Building Competence for Change

What is CHANGE COMPETENCE and why is it important? 

Let’s take the example of a European pharmaceutical business we supported some years ago. 

The Senior Leadership team had successfully led change​, but the organisation lacked change competence in certain areas​. This was the point when our sponsor, the HR Senior Vice President, engaged Enabling Change to support the business by enabling Europe-wide business and cultural transformation​ as well as building change competence. 

The Objectives

1. To make the transformation model tangible​

2. To provide practical tools to support the ongoing transformation and lead change across all European organisations​

3. To build lasting competence in leading change and business transformation, including sharing best practice​

4. To facilitate best practice and knowledge sharing within the European organisations​

Our Approach

We concentrated on building CHANGE competence DURING the change process via a 5-step approach:

1. We set up a 2-day Workshop. 
   Why? To promote a mutual language and shared understanding of the objectives.
   

2. We established Executive Sponsorship
   Why? To integrate with the organisation’s existing talent development activities and to ensure each event is sponsored by a Senior Leader. 
   

3. We created bite-size change education modules
   Why? To put competence building into the context of the business transformation. 
   
   

4. We created a Tailored “Change Competence Toolkit”
   Why? To remove barriers between learning and practical application. 
   
   

5. We evolved our solutions to virtual via short videos 
   Why? To ensure fresh knowledge on the topic of Change Competence and accessibility to all employees.

The Results

We achieved a successful transformation and value-creation through active sponsorship driven by senior leaders AND an engaged and upskilled employee network.

But that is not all. 5 years after this work had taken place we recieved some feedback from a participant who attended the training.

“I had the opportunity to follow a 2-day training course in October 2018 from you on change management and still today it inspires me. I use your tools in workshops and keep your insights at my fingertips as today’s world is constantly changing.”

The workshop this participant attended with us still impacts their work years later because they had been equipped to​ tackle the challenges that will arise in the future. A sign of successfully enabling change competences and making change truly sustainable.