Tommy serves as the President at ThreeWill. In this role, he works with his leadership team to hire the best people, find the right business opportunities, and ensure that ThreeWill delivers for our clients on projects.
Get Better Adoption and Change Management by Leveraging the “Carrot” Mindset
As a leader in an organization, you have a choice with how to motivate a team. You can use a carrot or a stick (aka reward or punish) or some combination of these to make progress with the teams you lead.
My go-to choice for motivating our organization is using a carrot. I see one of my most important tasks at ThreeWill is “catching people do great things.” We all know it is easy to find things you want to improve, but I have experienced better results through focusing on what you want to amplify or replicate in your organization.
I think this carrot mindset can be leveraged when it comes to adoption and change management in an organization. When rolling out technological solutions in your organization, you can “catch people doing great things” through some of the following:
- Showing appreciation for your champions
- Measuring and sharing progress
- Recognizing the wins
Showing Appreciation for Your Champions
We find it key to name your champions when rolling out a technological solution. Champions are typically in the trenches with the solution and are important for showing how to leverage the solution in a way that gets results.
Champions need support from the stakeholders of the project, so be sure to recognize the impact they are having on the success of the rollout. We find it helpful to do that in a public and private way. Recognizing them in front of their peers and/or managers shows how important the initiative is to you as a stakeholder and reinforces your appreciation for the champion. In addition to public recognition, it is a very nice touch to provide a direct message to express your gratitude.
Measuring and Sharing Progress
When you have a key technology initiative, you need to understand the definition for success and what you expect to improve by rolling out the solution.
We all know some initiatives (like improving productivity) can be squishy and subjective, so you need to work hard at identifying the key measures for success. After you get that in place, it is key to recognize positive progress. It is easy for an initiative to lose steam if there is no recognition early and often of the progress made to provide the fuel needed to keep the initiative moving forward. Recognizing the successes along the way give examples of how the solution makes a difference and models how others can achieve similar success.
Recognizing the Wins
Wins are hard to achieve with technology initiatives. When you do win, make the celebrations count. Create a culture that says if you put in the hard work, we will pause to celebrate vs. just moving on to the next challenging thing to do.
Emphasizing the Human Element
The human element of a technology initiative may be the most under-served element of rolling out improvements in your organization. If we do not properly motivate and recognize the people involved to make the initiative successful, we can be doomed from the start.
This is remarkably simple advice, but I find it can be overlooked so I wanted to share with others. I hope you can make a difference with your technology solutions rollouts by catching your people doing great things!
CONTACT THREEWILL TODAY FOR HELP ROLLING OUT YOUR TECHNOLOGY INITIATIVES!