Ciamos

Bob Janes

When you come to take people out of their day to day roles and ask them to become ‘change agents’ you are making heavy demands on their abilities. To become and remain effective they need strong support – the pressures to conform and usually extremely strong and mostly ‘under the surface. Unsupported change agents lead to disappointing change programmes; occasional disasters; and undelivered promise.

Change Agent support has three main parts: initial “training”; ongoing “coaching”; and end-of-project “transition”. This note just looks at the first of these.

Initial “Training”

A change agent is typically asked to change his or her spots overnight. You ask someone who has previously been working somewhere in the middle of an organisation to take on a new role; to work with their peers and managers in very different way; to deliver results that the existing organisation has wither failed to deliver, chosen not to deliver, has been unable to see or has not been permitted to deliver. You are asking them to work in different and unfamiliar ways. You are asking them to challenge themselves and the organisation in new ways. If you aren’t doing most of these things then you probably don’t have a change programme.

Initial “training” isn’t training in a traditional sense and can’t be effectively delivered in a ‘classroom’. What needs to be imparted are:

• Clear permission to be a change agent – this has to come from the top of the organisation and must be open and unambigous.
• Awareness of the scope and the vision – even if how to achieve it is still unclear.
• Becoming a change team – one person can’t act alone.
• Learning a change methodology. There are several around, the new change agent needs to have some skills in hand when they go to work. (Typically this will include process awareness, process mapping tools, some way of distinguishing the present from the future design. NB Process awareness is rare!)


• Enhanced inter-personal skills. Change agents work with and through people. They are often unwelcome guests.
• Enhanced intra-personal awareness. Change agents need to start to know themselves. To a large extent their effectiveness arises from their personal alignment, congruence and confidence.
• Enhanced communication and influencing skills. They need to be heard effectively.
• Enhanced meeting management and workshop skills. They need to rapidly become comfortable working with groups of people in formal and informal settings and to be able to move the group effectively through a process.


• Awareness of process tools. There is a large armoury of process tools developed over the years by the OD community. Change agents can’t be expected to pick all of these up immediately but they do need to know that they exist and where to find out about them when needed.

© 2002 Bob Janes