Last week I shared a post about the importance of communicating for buy-in; however, that is just one part of managing change! Successful change in organizations also requires new behaviors, new mind-sets, new skills and new abilities. They are one of the key building blocks that sustainable change efforts are built upon. But what can leaders do to ensure that not only they are equipped with the skills for managing change, but their employees are as well?
As you may know, I’m a big fan of MindTools, which has a free change management skill self-assessment. The assessment helps you evaluate your own change management skill set in the following four key areas:
- Understanding change
- Planning change
- Managing resistance to change
- Implementing change
I’d encourage you to try it at MindTools
For building employee skill sets, it can be helpful to identify the skills needed for a particular change effort by first conducting a training needs assessment. It is critical to identify skill employee and implementation team skill gaps and needed training to adequately prepare everyone involved or affected by the change.
Here are a few key questions that are helpful to explore:
- What are the primary skill and ability gaps among our employees and/or change implementation teams?
- Given our organization’s capacity, how can we best deliver skill building?
- Do we have the content within our organization to address these capability building needs?
- How can we best draw upon our current capacity to deliver needed training?
Thinking about a change that you are in the midst of, what capability building needs do you see? How can you mobilize resources to address those needs? If you want help with a training needs assessment, contact me at anita@riosconsulting.org
Anita Rios
Rios Consulting 