How to Enlist Support and Overcome Resistance

You should be prepared to invest in meaningful stakeholder engagement at the start of the change cycle and continue, relentlessly, throughout. It will be worth it.

The biggest single contributor to success is securing the unwavering commitment of the senior change sponsors. Without this, the HR transformation programme becomes vulnerable to attack and disruption. We strongly recommend getting this in place early as a priority.

You may have to be creative to win an audience with the most senior stakeholders. If you can, arrange one-to-one meetings and use these opportunities to present a compelling factual case in support of the programme. If this is not possible, then gain access to the next reporting level and seek to influence this group of people so that they in turn can upwardly influence their superiors.

Whilst one-to-one meetings can be extremely impactful, think creatively about other channels:

• team meetings/workshops;
• invitation to a steering group;
• making sure the Personal Assistant (PA) includes a brief on the HR transformation programme in essential reading material;
• requiring a response through an auditable process, such as electronic tagging, so that the respondent is aware that simply refusing to reply will create an automatic elevation to the steering group or higher;
• using various Web-based tools to engender engagement, such as surveys, discussions forums, blogs and wikis.

Of equal importance to understanding how individuals or groups show their attitudinal stance for the change initiative, it is necessary to monitor and measure behaviour. You will almost certainly identify what we call 'secret subversives' — people who appear to be on your side, but then undermine the programme. They should be identified and dealt with as quickly as possible.

Developing a list of actionable items that demonstrate behaviour is essential. It should include:

• demonstrating that they are accurately communicating the change initiative to their teams;
• showing endorsement of the newly created HR processes;
• signing off on key documentation that allows financial investment.

It is important to stress again that investment of time and effort in the segmentation and characterisation of the stakeholder community, combined with techniques to understand their position on the resistance to commitment continuum, will repay itself in terms of dividend many times over. This is not a task that should be undervalued, misplaced or subordinated to a low level in the priority order.

Often in change programmes these 'soft' or human issues — which is essentially what stakeholder engagement is all about — become subordinated to the technical issues and considerations surrounding system choice and implementation. Beware of allowing the technical issues to take over for too long. Without the people on board, no system will deliver the benefits you promised in the business case.

Once you have mapped out the stakeholders, the next task is to understand where they lie on the resistance to commitment continuum, and this in turn will determine where effort should be prioritised.