Implement the Social LEVERS

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Describe strategies to marshal the social influence of leaders for your change initiative.
Describe strategies for engaging the ecosystem - including stakeholders, peers, and other influential groups - in your change initiative.

As you consider your organization’s goals, review the social engagement strategies here and choose those that make sense for your company. You might also find that a blend of the leadership and enablement strategies work best for your change initiative.

Engage Leaders in Change

Leaders aren’t just cheerleaders of ‌change–they’re role models. Leadership plays an enormous social role in achieving your change objectives. The active support of leadership accelerates success, while its absence likely hinders it. Consider which leadership strategies you can deploy to encourage, model, and support the development of new ways of working.

First, identify the key leaders, both executive and midlevel management, whose support and participation is critical for success. Then, identify leadership engagement strategies. The goal is to equip leaders with what they need to be able to clearly and authentically communicate, model, and advocate for the desired change.

Here’s a set of tactics to consider including in your leadership engagement strategy.

Encourage leaders to demonstrate personal accountability by including the project’s success as part of their individual goal statements.
Incorporate behavior modeling by adapting a management approach to demonstrate their own adoption of the tool. For example, set up a new report or dashboard in Salesforce, and run all team status meetings through the app.
Develop short leadership videos to communicate the importance and significance of the program in a scalable way.
Develop leadership briefing kits, or “walking decks,” to provide leaders with on-hand materials to talk about the change during their meetings. Use AI tools to seamlessly adapt the briefing kit content to different audiences based on their goals and interests.
Establish two-way feedback channel(s) that give employees the opportunity to provide feedback live or asynchronously; look for ways to engage leaders in the conversation. (Slack is a great tool for this.)
Establish a consistent update cadence, whether through town hall meetings, newsletters, blog posts, Slack, or email.
Secure an executive to kick off training and other meaningful rollout events to reiterate the importance of the event and bolster employee support.
Establish leadership recognition programs for executives to recognize employees who go above and beyond to support the success of the initiative during town halls, all hands meetings, quarterly sales meetings, and so forth.
Establish manager or leadership office hours. These can be virtual or in person. Create an open-door policy for team members to drop in with questions, feedback, and more.

Finally, execute the various tactics you’ve included in your strategy. Make sure leaders are involved throughout the lifecycle of the initiative, from kickoff to completion.

Engage the Ecosystem

Leaders are only one part of the social equation. Coworkers, influencers, stakeholders, and others hold incredible influence on the behavior of those you are trying to reach.

Deliberately engaging the ecosystem will bolster your efforts immensely. Are customers, employees, partners, vendors, and communities organized and connected in a way that supports the change? Here are a few strategies to consider.

First, identify and engage key stakeholders. Change in a complex organization affects a wide variety of people, and it requires agreement and commitment from various people and groups to succeed. An effective stakeholder engagement strategy involves key stakeholders early in the process to build momentum.

To identify individuals and groups that will be affected by the change, consider the following questions.

Who needs to be involved to create an effective change solution?
Who needs to be involved to get adequate sponsorship, resourcing, and decision-making authority?
Who has a disproportionate impact on other people’s perception of the change?
Who needs to be involved to represent those most impacted most by the change?

Then, conduct a stakeholder analysis. Use the 2x2 stakeholder mapping framework as a guide for conducting a stakeholder analysis. Look at your list of stakeholders and group them in these four quadrants, based on their level of influence and level of interest or impact.

Stakeholder Mapping Framework

Develop an approach to keep key stakeholders in each quadrant informed and involved during the transition. Strategies will likely look fairly different for each quadrant.

Activities with the Change Makers (Q1) should be highly participative, like co-creation sessions or joint prioritization meetings.
For your Change Sponsors (Q2) and Onlookers (Q3), you can use more passive strategies like progress reporting, alignment calls, and branded communications.
With your Change Adopters (Q4) use how-to communications, training programs, and drip campaigns - activities that we cover in the Enablement lever.

Gather feedback to inform your approach from stakeholders in all quadrants. Track and monitor engagement progress over time and capture qualitative updates (like key stakeholder priorities and concerns). Consider developing engagement metrics to quantitatively measure progress.

Organize a Change Network

Trying to influence everyone in your organization can feel like a tall order. That’s why it’s helpful to organize a change network. A change network is a select group representing various parts of the business affected by the change. A change network helps expand the reach of the core change management team, build grassroots support for the initiative, and develop clear communication pathways.

Boost your initiative by taking the following steps.

Find change champions	Look for people whose opinions are respected and sought out by others, and who are willing to make the change initiative successful. Invite identified change champions to participate in the network and ask to confirm their participation.
Develop a plan	Develop a meeting cadence and communication plan to engage your change champions.
Get started	Hold a kickoff meeting, then execute the change network plan.
Entrust the group	Provide access to information and tools for spreading the word. Involve them in planning the rollout and encourage involvement. Gather feedback and act on their suggestions.

The Leadership and Ecosystem levers build social momentum. The above strategies help large groups begin to think and act in new ways. That said, creating social momentum in your organization can look different. Focus on ensuring that your leaders signal the importance of the change. Tap into social capital by involving the group at large.

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