to meet the tasks set for you. The world of work will fundamentally shift several times, that I am certain – the one thing you can be ready to do is to be comfortable in the uncertainty and be ready to adapt.

If you start building these habits now, you’ll not only manage change more effectively you’ll find more meaning, growth, and enjoyment in your career, with less stress than those who try to resist it.