4 reasons that Change and Training are a match made in heaven

We know that Change Management is more than just comms.

It's: "Moving a group of people from what they are currently thinking, feeling and doing to a new way of thinking, feeling and doing, in order to realise the benefits of a business change." 

And we do that through communications, training, and business readiness.

I absolutely LOVE the training aspect of Change. 

I'm a born leader, and because I pick up skills, knowledge and processes quickly and I love to share, I became the go-to person for many uni classmates in my Media degree.

And this carried on in to my career with grads and colleagues.

And then to Marketing teams when rolling out new campaigns, processes, systems, and approaches.

It was when I became an accredited Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Practitioner and Coach that I started to "formally" train in organisations and beyond. 

It actually all began with a handful of female colleagues that I invited to participate in a few confidence workshops, and some capability sessions I ran during team meetings. 

Then I started to run workshops publicly, partnering with learning start-ups like Work-Shop and Class Bunny.

And then I was hired to create and run Change Leadership workshops for conferences.

And finally started running my OWN webinars, trainings and courses.

I took all those skills back into my corporate career in Change Management and started building capability for my change projects and programs. 

Sometimes I'd be designing and building technical training to support a new system or digital rollout.

But where my passion really lied was in building the "soft skills" capabilities: project management, communications, influencing, leadership, vision setting, lateral thinking, and of course, change leadership. 

So that's what I offer now to my students and consulting clients.

But if I reflect on the type of training I design and deliver and teach, it's not exactly the traditional type of training that we think of when corporate learning and development springs to mind. 

Often, we remember the onboarding modules built into the LMS (Learning Management System) or the facilitated training sessions to support the rollout of a new system or process or team structure.

And these are critical in supporting the employee experience, productivity, and change success.

But there's a few extra touches that I think a Change lens can bring to the Training space and make magic really happen:

#1 Change is holistic

One of the challenges with Business As Usual (BAU) teams like Internal Comms and Learning and Development is that their scope is often limited by capacity and capability to their area of employment. When these resources come to help out with a change, they get a broader view and exposure, which is awesome. But Change Managers generally focus on the big picture first, then plug comms and training in. Changies aren't constrained by the confines of their BAU role and can take that wider viewpoint from the outset. 

#2 Change is experiential

With more budget for training and launch, we can sometimes do some exciting stuff to switch on the five senses and make our training more immersive, interesting, and longer-lasting. And maybe this is the NLP/Coaching side of me coming out more! For example, for live trainings and workshops, I'll often incorporate food and music to help bring it to life. Or with my own Change Leadership training, Leading Successful Change, the training content is 6 weeks of online modules. But then there's monthly group coaching calls and a private, exclusive community that carries confidence on into the future, way beyond the technical course content. I design an experience of how I'd like people to feel, more than a training of what I want people to learn.

#3 Change embeds ways of working

Because Change is holistic, it often looks upstream and downstream and considers all the additional soft skill sets, rhythms, and ways of working that are going to be needed for people to continue doing things the new way in the future. An example I often use with my consulting clients is that to make the most of business intelligence, dashboards, and reporting solutions, their people will probably need to build insights generation and business partnering capability. So while the internal L&D or technical training team focuses on teaching the team how to use the system itself, I design and build the supporting soft skills capability programs so value is actually extracted from using the system!

#4 Change is grounded

A big consideration of any Changie is how something is actually going to be used or performed in day-to-day. The way I teach Change is to focus on practical, fit-for-purpose capability. Less theory, more tools and templates. Fewer models, more real-life examples. Less technical, more techniques. I love to see something that I'm teaching get used the next day in a real-life situation, which not only integrates the learning better but also reinforces to the learner why that skill, knowledge or technique is worthwhile continuing to build and use.

There is so much value in thinking about training for Change way beyond the technical training. Change and Training really are a match made in heaven.

If you'd like to learn more about how to design and create training and capability for Change Management, come join us in Leading Successful Change. 

CLICK HERE to find out more about Leading Successful Change

Lata xx