How to create a shared language to support your transformation

Communication is everything when it comes to leading change effectively. I love to define things really simply and I define Change Management as: “Moving people from doing things in one way to doing things another way through communications, training and business readiness.” Communications is one of the 3 major pillars of Change, so much so that many people think that Change Management is ONLY communications - because that’s what they see going out to the organisation. It’s not - Change is broader than just comms. But comms is a massive chunk and how and what you communicate can make or break your change.

And I’m not even just talking about the stakeholder engagement and team adoption level - way before you get to impacted stakeholders, you can get confusion, resistance and factioning amongst the people who have been brought to work together to create, deliver and lead the change: for example, the Project Team, Subject Matter Experts and Change Champions who are involved in the change. If you’re all talking at odds, using different terminology for the same idea or tool or task or technical data point, it can majorly slow down development and delivery. Communication is formed by language, and shared language is what creates alignment to a common goal, trust, and useful meaning.  

In one transformation program I worked on, this exact thing was happening. There were almost 100 people working in the program and there was duplication of effort, resistance to plans and approaches, and confusion of exactly what was being delivered simply because different people used different terms for the same thing. As a Change Manager, I believe in tackling things at root cause so to get alignment and consistency, I mapped out all the different names for all the different technical terms. Then I brought all the key players together into a room, including the Sponsor, to discuss and agree what each term meant, different terms we’d been calling it, and the agreed term we’d all use moving forward no matter what project we were in, retiring any other names for it. By the end of (several!) workshops, we had a full program glossary and a shared language for thinking about and talking about our change. 

This whole translation process is a major part of the value Change brings, and it’s why I advocate so strongly for fit-for-purpose, practical Change Management. You’d never see “create glossary” in a Change Management job description and on the surface, it’s actually quite an administrative task. But it was the right thing to do at the right time to help the program move forward together, and it actually required a lot of advanced-level consultation skills because people were really wedded to their term for something. We couldn’t command-and-control, we couldn’t go off in a dark room and decide for ourselves behind closed doors, we had to come together to collaborate and co-create. But it paid dividends because as the program got aligned, we were able to start communicating out to the business with a united front. 

And we know just how important communications are to any change. 

Identifying, then resolving, these kinds of unique and complex change and engagement problems are part and parcel of being a great Change Consultant. I’m developing a brand new advanced-level Change Management workshop and if you’re a seasoned Change Manager, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you’d like to see included. 

Complete the short 2-minute survey here - but hurry! The survey will only be open for a few more days:

CLICK HERE to complete the advanced Change Workshop survey 

Lata xx