Maggie Olson on How to Support Change Management in the C-Suite

Speaker 2 · 0:05

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Jeremy · 0:23

Hey friends, the Nova Chief of Staff certification course is one of the most popular professional development resources for growth-minded leader assistants like you. With dozens of templates, self-paced learning, multiple instructor touchpoints, and peer engagement, Nova alumni walk away empowered and confident to level up as an assistant or even negotiate a promotion to a Chief of Staff role. With well over 500 students across 22 countries, Nova is the top spot for Chief of Staff learning and development. Join the movement today at leaderassistant.com/nova. That's leaderassistant.com/nova. Hey friends, welcome to The Leader Assistant Podcast. It's episode 307. You can check out the show notes for this conversation at leaderassistant.com/307. Today, I'm speaking with my friend Maggie Olson again, and Maggie is going to talk all about how to support change management in the C-suite. Not like there's any change going on in my world as an assistant or in you all listening. I'm sure nothing ever changes in your day-to-day as you assist crazy executives. Of course, I'm joking, there's lots of change, so I'm excited, Maggie, to have you back on and chat about this topic.

Maggie · 1:51

Yeah, I'm excited to be here. As I was preparing, it's wild how much change is happening in the C-suite, and I almost think that the chief of staff role is like the change manager role. A lot of senior EAs, I'm sure you feel the same way because we're dealing with the same major projects, major initiatives, that trickle down from the C-suite through the company, through the organization. It's literally all change management, but we can get into some specifics for sure around exactly why and how it's important to approach change management as a chief of staff or senior EA.

Jeremy · 2:28

Perfect. Sounds good. I'm excited to have you dive in. Okay.

Maggie · 2:31

Awesome. Well, I figured first, we would start with just the basic definitions of what is involved in change management. So if you go online, you look around at some articles, here is what you hear. Leadership that invites participation, involvement of stakeholders to inform strategy, communication that shapes new behaviors, training that unites organization, metrics that define success. Another source talks about the five C's of change management, Communicate with Clarity, Consistency, Confidence, Commitment, Care, and Concern. Okay, I don't disagree with any of these. They're all accurate. And finally, in a stepped approach, step one, get the organization on board with the change. Step two, develop change management strategy. Step three, implement the change. Step four, embed the change within the culture. Step five, analyze the success of the change initiative. So there's definitely some common themes, right? Measurement, consistency, communication. But truly, what does this mean for a chief of staff or kind of that C-suite support senior executive assistant? And what we were just talking about is that chiefs of staff are really well suited for major changes, cross collaborative initiatives. And what's quite beneficial is that many, most chiefs of staff and probably some senior executive assistants also own the rhythm of business for the executive leadership team or ELT. If you hear me say ELT, executive leadership team, which is your leader's executive team. Because owning the rhythm of business is usually a chief of staff responsibility, this means that the chief of staff can ensure that important changes remain a top priority for the ELT. They manage the agendas, they manage the rhythm of when we're meeting about what, they help manage the follow up and the information gathering and the trickle down. So obviously, chiefs of staff are well suited for change management. But really, what does this look like? If you've heard anything that I've come on the podcast before with Jeremy and talk about, it's probably not surprising that I'm going to start with reflection and planning. So reflection. If your team is approaching a big change, really big or small, any change that's going to affect your company, your culture, people, a team, the whole organization, you have to first reflect. I'm going to go through some of these questions. And there is a guide on our website at novachiefofstaff.com/resourcelibrary, where you can find all of this change management planning kickoff if you're looking for it. So let's reflect. What is the change being made? Are we doing things as objectively as possible? Who's affected? What are the objections going to be? Who are the major stakeholders? The ELT, other leaders in the company, different teams or one team, maybe HR or a training department? As some examples, is there training involved? That's a whole nother work stream. How will we measure success? How are we thoughtful about timing? Is it Christmas season? Is this change going to affect company culture because it's the holidays? What kind of timing should we take into account to be thoughtful about our employee base with the change that we're making? And how do we connect with employees today? Newsletter, leadership communication, like a note directly from the founder or the CEO or the business leader, bulletins from HR, downstream communication that's just vocal from your leader, team leader communication in a meeting, right? That's how they get their updates, a daily meeting or a weekly or monthly meeting. All-hand sessions, surveys, CEO coffee chats, those are just some. Your company probably has a lot of different ways to reach your team, and it's important to know what all of those ways are so that you can reach people the way that they want to be reached, the way that they will learn best. Obviously, email is different than spoken. It's different than an intimate coffee chat with the CEO. What are the right methods for the change and for your company and team culture? Then are there any other questions or concerns that you think will come up based on the change that you're thinking about here? Now, after you reflect on these things, take notes, be super thorough, turn this into a project management style document. Again, I've talked about this kind of thing before. It's highly relevant to approach projects like these and a lot of projects with a very strong executive project management approach is what I call it. Again, we've got some templates for this on our site that I shared earlier in our resource library. But document all of this into a project management style approach. Ensure that you've met with stakeholders, ensure that you've updated your ELT and your leader, and then get to work. Ensure that you have consistent sessions with your working team and consistent updates for your stakeholders and your executive leadership team. Then that's the reflection and getting things documented part. Then you want to move into the planning. We're going to go a level deeper. In a minute here, Jeremy and I can walk through some change management that we've done and led. But in the planning phase, we go deeper. It's all documented and now we really get to work. Identify the connection points for the change and write or plan those communications. Earlier, I listed off all the different ways we connect with employees. Which ways are we going to communicate this change based on our options? Start documenting those, start putting the Google Sheets together, the Word documents, getting things organized and ready to go. Map out the training if this is a change that requires some training. Build the dashboard or the metric reporting system so that you can measure success of this change if that's applicable. Write supporting documentation that you may need. Maybe you have a little website page on your company website or you're sending out PDFs around whatever this change might be. And then map out the communication touch points with dates and timing and document links. More is better. And as I mentioned earlier, as many different styles of communication, the better. We all learn differently. Some people prefer an email. Some people prefer in-person. Some people prefer or need multiple different kinds of communication to really understand and hear the message that's being shared with them. And then really, you're implementing the change. And from here, there's so many different variations of what this change could be. And we'll talk about some examples. But at this point, it's all about follow through and follow up. You're connecting with your employee base through feedback. Maybe it's a survey. Maybe it's a touch point. Maybe you're bubbling up feedback from downstream teams to your C-suite leadership team. Go back to the communication styles and ensure that you've gotten the message across. Continue to follow up even if it feels like, oh, we're on to 20 new projects this week and that was a couple weeks ago. Go back and follow up and retro, how did your team do on that change management? Is there still anything that needs to be done? So I'm going to pause there. Jeremy, what did I miss? Did I cover the big pieces that you would encounter in change management?

Jeremy · 10:18

Yeah, I think those are super great high level overview and even just the modes of communication being important. It's, you know, some people think, oh, we need to communicate this change, so we're going to send an email and that's it. And it's like, well, the engineering team doesn't read emails or the other team, this marketing team is living on Slack all day and there was no communication on Slack or we had a company-wide all hands and nobody mentioned it. And so just having to use all those different modes of communication to broadcast the changes. And then it also allows for people to push back and have questions and provide feedback along the way. And so I guess my question to you then is maybe is there a time or challenge that you faced in your personal career where the change management was maybe not going so well, people were really resistance or it was just a challenge, change management challenge? Anything you want to share there?

Maggie · 11:37

Yeah. Oh my gosh. It's so funny thinking back about all of the experiences with managing projects and trickling everything down from C-suite through the organization. You know, one thing is you were talking Jeremy that I wanted to add, which will definitely show up here in my example, is the need for your C-suite leader to back up the change and communicate in their own way to their people, the way that their people expect them to, about the change. A lot of change is about positioning and marketing, really, like how is this change benefiting the person who's receiving it or benefiting the company and how are we positioning it, almost from PR perspective? And it's important that your CEO or business leader is really involved in helping position all of this, even if they may not be the most major stakeholder, but it's a decision that affects them or people who report to them. So something to think about there is make sure you include your CEO or business leader support in your project management of this kind of a thing. But the fun example I have for a difficult project that there's just no getting away from it being difficult is remapping a seating chart for an entire organization on my leader's team. Now, the leaders on my leader's team are VP level, very senior with teams of 30 to 60, maybe 15, 30, 45, 60-ish on each of these four or five teams. With return to office and COVID moving behind us, we had to figure out, okay, how do we get everybody back in the office and where the heck are they all going to sit? I'll run through some of the application of the framework I was talking about. But first of all, what's the change being made? Okay, people are getting new seats. This is a highly personal change that people feel very emotional about. My next framework reflection question here is, are we doing things as objectively as possible? In this scenario, I don't think the best person to make this change would be one of the existing leaders of the teams that are being moved. I think a better person would be someone like the Chief of Staff who really is most connected to the leader of the business and a little bit agnostic to the individual teams and can try to make the most objective decision without being as emotionally charged or having emotional relationships in to where people are sitting. We know that everybody is affected and we want to map out what those objections are. So clearly objections, well, kind of where we went wrong here is we figured that we were making everybody happy, that all 60 people were going to have to be on the north side because they were all next to each other. And the team with 30 was going to have to be over here, which was near the tunnel to the food, so they would be happy. Our team was really small. My kind of Chief of Staff team was smaller, so we were going to sit in the small area with 15 of us or so. And things just kind of fell into place and made sense that way. But wow, we did not anticipate the emotions that were involved in a decision like this. So there was a team upset because they were kind of under a stairwell. We thought that it was a great spot because they were near the tunnel to the food. There was a team that would rather have been split up, which just makes no sense to us.

Jeremy · 15:17

Under the stairs? Come on. Under the stairs is like the safest place to be in a tornado. Come on.

Maggie · 15:22

I know, safe, cute, cozy. What's wrong with that? My team was small and there was a small pod of desks next to like an amazing window. So we took that spot and we got some flak for that, but nobody else would fit there. So it's a difficult thing to manage in terms of the change. And as I was mentioning a few minutes ago, I had to talk to my business leader and say, I need you to communicate with your VPs and like, feel free if you want to make some changes to my recommendation here, like we can totally do that, but here's what I recommend and why. He had signed off on all that and I needed him to kind of be the final voice to say, this is why we're doing it. It is what it is. This is the best option for our company. Like, let's kind of move on. But it's a tricky one when so many people are involved and leaders are also wondering like kind of what's going on. You have to manage the messaging all the way down to the employees who are moving around. So at the end of the day, it was really about kind of, we're all signing off. This is what it is. I had some other leaders kind of speak up and say, you know, these are great spots. We're good to go. And the team rallied kind of held hands and moved forward with it. And then we managed the change management to the employee base through various communications and land desk moves. And we were super organized and gave a lot of transparency. So it all worked out. But there's a lot of change like that, that really you can't get away from having to make the difficult decisions and having to make the change. And you just have to do it in the best way that you can and go back to the fundamentals of really communicating and caring about your people and bubbling feedback up and making more changes if you need to.

Jeremy · 17:05

Yeah, and it's especially hard with that big of a team. And, you know, it's like you can't, you'll never make any decisions if you try to please everyone. And so you just try to take the feedback, what's really important to your team, what's really important to your team. I remember we had a similar deal where we moved offices and there was one of those things where we were a small startup company trying to save cash and we're like, well, let's just spend a Friday, Saturday moving most of stuff ourselves and setting everything up so that we don't lose very many days of productivity on the other end.

Maggie · 17:50

Yeah.

Jeremy · 17:50

And so, you know, we went in and worked some overtime over the weekend to get everything set up and ready. And then one of the team leads was a little bit frustrated and dramatic about where the desks were and where things were set up and how things were set up. And we're like, you could have showed up and helped us and had a little more input. That team lead is no longer with us. But there's just that culture thing of like, sometimes you just have to make decision and move forward and not take, especially in a startup environment, not take up too much more time from building the product and moving forward.

Maggie · 18:35

Yeah.

Jeremy · 18:36

So yeah.

Maggie · 18:36

Yeah. I mean, the cool thing about the Chief of Staff role and the Senior EA role, if you're acting in this capacity, is that you are the voice of your employee base. You have such a pulse on the culture of your company, or your team, or your business, that you can bring those concerns to your executive leadership team. You can ensure that it's talked about in some session during your Rhythm of Business schedule. You can be the advocate for people, but it's important that it's thought about ahead of time, that you're reflecting, you're planning, you're approaching with a strong project management base, so that you can really solve those problems and listen to your people, and then help them feel heard, because you're really approaching with a full circle mentality, if that tracks.

Jeremy · 19:30

Yeah, definitely. Awesome. Well, this is great. Any other last tips or final words related to change management?

Maggie · 19:43

Nothing else probably related to change management, but we do have those, how to kick off a big change management template, some project management templates in our resource library at novachiefofstaff.com/resourcelibrary. So feel free to help yourself there. And I appreciate you having me on Jeremy.

Jeremy · 20:01

Also, Maggie, thank you so much. And I'll put that link in the show notes as well. leaderassistant.com/307. And of course, as always, reach out to Maggie on LinkedIn or Novachiefofstaff and their team and find out more about all the resources they're doing in their course and everything. And so great, great resources that I'm excited to share and extra excited because I didn't have to produce them. And she did her and her team did a great job producing them.

Maggie · 20:32

So thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Awesome. Well, you have a good one.

Speaker 2 · 20:47

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