How to Manage Late Adopters During Organisational Change and More with Nigel Mahoney
- Sydney Lego
- Aug 8, 2024
- 3 min read
June 11th, 2024
Q: What was the time and number of sessions that you allocated for the experiment and discovery portion of your training and change management?
A: It really depends. Something like value stream mapping we do over two days. We tried to do what the state looked like and then what the future state was, which was over a few days. Other ones can be much quicker. We have done one with WIP, where the team spent about an hour just looking at the experiment introduction. Then with the experiment itself, again the value stream mapping was three months and the experiment was just a couple of weeks. So, it really depends on the experiment.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the organisational change with the people you were working with?
A: A lot of challenges. Quite often if you’re in an organisation and you’ve got purely expert leadership it is very difficult to get one of them to change their mind. It is recommended that you have at least a couple of people with an achievable mindset who are setting KPIs and OKRs because they are the ones that will come along the journey.
It also took time to build trust with the team. It was not until they trusted me that they then began to let down the barriers and try new things.
Q: What is a good way to talk to early-stage, startup organisations about how to think about how to structure themselves to avoid some of the challenges of change and antipatterns to build it into their culture?
A: I generally end up working on big corporation projects, so I have not had a lot of experience with smaller and newer organisations. I do really quite like the work Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais did with Team Topologies and how they scaled up doing that. They try to maintain a culture there as well as the whole DevOps culture. It's all about the same fundamental things and it is about communication and building the teams. You need to create the environment for them to grow but let them grow organically.
Q: We know that all organisations are going to have late adopters. When you find that those late adopters are higher up the chain, do you have a different approach to continue to move the early adopters and followers along?
A: Ideally you have got to start with the late adopters as well because you do need that leadership buy-in. If you don’t have leadership buy-in you hit that ceiling, which is what I have found working for the team level.
You can approach this in two different ways, and sometimes it’s much harder when you are internal to a company than when you are external. As a person coming in externally to a company, I feel quite confident meeting a CEO eye to eye, at my level. Someone internal to the company should be able to do that, but obviously, psychological safety is not there. The difficulty that you face is that you need to face the CEOs and the HiPPOs and meet them where they are at the same time. This again, is building relationships, which takes a long time.
Q: Do you have any tips or advice for how to build trust with C-suite executives, which can be a different challenge compared to speaking at the team level?
A: I talked about the different action logics, but that doesn’t mean I always have to be a catalyst. I think the thing with C-level suites is that they always want an answer, and you need to know when to go to the expert level and say “This is your problem, and this is what’s happening.” But, when it actually comes to working in the team, that is when I kind of switch to the customer.
So, I think one tip is to know when to answer and when to ask questions. It is that trust thing again. Sometimes you need to go in and show them what you can do first before they trust you to experiment. I think you sometimes need to work more from the experiment rather than the expert mindset.