Unlocking Change Success: Harnessing Coaching Skills in Change Management
Change management is, at its core, about making change happen and sustaining it to realise the full benefits of the change. Done properly, it’s more than following a process and using tools and templates; it’s about enabling people to transition to a future state through engagement in a way that unlocks sustainable business value.
In this article, I outline how coaching can inform change management. Specifically, as a change manager, you can use key coaching skills to help achieve a compelling and widely supported change vision. In addition, you can develop a comprehensive, context-specific, and stakeholder-owned change strategy.
A change vision is a view of what the future state will look like once the change is successfully implemented. A vision is about answering “why change?” at both the organisational and individual levels in a way that creates energy and a willingness to change. It needs to appeal to both the heads and hearts of the people touched by the change, creating a sense of meaning that will motivate them to take on the adjustment challenges that come with change. A change strategy answers the question, “How will we achieve the change vision?” It is context-specific and needs to accommodate for the particulars of the change and the organisational and individual environment, both internally and externally. A change strategy should ideally have various sections such as sponsorship, the change team, stakeholder management, communication, building support, managing resistance, training, skills development, risk mitigation, and success measurement. The key is ensuring it is coherent, comprehensive, and suited to the context. A change vision and strategy should be actively supported by at least 75% of management to stand a chance of not only being complied with but also internalised and integrated into the culture and fabric of the organisation.
Partnering
In coaching, partnering is based on the belief that the client is resourceful, creative, and capable of generating their own solutions. It entails a dynamic where both parties work together as allies and equals; the coach provides support, guidance, and a structured process, while the client actively explores perspectives and insights, makes decisions, and takes action.
As a change manager, it is critical to master partnering; you don’t want to be pushing or pulling your stakeholders along. Partnering in the vision and strategy process extends beyond your sponsor and should include key stakeholders across all levels and areas. These are the decision-makers, people who, through formal or informal ways, have the most influence to impact the change, representatives from areas affected by the change, and those who will make the change happen. Neglecting to include key stakeholders can cause irreparable damage to the buy-in and momentum created around a change. A facilitated workshop focused on brainstorming with the stakeholders you already know is a highly effective approach for identifying a comprehensive set of stakeholders. This method practically demonstrates the concept of partnering.
Partnering is the basis of true collaboration and requires you to let go of the idea that you know best for a while. Sometimes, it is useful to put a strawman vision and strategy together with your sponsor after you have collected information through one-on-one sessions with a wide audience of stakeholders and before you hold larger workshops. However, it is critical that there is no attachment to this strawman. It should be used only as a foundation to co-create the way forward, ensuring that multiple viewpoints, expertise, and insights are taken into account.
This approach cultivates a sense of ownership, inclusivity, shared responsibility and active engagement for the change; it fosters a collective sense of pride and accountability, unlike a top-down push, which often gives only short-term results.
Creating Trust and Safety
An environment of trust and safety allows a shift from fear to opportunity and encourages stakeholders to share their thoughts freely, explore unconventional ideas, and challenge traditional norms. This approach sparks innovation, creativity and active participation, enabling the development of a vision and strategy that is not constrained by preconceived notions. Coaches understand that genuine human-centered relationships based on empathy, integrity, and candour create this environment.
As a change manager, remind yourself that every person you encounter has a rich life within themselves and away from work, which you know nothing about. Foster empathy through a holistic understanding of them as individuals—their concerns, fears, and aspirations. By doing so, you can provide opportunities for involvement that both ignite their intrinsic motivation and create the psychological safety needed for them to explore the possibilities of change.
Influence is largely about integrity, humility, and empathy. Reduce your own need to exert power, and put yourself in your stakeholder’s shoes. Help them identify how their perceptions and limitations may impact the process and support them in finding innovative ways to contribute to a vision and strategy that serves the organisational needs and can be fully owned by them at an individual level.
Empathy doesn’t mean ignoring difficult topics, areas of potential conflict and tip-toeing around people’s sensitivities. Trust and safety is about serving the highest good from a place of integrity and candour, confronting challenging situations head on in a non-judgmental way and intending to find a win-win solution. Conflict is typically derived from fear, and fear comes from individual perceptions. Through empathy and candour, you can provide a space to operate from opportunity, energy and potential rather than fear. Trust the engagement process to unfold organically as you hold the space for another. To do this, you will need to be present and not fixated on your own mind, agenda, and perspective. Pragmatically, win-win solutions are not always possible, but operating from a place where that is the intention allows you to see opportunities to make it happen.
Use this approach to set the tone for what is acceptable interpersonal communication in group sessions and gently hold people accountable for unprofessional interpersonal ways of relating that deter from building trust. For instance, take a pause to include those who have not shared, intervene courteously if loud voices disrupt the meeting and talk over others. In group settings, loud voices may drown out those with something valuable to say.
Active Listening and Deep Presence
Active listening is a key coaching skill that involves not only hearing the words spoken but also the underlying messages in what is not said. One must be aware of tone, body language, facial cues, engagement style, and emotions. Active listening requires attending fully to the present and giving the other your undivided attention. It goes beyond passive hearing and includes using open body language and minimising distractions to create a deeper connection and understanding between people.
As a change manager, it is critical to seek to understand the other before trying to be understood. Listening to understand is not the same as listening to persuade; persuasion is neither effective nor does it build trust and safety and will probably backfire on you. When using one-on-ones to gather information on your stakeholder’s ideas on vision and strategy, you generally shouldn’t be talking for more than 25% of the time you have together.
Noticing metaphor is another powerful aspect of active listening. The metaphors used when speaking will give you insight into how someone sees organisations. Consequently, you can begin to understand how they engage in the change vision and strategy process. For instance, leaders who see an organisation as a political system are more likely to see leveraging power sources and control of resources as ways to build a unified vision and strategy for change. In contrast, leaders who see an organisation as a complex adaptive system will be less inclined to get into the details of a strategy, preferring an inspirational vision with a wide ambit and an emergent change strategy.
As active listening enhances understanding, it will allow you to truly grasp various stakeholders’ needs, aspirations, and concerns, including employees, leaders, and clients. What are their fears around potential disruptions in daily operations? What information are you getting that will help you with potential pockets of resistance that may impact the change journey further along? What do they want to say but are too afraid to share openly? Accommodating this level of depth in your strategy will ensure that your strategy is suited to the context of the change and is practically feasible.
I once worked on implementing a sustainability initiative. I remember listening attentively to ideas about how the initiative could positively impact not only the organisation but the broader community. Hearing how that possibility built energy, excitement, and ownership, led us to incorporate these ideas into the vision. As we encountered challenges on the change journey, returning to this vision helped remind people of the difference they would make to the world, not just their organisation.
Asking Powerful Questions
Powerful questioning involves asking thought-provoking and open-ended questions to encourage deep thinking, reflection, new insights and expanded perspectives. These questions stimulate creative thinking and problem-solving, supporting the development of solutions that are both innovative and grounded in the practicalities of the context. Solutions that really work.
As a change manager, asking powerful questions in the visioning and strategy process will help you in numerous ways: challenging assumptions, uncovering potential hidden impacts and needs, bringing to light unconscious biases, and improving the quality and feasibility of your stakeholder’s ideas.
Powerful questions also help motivate and internalise a change for stakeholders. For example, by helping a stakeholder identify the link between their individual vision and strategy and the organisational vision and strategy, you can help them envision a future full of opportunities that align with their own and the organisation’s purpose and values. You can help them see the desirability of change and the true problems they and the organisation face. This drives the motivation to devise innovative strategic approaches and a unifying vision.
A partnering approach based on trust and safety enables you to ask tough questions that really challenge your stakeholders to see past their own perceptions, biases and limiting beliefs shaping their contribution to the vision and strategy process. You can help them see gaps in their thinking and where they are failing to see the wider impact on the organisation. In working with key stakeholders at an individual level, you ensure that when you get to workshops involving a wider set of stakeholders, the groundwork that will encourage unified thinking for the good of the organisation has already been done.
The best questions are emergent and come from active listening; unfortunately there is no list you can choose from. I once asked a sponsor, “What do you really want from this change?” A simple question that took the conversation in a whole new direction. What he had previously shared as the vision for the change was not the same as what he really wanted from it.
Conclusion
A coaching approach takes time and deep engagement; amid time-sensitive changes that require quick action and turnaround, it may not be the ideal approach. Similarly, less coaching-style engagement will be a better approach when the change is well-defined, contained to a small area, or similar to previously successfully implemented changes. It is important to be pragmatic. A change manager also needs to be able to leverage their other skills—be it training, mentoring, or project management—as coaching skills may not be ideal for every engagement. Change management is as much art as science, and coaching skills become useful tools in a change manager’s vast toolkit. As you get more familiar with using coaching skills, you will know when and how they work best in your environment. The applications are endless and span the full life cycle of change.