Undervalued, or Unconvincing?
Most change people I know can tell you exactly what they do.
Ask them what itâs worth, though, and many get vague. Leaders are the mirror image. They know they need change management, or change enablement, they just canât tell you exactly why.
So, we end up in this strange spot where everyone agrees the work matters and no one can quite agree on what itâs for.
Some of us may call that being undervalued.
I donât think it is. I think weâre unconvincing, and there is a distinct difference.
You may have been in this situation. A change lead is brought in at a point where the change implementation starts to hit a wall, stalls or derails. We might say we should have been brought in earlier, before the problems arrived. And weâre usually right. But it almost never works anyway, because being right and being convincing are two different things.
A seat at the table?
Nobody owes us a seat at the table simply because the change discipline exists. That seat is often overlooked, or intentionally left out, because, as Iâve often been told, âit will just slow us down!â And that perception isnât unfounded. Itâs true that taking time up front to figure out where the change might hit a wall is added time. But what we donât clearly articulate is the mechanism by which we predict it, the cost of not getting it right, and the value of doing so.
We have to earn the seat with evidence, not with one more good argument for why people matter.
Now, some of this honestly isnât our fault, and I want to say that plainly.
The change role often gets misunderstood.
An organization or business unit may name one person responsible for change, yet give them no real authority, no inputs, and no alignment on what it actually takes to pull it off. Adoption becomes that one personâs job, when it was never a one-person job to begin with. Thatâs a real hurdle. Itâs just not an excuse.
Then thereâs the toolkit.
Every change job description asks for the same things. A change plan, a stakeholder map, a change impact assessment, a readiness assessment. So, we make them. But a change plan you build alone, before anyone understands why it matters or agrees to help, just sits there. No one opens it. Thatâs not value, itâs paperwork with your name on it. The tools are only ever useful as a byproduct of the real work, and the real work needs other people in it. On their own, they donât prove anything.
Do they really care?
Some may think organizations just donât care about the people side. Thatâs not true. Plenty of them do, the second they can see it impact their key metrics, such as time, scope, quality, and value. What they wonât buy is âpeople matterâ on its own. Said like that, itâs a nice sentiment. Show them the same thing as a hit to the timeline theyâve promised, or the quality or benefits theyâve committed to, and now itâs a business case. The people side was always real. The question is whether we make it something they can see.
Make it tangible
Thatâs really the whole job. Stop telling people youâre valuable and start showing them, early, using the language of the decision makers. I call it decision-grade, which is just a fancy way of saying evidence a leader couldnât responsibly make the call without. It needs to be shared while the decision is still open. It must talk in time, scope, cost, quality, and value. And it must be solid enough that a room full of skeptical people can poke at it and still use it. A change plan isnât that. A clear read on whether the organization can actually carry the change initiative itâs about to approve, is.
The Solution
That is exactly what I built the System Readiness Audit⢠and PcQ⢠to do.
The System Readiness Audit produces a report you can use before anythingâs locked in, revealing whether the organization can actually carry the change. Itâs a tangible assessment you can put right in front of a sponsor.
PcQ⢠takes the human stuff weâve always struggled to measure and gives it a number, so capacity stops being a gut feeling and becomes the Overload Gap, and trust and alignment stop being soft words and become things you can work on.
This is how you stop being misunderstood.
Walk in equipped, and youâre not the dreaded change person, sent to make everyoneâs work harder. Youâre the person revealing something a leader didnât know about their own organization. Thatâs your foot in the door. Thatâs what earns you the second conversation, and a seat at the table.
Iâm not writing this so we can all nod along about how underappreciated we are. Iâm writing it for the change person reading this and thinking, yes, thatâs exactly what I keep running into.
The ones who get the seat arenât the ones who complained the loudest. Theyâre the ones who learned how to make the case. If thatâs what youâre looking to do, then we need to talk.
And if youâre a leader reading this and something just clicked, if youâre thinking âthis is the kind of change thinking weâve been missing,â and you want it for your team, let Pulse be your thinking partner.
That part, I can do with you.
Donna Tulloch
Donna Tulloch is a Change Management Consultant, Coach, and the creator of the People-Change Capacity(PcQâ˘) framework and the A.H.E.A.D. 2.0 AI-Empowered Change Leadership Model. She works with organizations navigating the intersection of AI transformation and human capacity through Pulse by DNK and Change Connection Lab.
www.pulsebydnk.com | [email protected]
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