Day 16, 17, 18 – Delivering on my mandate

Week 3 – Time to deliver my training workshop and handover the resources I’ve developed during my time here.

My final week kicked off with my Change Management 101 workshop Monday morning, focused on teaching key principles of change management, while using a “train the trainer” approach. The workshop went very well, with far more attendees than expected (a surprise when I walked into a formal auditorium to present, rather than the small office I was anticipating!), resulting in a fruitful discussion and brainstorming session on applying these newly learned change management principles. A wonderful success!

Following this, we also walked through the Employee Communications and Engagement Plan I had prepared, which includes a Communications Calendar and Engagement Matrix. All of these were developed in partnership with the team here, based on best practices as well as what is possible for them to deliver on with their existing resources.

Hearing about the success of the Change Management 101 Workshop, another team (the strategy team) requested I join them in their planning meeting to help brainstorm ways to make their strategic planning sessions more effective. Their challenge was that the forums were generally being used to identify challenges, but rarely were solutions being proposed and the group overall was very disengaged. During this planning session – which I was thrilled to join – we discussed guiding principles of good facilitation, as well as various techniques for energizing and engaging groups, and best practices for brainstorming focused on finding solutions.

I heard this morning that the team was thrilled at the resulting improvements to this week’s strategic planning session and that they able to achieve much greater engagement which was great news!

As a result of this newly identified need, I was also able to develop a Workshop Facilitation Guide to share with both the culture change and strategy teams, based on our discussions and best practices, and including templates and resources for them to build on in the future.

As a final deliverable, I also developed a Communications Toolkit Framework which the culture change team will be able to leverage while executing on the communications and engagement strategies and tactics we have developed for their culture change initiative.

And now we’re into my final days here – focused on completing handover and final coaching on the deliverables, as well as final reports and exit interviews.

While three weeks has certainly flown by I am pleased at what we’ve been able to accomplish during this short time and look forward to team’s continuing success as they continue on their culture change journey using their newly gained skills and resources.