I am quite sure all of you would agree that the most challenging part of change management is managing people in a change process. However there are various kind of people and one of the most influential in motivating you as change manager are people who are compliant to change.

Possibly these people are least effected by change hence they really dont care, but convincing people who are effected by change will be the most difficult task - you included (i.e if you are effected by it). Actually you will be in the best position to effect a change if you or your job will be part of change. Believe me you will succeed more when you are part of the group of people who are effected by change.

My experience suggests that only key skill you require to effect a succeefull change (and accoladed for it) is to communicate! communicate! and communicate! I can tell you also that more you do that the more the need for it.

Empathise is another keyword to convince people to make that change. Again I would say that 40% of change management is the process and 60% is people.

As you effect that change, remember to have a strong reason for the change as most of reasons for change are baseless - atleast to people who are effected by change.

Remeber there are two tools you can use to manage a change - the Whip or you yourself, In majority cases the choice is simple and trust me both are effective in different circumstances.

I had a very interesting experience on change, I was appraoched by a very senior member of the Management group to give an opinion of the way my department works and whther I was happy with the way things were going and if I was happy with line management etc.

In my urge to be sincere and honest I ended up telling a lot of truth about the job and what can be changed to make it better, and my disatisfaction with line manaagement approach, about the structure of the team.

These were mainly constructive criticism and I had a positive approach throughout my conversation with him. at the end of it all he thanked me for being sincere honest about my feedback. He also said that he would like to take my comments to his senior and make changes as necessarry.

I met him a week later and he said that he plans to change the location of the department to another country and intends to recruit a new team. and he was not feeling guilty as I anyway did not approve of the way things were going at present!!!!

A lesson learnt here, eventhough unknowingly you could be a tool to a change which can directly effect you.

In my earlier post, I had raised a question on change - are we afraid of change? Let me explain this a bit further and we can explore whether we are.....

Eventhough we change things in our day to day life even in our long term ambitions, our targets, our lifestyle, our attitudes and even sometime our principles.

This is all based on a central point of our purpose and that is to live well or with the main objective of, earning enough money to live well. Let us call this our pivot. Hence everything arround this pivot can cange but nothing should disturb this pivot. Once the green flows in we are ready to make small, medium and sometime big changes to all the above.

Once this pivot changes - all hell breaks loose in our heart and in our mind we then become instruments of our emotion and will lay all blame of our sorry state to whoever has made this change. Of-cource this will begin by questioning the need for change, question the wisdom of the person who has brought about this change, finding loopholes in the case for change and we all end up bringing all kind of emotions to the forefront and generate negative thoughts.

But in our fast life did we miss something which actually resulted in the change and took us by surprise, did we miss an oppurtunity somewhere down the line?

We as managers are always trying to create a business continuity plan and disaster recovery plans for our organisation, but when it comes to our own life's continuity after a "disasterous change" we know we have forgotten that.

Are we ready for change?.