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Celebrating Team Victories!

Congratulations! You’ve done it! organizational change leadership You’re at the end of your change initiative, and, despite earlier concerns, things have ended successfully! How are you going to celebrate this accomplishment? Here are some ideas of activities that you can do together as a team! Team lunch or dinner: Organize...

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Smooth Handovers Enable Continued Success

The end is in sight! The finish line is close! At last, you can declare success and bring this change initiative to an end! Or can you? What might happen to all of the hard work that you and the team have put into this project? We’re in the final phase...

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Communicating When Change Is About To Take Place

“Here’s what’s happening, and here’s what you can expect.” examples of organizational change   With these words, the pilot on a recent flight let us know that there was going to be a delay. She explained why (storms on our flight path), how long we could expect to be delayed...

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Avoid these 5 mistakes in leading change!

Implementing organizational change doesn’t have to be challenging. If you’re a leader interested in how to do this well, I’ve got 5 insider tips to share with you. Change is the only constant, the old adage goes. Organizations need to change to meet new demands, and an evolving marketplace. When...

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Use Team Charters to set a team up for success

“A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.” Katzenbach and Smith (2015) The Wisdom of Teams I find this such a helpful description of a team! It is simple, clear,...

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Five Steps to Make the Most of a Windfall!

Will a Mackenzie Scott grant to your nonprofit make you MORE or LESS attractive to other donors? Ever since Mackenzie Scott began making unexpected Transformational Gifts to nonprofits in 2019/2020 (a total of about $16 billion so far), some have had a concern that these gifts will somehow ‘chase away’...

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Mapping Stakeholders in Change – a leader’s guide

Oof – that was unexpected! Who knew there was going to be so much resistance to this organizational change? Have you ever been in this situation? You recently launched a change initiative with great fanfare! You’ve been planning this change for a while, but the response is less enthusiastic than...

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Are you Ready for Growth?

You’re excited about the future! You’ve got an ambitious strategy to grow and scale a proven program so that you can reach many more people! But are you really ready for growth? The unfortunate reality is that too many organizations find themselves overwhelmed by the practical challenges of managing growth....

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What exactly is an effective team?

Is a team productive if they complete the task on time, but had such a toxic experience in doing so that they never want to work together again? I was once part of a team like this. We were four people, brought together from different parts of the world, to...

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Reading For A Change

It’s summertime as I write, a time when things slow down from the usual pace we experience for the rest of the year. So I’m enjoying taking time to read some new books and revisit old favorites. I think you will enjoy them too!   Karolin Helbig and Minette Norman...

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Learn and Adjust As You Go

You bring the change team together for one of your regular meetings. The change initiative has been underway for six months. You’ve been following the “rolling six month plan” that you developed together. You have just completed a round of collecting progress data. And things are… just a bit off course....

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SCAMPER your way to innovative solutions

Do you remember how you felt in April 2020? That was the point when we all began to realize that this COIVD-19 pandemic might be around for longer than we had anticipated. And all the plans we had for the year were in jeopardy! Remember that feeling? We realized that...

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Watch out for Fatal Assumptions!

Kolmanskop is an abandoned town on the edge of the Namib Desert in southern Africa. Once it was one of the wealthiest, most lively places in that country. Today, it is considered a ‘ghost town’ and the desert has reclaimed for itself the once-majestic houses that made up the town....

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Monitor Progress with Key Indicators

We know that not everything in your plan will go according to plan. You will need to be nimble and adaptive, responding to what is actually taking place, rather than what you hoped would be taking place! When you are Cultivating Change, I call this move on the part of...

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Form a Change Monitoring Group to Stay Informed

Congratulations! You’ve started implementing your change initiative, following the steps laid out in your plan. Smooth sailing from now on, right? Unfortunately, you are going to face bumps along the way. Some of them will come from within the organization. And, as a member of the change team, it can...

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Develop a Stakeholder Assessment

You can learn a lot about stakeholder perceptions when you are mapping the current situation. In fact, you might even interview selected stakeholders during that step. As a structured activity, the stakeholder assessment is an opportunity to have a conversation and consider what you are learning about stakeholders in your...

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Communicating About Change

There’s an inbuilt problem with change processes. Few people know about them before they are launched, often with great fanfare. And that can come as an unpleasant surprise, leading people to doubt the motives of the change leaders and to wonder what other “bad news” might follow. Now, there are...

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Make a Plan – but not too much!

Here’s an idea: Prepare a plan for the change process, but don’t make it too detailed! What comes to mind when you think of a plan? Many people will have an initial image of an architect’s blueprints for a new home, or a detailed Gantt chart with activities shown for...

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