Interesting thing about water.\u00a0 You can pretty significantly influence the temperature at which water freezes\u00a0 simply by introducing an agent to it.\u00a0 But there are other times when water actually should freeze, when it is pure and below the freezing temperature, but that water can be held in a liquid state at just below the normal freezing temperature until a nucleating agent is introduced.\u00a0\u00a0 We\u2019ve seen in it a variety of environments whether it\u2019s in movies or what not.\u00a0 I remember a recent mythbusters show (for those of you who watch discovery channel in the U.S.) where they were able to keep a liquid in the liquid state, but once the first ice crystal was introduced, a rapid chain reaction occurred and the rest of the liquid formed into ice in seconds.<\/p>\n
HR is much the same.\u00a0 Any time you are introducing change to the organization, there are times where change happens naturally, and other times when change has to be strongly influenced.\u00a0 Unfortunately for us, we need those nucleating agents more often than not.\u00a0 The problem is that we don\u2019t always realize until it\u2019s too late that we needed an agent, or we didn\u2019t know which agent to choose.<\/p>\n
I completely realize that we are all sick and tired of the concept of change management, but all too often as I visit my clients, change is treated in the same fashion that it was 10 years ago.\u00a0 We push out training programs, and we attempt to do the same type of communications.\u00a0 Let\u2019s be the first to admit to ourselves: HR has no flair for marketing.\u00a0 We\u2019re in HR partly because we are not salespeople \u2013 often times we don\u2019t even understand salespeople.\u00a0 But sell we must, and when we realize that we don\u2019t have those abilities\/competencies, it\u2019s time to find the nucleating agents that will sell for us, and spread the word \u2013 forming ice crystals in seconds instead of\u2026 well, never.<\/p>\n
The best nucleating agents are those who are not only already on our side, but those who are obviously influential.\u00a0 There are those who have broad networks, and others who simply have the right connections to other important people.\u00a0 One would think that in Human Resources, we would know who these people are \u2013 but we don\u2019t.\u00a0 In the organizations that do understand that they are not the most effective marketing arm for new rollouts, HR solicits the help of VP\u2019s to communicate the message and brand.\u00a0 In effect, we have managed to enhance our training and communications materials with and additional layer: change management by edict.\u00a0 This is not to say that VP level communications are not necessary \u2013 in fact their level of sponsorship is very necessary.\u00a0 But when rolling out new manager portal tools (for example), the people who are going to sell are not the VP\u2019s, but other managers who buy into the product, decide that it is more effective than the prior state, and will selflessly market it for you.\u00a0 These, indeed, are the true nucleating agents in the organization.<\/p>\n
As sick and tired as you all are of hearing people talk about change management, it is still under-budgeted and improperly deployed.\u00a0 As sick as you are of it, I\u2019m equally sick of most of us not getting it right.\u00a0 I totally understand that when we are in the throes of implementation, we\u2019re all heads down and grinding away at table configuration and testing, but that is no forgiveness and excuse for messing up the end user rollout.\u00a0 Better to get the audience right and miss a bit on the config.\u00a0 So here\u2019s me, asking yet again, find your nucleating agent.\u00a0 Deploy them well.\u00a0 Get buy-in and adoption in the seconds it takes to crystalize liquid when the right conditions are met.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Interesting thing about water.\u00a0 You can pretty significantly influence the temperature at which water freezes\u00a0 simply by introducing an agent to it.\u00a0 But there are other times when water actually should freeze, when it is pure and below the freezing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1822,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37,8,34],"tags":[453,448,88,301],"class_list":["post-1820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-change-management","category-strategies","category-implementation","tag-change-management","tag-communications","tag-marketing","tag-nucleating-agents"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1820"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1823,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1820\/revisions\/1823"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}