Navigating Change Management with Julie Whitten

Speaker A: This is sas therapy. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining SAS Therapy. My name is Casey Trujillo, and I'm flying solo. Solo mio, which I saw that movie, and I don't know if I'm saying that right, I don't think solo meo means flying by myself. But anyways, so glad to have you here. My, My co host, Mr. Todd Kirk, is not able to join us today. Those, you know, summer, summertime, summer vacations, and wasn't able to get this all coordinated. But we have the most amazing guests in the world with Julie Whitten. So I actually want her all to myself to be able to have this great conversation. So it's even better because Todd steals my time. So, Julie, welcome. Glad to have you here on SAS Therapy.

Speaker B: Thanks so much, Casey. We're going to have a blast. So, uh, and Todd's going to be sorry he missed it, right?

Speaker A: Exactly. Amen to that. Julie, give everyone a little bit of background of who you are. What's. What's your expertise? Why are you. Why are you on the show today? Besides we beg and pleaded for you to be on the show? Why don't you give everyone a little bit of background around your experience?

Speaker B: Sounds good. Yes. I've spent 25 years in the change management and employee communications corporate world, leading a 5 Fortune 500 company, uh, in both of those functions. And I've seen a lot kasey in that amount of time. A lot of things that kind of came, came around again and again. And, uh, you know, with my background really being grounded in communications, when I found change, it was the light bulb that really changed the way I work and the way I approach things. And recently I went on to write a book about what my experience is and what I saw as, uh, well, as start my own consultancy.

Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. Okay, so we're gonna have so much fun today because we're, we're gonna go all over the place. Julie, first and foremost, you started out in. In communications, or was that marketing, and then they turned you into internal communication? Communication. So first job, what. What is the role of. Because a lot of people, again, our main audience is software vendors, right? And it's their customer success team, their implementation team, their, uh, account executives. You know, a lot of people might not know the inner workings of their direct customer. So what does a communication person do? And then I want to get to how you found change management. Let's start here. What is the role of communications at an organization?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I basically say, what, what do people need to know? And do with all the information that's coming from all of the, if you think about all of the different functional groups in an organization, whether that's it, hr, finance, supply chain labor, on and on and on. And then let, let's not forget the day to day business duties. Right. Uh, communicating that internally to the employees, what do they need to know and do and making it sure that that is echoed through all of the different communities communication channels like town halls, the Internet, emails, et cetera.

Speaker A: Okay, so just to put this into a little bit more context for, for our audience, I might be selling a software that works with the marketing team. Now the marketing team might be 50 employees. That type of communication probably is not going to make it to your desk. Your desk is going to deal with things that are enterprise across the entire organization. Things that every employee might want to know about. Right. Is that, is that fair? Like how do you.

Speaker B: 100%.

Speaker A: How do you decide what you're working on and then what other departments can just handle themselves in their own comms like a manager just reaching out to their, their own workforce.

Speaker B: Yes. Enterprise wide information where there's a behavior change required most of the time.

Speaker A: Okay, how do you decide? Because I'm sure there's a lot of initiatives because you mentioned hr. You mentioned it. I mean just the own thing that the leadership wants to talk about. Right. How do you decide what gets. And again, this is maybe too long ago, but how do you decide what got on your agenda to communicate out? How would you communicate out? Uh, I, I mean I know you mentioned a couple different vehicles, but what was the main one that people seem to, to interact with and engage with, talk to people about that. That more of that inner working there.

Speaker B: Yeah. So the, the how is a great question, Casey. So it's really scope and magnitude and the return on the investment that you're talking about. Right. So it, the, the company strategy, if you're, if you're communicating it at an enterprise wide level and there are communications that happen. Right. Uh, with uh, various functions or departments or you know, regions. If you think of, you know, big company that operated all over the U.S. different regions have their own communications. But that's kind of the general rule of thumb for things that happen at the enterprise wide level. And the second question you asked, remind me it was more about the channels, correct?

Speaker A: Yeah. What was the most effective channels as you were interacting with your own employees? I know it depends, but you know, across your experience, you know, what do you think was probably the most effective channels?

Speaker B: You're Gonna love this answer. There wasn't one. There's, there's no silver bullet. Okay. So it's always a multi channel communications approach and especially if you're talking about frontline employees. A lot of companies that I've worked for on my previous life, they don't have a way to reach those employees other than through their manager. So that actually becomes a channel that's usually a combination of email, uh, webinar slash town hall. Uh, sometimes they'll use Viva Engage, which is kind of like a, almost like a social media, you know, internal company approved Facebook I guess I'll call it.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: It's a combination. But then a lot of people don't think of these as communication channels. But I tend to go there because of my change background Meetings, meetings and conversations. Because we often underestimate the amount of socialization that's needed for something to go well for a project initiative to go well. And really how do you bring in those two way conversations? It's not through email, it's not through one way town halls or webinars. It's really conversations. So um, when I start to think about a good communication plan, it has all of those different channels.

Speaker A: Okay, so I'm going to pause everyone here. We're going to get into how she get into change management and a lot of what you're going to hear us talk about right now will fall into why she probably fell in love with change management. But I still want to dive into this Persona of communications because again I don't believe our audience understands this person and how vital. If you sell something to the enterprise and you want this communication to happen everywhere, they need to understand the mind of someone that's in this role. So Julie, question number one. How would you measure success? How did your role as someone that's getting out communications, how do you measure success? Is it just that you send out the communications and it looked good? Was it looking at interactions? Was it looking at engagement? Like what, what do the KPIs of someone in communications look like? Cause again this is going to be a setup for our solution providers understand what I'm about ready to get to, but they need to understand what's in it for you as someone in comms. Talk to me a little bit about what, what would be some of those measurables that you, you were looked at.

Speaker B: Yeah. So from purely comms perspective, we're not talking about change. I'll get there in just a second. Yes. So open rates. Right. So they're looking at ah, how Many people opened the email, um, how long did they stay? What did they click on? Because you can look at the various links, a lot of times that will lead to a company intranet, right, where you can count clicks on a page, you can count attendance at webinars, you know, kind of percentage of participation. Like I know I used to work for a company. We would want, um, our goal would be 60% of senior leaders would be participating in the quarterly town halls to understand kind of where the financials were in the strategy. So those are kind of pure communication metrics that you can use to measure success and engagement.

Speaker A: Uh, okay. I hope people just got the golden nugget that was just laid upon their laps. But I'm going to double click because I don't think people understand that. So if I'm a software vendor and I know you've worked with various software vendors, and your employee comes to you and says, julie, hey, we're making this big transition. We're going to change our CRM software or we're going to change and we're going to implement some new collaboration software. And you're like, great, what do we need to communicate out about? And your employee says, oh, here's the email templates that the software vendor gave me to give to you. Okay, Give me the goods that you've seen, the good examples and give me the bad examples and give me what would be the ideal of what you're looking for, if that makes sense. Like let's our people on just don't give. Here's six emails. Give this to your comms people and let me know if they send it out. Like, I think there should be more than that. And maybe I'm being too hopeful. I don't know. Julie, I've never done your job. So I went that past job of comms. Talk to me about what that looks like.

Speaker B: Yeah, I, I used to get that a lot. Uh, and I'll be honest with you, it wasn't extremely helpful. I know that we can be candid on this conversation. So I've got to put my change hat on here. Right, because you're asking people not to read an email. You're asking them to change their behavior. That's something completely different. Right. You're not measuring the same thing you want to measure. Yes, people clicked on this, but did they do what they needed to do? Right. So it really requires a robust change strategy around it, especially when you're talking around new CRM. I'm actually working on a project like that right now. So let's take a step back. So the top two reasons that projects and initiatives fail. Number one is the why not people not understanding the why. I'll take that one click down even further. It's not just about the organizational why, it's about the individual why. A lot of people miss the vote on that. So why is there a new CRM? How is this going to benefit the person using it? Is it going to require, you know, more. More of their time? But in the end it's. Is it going to require or get them a better financial gain? Are they incentivized to do this? Something like that. Number two reason, um, that project initiative fails. Lack of active invisible sponsorship. So who is the person that's asking people to make this change? Right. So if you just handed me an email and I'm sending it out from a generic email box with nobody telling them why they need to do it and what they need to do, it's noise. It is competing against everything else in an organization. Think about a very large organization of things that are going out, which is a lot. Right. And my, my other advice is it better people tell people what they need to know and do. Because a lot of times we'll get, um, in the communications department, what we call SME speak, and it's really very technical, right. It's kind of the ins and outs and the nuts and bolts. And at the end of the day, people have no time, right. They're time poor. Especially if they're running a business, uh, managing other people. What do they need to know and do? So email would be just one piece of a, um, robust change strategy, which you would understand if you did a full stakeholder analysis and had your executive sponsors on board, blah, blah, blah. How's that, Kasey?

Speaker A: Oh, good. Okay. So again, we're, we're gonna just, we're gonna consistently double click on this and then we're gonna get into how you found change management, which, because I have that background, I'm seeing exactly why you fell in love with it. But let's. Super easy for people on the call. So, Julie, I am, um, your internal employee, and I'm coming to you again. We're going to pretend you're the, you know, overcomes, and I'm going to say, hey, Julie, so we're, we're going to be making this change. We're going to be making this change in, in, in 90 days. And I need to get on the same page with you because I know awareness is a big, big point in driving that out I just don't want to create noise for our employees. Julie, what we have is we have the executive sponsors. So our executive sponsor is our VP of sales and she is going to be the one that's going to be our executive sponsor for this. So we've worked with her in crafting the communication. We did our first draft for you that we're going to give to you. And so she's going to be our executive sponsor. We also from the software vendor got a communication for our middle managers because we know this is going to be important to them. So I'm going to give you, I mean give you a middle manager communication and it's actually going to be to a webinar just for managers to let them know why this is of a benefit them, um, as middle managers. And then we have an end user component that we're going to have available to them and it's going to be uh, a lot of what's in it for them as that end user. And so I'm going to give you this. I know you have a way in which you, you believe that this should be sent out in what order and different things like that. We have some, also some internal teams, messaging, just some different links we're going to put on a SharePoint site so you can track that. Julie, is there anything I'm missing in providing this information to you? Is this helpful?

Speaker B: Okay, it's helpful. I'm going to give you a. Casey,

Speaker A: give me some feedback. Julie, if you're hearing that come from your own employee saying, hey, I know I got to drive this, this is what I've been prepared with from my software vendor. Give me a report back. The good, the bad and ugly of what you just heard there. What did you like?

Speaker B: It's not horrible. It's not horrible, Casey. It's actually quite good. There's a piece of that I think we could enhance.

Speaker A: Good talk to everyone.

Speaker B: Yeah, that piece is. So we talked about executive sponsorship, but I want us to take a minute and think about who's receiving the communication and who they report up to.

Speaker A: Nice.

Speaker B: They don't report up to sales, do they? Right. So you want your executive sponsor. I would recommend a sponsorship team in this case, when it's coming from a function that's kind of the back, back office function that's not directly correlated with the business join because they don't know who that leader of sales is. And they, you know, I don't want to say they don't care, but they'll respect if they see Somebody they know. Right. Or in maybe it's a joint partnership, respected even more. And then they're the person that's helping to kick off the call. So that's what I would. I would recommend.

Speaker A: Okay. All I wanted to paint for the audience is, is the difference in how that helps someone. That's over communication. Because I think you've all heard this as a CSM or an ae and we like, hey, we got to communicate this out. And you get excited. Like, great, Let me give you some email templates. Let me give you some links. That is not actually helping the person over comms. M. You're just giving them more noise. And then the comms person is going to say, hey, these are the things I'm going to need. And then your point of contact is going to get a little bit frustrated. And then either it doesn't get the communication it deserves, or at, uh, the end of the day, you send out maybe one comment. It doesn't get the person over comms excited about sharing the information because they have a job to do also. Right. Julie, that misinterpret any of that of.

Speaker B: No. Comms teams are extremely lean, Casey. They're overhead. Right. And there's. They're got. They have it coming from every single direction. We're just talking about internal comms. Right. But you can only imagine the external side of things. Right, Exactly. Happening. So great advice.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Okay, so that we probably went maybe a little too long. But I just. I just feel it's so important because I just see it every day and it's one of those things where it's just like, uh, you know, fingernails on a chalkboard where you just. I cannot hear that sound anymore. But I. Without fail, I'll see, uh, uh, a communication from a CSM to a point of point of contact to the customer with about 20 links, a bunch of attachments, and then like, here you go. Wow. That was not useful. So, okay, Julie, let's get back to comms. How do you fall for change management? Like, what happened? Who talked to you about this? And. And talk to me why that was such a discovery to you and saying, this makes sense. Now talk to us about that love story.

Speaker B: Sure, sure. So again, it's been a long time in comms, right. And I kept seeing the same large initiatives come back over and over again. New management systems, CRMs, um, skew rationalizations, and they just wouldn't stick. Right. So a few years later, the organization would be doing the same thing. So I ended up taking this. It was an Internal class around change management and light bulb went on for me of how do you, it's not about just communicating how do you change that behavior of the person that's receiving the change and what is needed to do that? Um, there's a ton of different frameworks that can be leveraged Kasey. There's organizational assessments to figure out what the level of risk is and that helps formulate the change plan, which the part of the change plan is the comms plan and is the training piece of it. But that's not all. And, and basically why do we do it where. There's two reasons. One, it's the right thing to do for people, but two, it's to get to that adoption state faster and to protect the investment. So I feel like people just assume that adoption piece of it. Oh people, everybody's going to do this 100% and really anytime that adoption is challenged, it's going to affect the ROI of the initiative.

Speaker A: And this is why people need to pay attention to this is because today it's getting easier and easier to replace your software. So if you are not following these best practices and change and in grabbing that executive sponsor, having a good comms plan, understanding the organizational risk to change, right. Doing a little bit of that, uh, what do they call it, Clark, where you go back and say, okay, why isn't adoption taking place? Why is the change not happening? And going back and understanding the importance of middle managers, right, all of those components. At the end of the day, let's say you sign a three year agreement. At the end of the three years your customer is going to say, wow, this software wasn't as easy as using what that sales rep told me it was going to be. And then they pull it out. But in all actuality, it probably was the customer's fault in not doing a good change management process to help their employees to make the change. I'm not saying always, but there's uh, some pretty convincing data out there that says if you'll follow the change management best practices, you're most likely going to have success and hit the ROI and the outcomes that you're actually looking for which will make them renew your software. Julie, am I off on that? What would you add to that?

Speaker B: I think you hit it hit the nail on the head, Casey. And it's actually just what I wrote the book about. It's called the People Stack and I explore these five different layers are kind of sitting above all of these frameworks that need to be true for change to actually stick so if you, if we have a minute, I can take you through the different layers. Okay. So the first one is clarity. First the clarity of why it's happening. We talked about the why, what needs to be done from an employee standpoint and up and down the organization. So a lot of times um, you wouldn't believe the amount of things that I've gotten pulled into to help support where there is a lack of clarity. And you've really got to spend some time, if you can't get clear amongst your project team of what's happening, how are you supposed to go out into the organization and have success? The next one is alignment and we talked a little bit about it with the executive sponsorship piece but that leadership alignment. So you'll see sometimes going into these very high level executive meetings where people are not all nodding their heads, I'm on board, right. And they, they walk out and they're all walking in their separate ways and, or the, the, they're, they're aligned but the organization isn't. So maybe they're incentivizing people to do something that was part of, that doesn't align with the new way of working. It's conflicting. So you could see where it breaks there. Uh, the next one is your capability. So that, you know, normally is your training and your knowledge. Some of the red flags I see in that one are the training comes out way too far ahead of when the go live is. So people forgot. Another one is they don't have the time, uh, and space to actually practice whatever it is in a real environment. So employees don't have the confidence but built up around it to actually do what they need to do. Um, and that's where you tend to see a lot of resistance pop up. Also workarounds. So people are checking the box but you know, a new system might be in place, they might be kind of fudging it and it's not going to get the results that it needs to get. The fourth one is probably the most important and the most difficult to achieve. It's belief. So do people actually believe that this is the right thing to do? And depending upon the change, um, that could be really difficult if it's a, ah, reorganization or an AI transformation. But how do you get people to trust in whatever it is you're doing and that it's the right thing to do? And then the fifth one is the sustainment. And I know we've probably all been part of changes where they quietly just slip back because whatever the changes isn't embedded into the organization and they're not being held accountable too. So that's kind of what I discuss a little bit in the book. And then I move into, uh, resistance that pops up. Why it pops up, what it looks like, what's the emotional journey behind it, um, and the psychology behind it. And then what, what to do with it and how to lead through it.

Speaker A: That's awesome. And again, at the end of the day, people are people, they, they come with their own experience, their own understanding of, of what's taking place. So I always say, you know, change management is, is slow until it's fast. Or you can do the opposite and you can go fast and then go super slow. Like it's your choice.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You're going to get to one of them.

Speaker B: But that's the hard way or the easy way.

Speaker A: Right. So let's, let's go through each one of those items. The first one was clarity.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: This one for me, Julie, is probably one of the ones that's most difficult because clarity usually involves upper management and they all think they're so busy and they. Again, I'm gonna group people here. I apologize. I'm not, I'm not trying to say everyone's like this, but a majority are lack a lot of time and they think they know it all. And so when you're trying to get clarity, they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're rolling out a new CRM. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. Yeah, I know we're doing that. No, I don't think you understand how this is going to impact your team, the divisions that you're over. Like, I want to make sure we're really clear on what's going to take place and how this is going to impact you. And so I think a lot of people fear clarity and they just take the nods of the heads and they're like, great. And then something blows up and they're like, well, you didn't tell me that. And you're like, well, I sent you the peoples around that. Right? So how, how have you seen any. Just one best practice, uh, or one thing to stay away from in clarity? And any, any suggestions there, Julie?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I, it makes me think about, uh, the change impacts and doing, uh, today, tomorrow, so thinking about what are the things that are going to change. So is it a process? Is it technology? Is it mindset? So what is that walking through all that? What does it look like today and what does it look like tomorrow in the new world? And, and have them agree on both of Those. So it's not that you can't bring them to, you know, whatever presentation or meeting to socialize it, but I think also if you have them kind of pull some of the things out that it's coming through as their idea. Right. So they're more likely, like you said earlier, to agree with it.

Speaker A: Amen. Okay, perfect. So clarity. Just know that clarity means clarity and don't just take the initial shake of the head. I love. This is the current state, this will be the future state and this is what's going to change to get us there. Does that, you know, really make sure that people are signing off on that? Okay, then we go to alignment. Is alignment more of what I need from you? What, what is alignment? Is alignment on the goals that this is going to save us X amount of dollars, it's going to reduce X amount of risk. Is it both? What do you mean by alignment?

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's both. It's a, it's a great question. So most people tend to jump to leadership alignment first, which is critical. Right. So you've, you just kind of give an example of clarity where you're talking about the today tomorrow piece of the change impacts. But are they able to articulate what those are? And one of the tools I like to use is um, you know, key messages or talking points and frequently asked questions and actually like ask them the questions to have them repeat it back. So you're kind of, they're learning the information at the same time. So that's like the alignment across but then it's gotta be socialized all the way down the organization. And the incentive, incentives have to align as well. So there's a couple different pieces there.

Speaker A: Thought process there.

Speaker B: Yeah. And again it's like telephone. Right. As the message goes down a large organization, it's, it gets jumbled. So you've got to kind of ground people in those key messages, those talking points and that's where all your channels for conversations are going to have to come through. You, you mentioned the middle managers earlier. Critical because a lot of times they're communicating where and that's where the change needs to happen is the person they're communicating to.

Speaker A: So good. I'm going to give one best practice on alignment. This is one that, that I'm super passionate about is um, you know, there, there's usually, you know, three. There's more than three stakeholders. But in this example I'm going to give you three. So there's the, usually the executive team member or the senior level member that said hey, this is the problem we need to fix. We need to go find a solution. They find a solution, they buy the solution. Okay, great. So there, there's usually around what three things you usually write. Increases revenue, reduces or decreases spend. Right. Usually that's what they're looking for. And they're like, okay, we need to solve this. They find a solution. Okay, great. Then we're like, okay, we gotta get the end users to actually do it. Because usually most software impacts the end user and, and that's the people that actually go do the job. So if we don't get the end users to change their behavior, we don't get to those outcomes. Okay. Everybody understands that one. The one that I think people miss a lot today in this, in this triangle is, is it going to enable the features that allows the organization and that end user to actually do what they need to do to get to the outcome? This is a great example. If you have an AI tool, if your IT team does not have a governancing policy and they're not sure about releasing AI out to the wild because they're still struggling with it. Well, you just bought a software that end users can't actually get the full advantage of because it's in compliance is saying, we're not going to allow that AI piece of this to be out there. And now you're backlogged for a year until that finally gets approved. So you also need to make sure it is on board with the features and functionalities and they've signed off to enable that to happen so that we can get to what the stakeholder wanted and what the end user needs to do to get to what the stakeholder wants. So that's the other thing on alignment, don't forget alignment needs to happen. And making sure that the feature sets that you're promising are going to deliver the outcomes are enabled and can be enabled. That's the only thing I would add. Julie, anything you would add to that?

Speaker B: No, that's great. I mean you're, you're talking about a thorough stakeholder analysis, right? To understand all of the different parties and you identified, you know, somebody that is a primary stakeholder in this, um, the success of whatever this is.

Speaker A: Yeah. I just feel somebody's. It's like, hey, we just bought the software, help us implement it. And they're like, woo, there's some pieces missing here. People just enable it. Why does it always have to be a blocker? And it's like, they're not being a blocker. You just didn't Bring them along. Right. Okay, so then we go to capabilities. And capabilities is more around everybody in the organization using the software that they understand the capabilities, Is that what you're saying?

Speaker B: Or is it able to actually use like perform the new, the new behavior, like whatever that new behavior is. They've got to be able to do it. We've got to teach them right how they need to do it. But a lot of times they're not given the time or space to actually do that or they're not doing it in a real environment. So maybe it's a simulated environment that's not accounting for all of the different factors. Um, I've seen it, like I said earlier, like the training, it will come way too far ahead of when the go live is. And they'll be, you know, people will forget again, they're not using it consistently because that's how you learn. And we see people finding those workarounds when they don't really believe in it or think, you know, maybe it's not here to stay, they just checking the box to get through it.

Speaker A: What are any best practices? I know it's could be, it depends. Um, but what would you say is the appropriate amount of time to start to get users going to some, some education or playing around in some of these environments? Is it a couple weeks before launch? A week before launch? Any, any best practices you have there?

Speaker B: Yeah, I don't think it's a one and done in my opinion. And again, it does depend on the complexity. But uh, you know, they want to know. We need to let them know what's coming. Right. And what, help them understand what their role is. So some of these aren't full fledged training on the skills, they are just understanding what the project is, why it's important. Again, number one reason why things fail, I like to throw in there some, some just capability training around change management, just understanding what their role is. Especially if they're a leader. How do they help others, how they identify resistance. And the reason why I do that is because again, organizational change is a series of individual changes. So if they can recognize how they show up in the face of change and why, then they can have the light bulb turn into how they can help others. So I'd say it could be a good like four to six months if you're kind of thinking about those other aspects. And again, you're not just teaching them the skill, you're teaching them how to be a leader, to lead people through that change.

Speaker A: That's fantastic. It's fantastic. I uh, used to love, uh, Microsoft. I'll give a shout out to Microsoft. They used to do what they would call excitement days. And so it'd be about three weeks before they were going to move over to whatever new Microsoft technology. But they would hold these little 10 minute sessions and they again, when people were more at campuses and different things like that, or they do virtual ones and the whole purpose, they start out and just say, hey, our goal today is not to train you, it's to uh, help you understand how you could work with this new software. What are the things that are going to drive the excitement for you that you're, you're, you're going to want to use? So don't worry about taking notes, just say, hey, these are the things that I am super excited about. Put that in the chat comment. And then they would go through like 10 or 15 different features of use cases that they knew that people were going to be excited about. Like, hey, are uh, you, you know, you hate sharing your, you hate trying to find calendar times with, with someone externally. Just put your link in right here. They're going to click on it, they're going to see your availability. You don't have to do anything besides that. And then it'll set the time and you don't even. People would be like, oh my gosh, that's the most amazing thing ever. Right? And they would just hit on some of these things where people are like, so when do we get trained on this? Magic had happened, right? Is when people would ask that question, okay, awesome. So capabilities. Then we move to what was after capabilities? Belief. Talk to us about belief. Why is this important? And, and what are some best practices in belief?

Speaker B: Yeah, so trust is, occurs at every single layer in this human operating thing that I call the people stack. But belief is probably where that trust tested. And here you're going to want to think about, um, is there a past history of changes that have failed? Is there trust in the leadership? Has the leadership been around for a while? Do they have credibility? Because sometimes you need to spend some time there. If that's broken, it's not going to move forward. Another thing I like to think about in this one is that trust looks differently in each of the generations. So uh, if you think about a baby boomer, a handshake was a form of trust in the olden days. But you know, if you think about some of the millennials, it's much looks much different. Right? And they're actually, I think much less likely to trust people at the, at the get go. But, um, yeah, so I think just kind of measuring or kind of taking a stance as to where does, where is that and what work needs to be done to build that up to get people to believe and then identifying your change champions, your early adopters, to help, you know, kind of from a peer to peer standpoint, help with that belief. The end of the day, like you said earlier, you know, people are going to do what they want to do. They've got thoughts, feelings and ideas. We need to recognize that, um, resistance is interesting as we see it present itself. I like to think of it in the form of animal Personas and attachment styles. And there's a way to, you know, from a psychology standpoint to take a look at what does that look like and what do I do with that information because it is a cry for help and it is an opportunity to address. And we shouldn't expect that there would be no resistance because that's just not realistic. We are hardwired as human to be resistors.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great comment. One of the things that I love that a software vendor, uh, did is they would go through and obviously there's product adoption, analytics and again adoption is they, hey, they're moving past these core features and getting into the features that drive business outcomes. And so they would provide that information to their, to their point, uh, of contact to say, hey, it looks like we have these individuals that, that are taking advantage of the software. I think it would be advantageous for you to reach out and just say, hey, tell us a little bit about how you're using the product. You know, have you saved time? So those are the people they would survey, right? They would get the surveys back from those people and they would often find out that these people were having phenomenal success. Well, those were the stories that they would say, hey, in our next town hall executive sponsor, again, going back to the importance of executive sponsor, what if we had Sherry from the manufacturing line report upon how she's uh, saved her team over 400 hours by utilizing this new, this new system. And the executive sponsor wants to look great because they're the ones assigned the check for buying this new software. They would have the person come on, share five minutes of like, hey, this is how it impacts. This is uh, how we currently working. When we rolled out the new software. This is what we do, this is how it works and this is the benefit that we're seeing. You know, it's always like that, that show, and I know it caught some flack because Maybe they did some things that were great, but the biggest loser, where people would lose weight, you wanted to be the biggest loser, the one that lost the most. People love befores and afters. It's like, oh, I want that.

Speaker B: I want to.

Speaker A: I want to look like that. So I think that's one of the things, again, because our audience is software vendors. If you can identify those wins and help your champion find those people, then you're enabling the champion to circulate the good news and also the bad news. So we can make sure that we're addressing that and getting that done. But as a. As a software vendor, if you can help your point of contact with that by product usage, and, hey, this department doesn't seem like they're using it at all, don't be scared of identifying that so that you can go find out what's actually going on, because there's probably some clarity or lack of alignment that's keeping them from using your software. So I always think any news is good news because you're just surfacing the news that you can now start to address it.

Speaker B: It's a great best practice, Kasey. And it makes me think about, um, you know, our earlier conversation about talking to the comms person.

Speaker A: Right, right.

Speaker B: There could be already councils or champion networks established. Like, you don't necessarily need to start from scratch sometimes. I know where I used to work, we had built up kind of two levels. One was at the senior leaders level, um, and the other was, um, kind of the manager level. And it was an invitation, like anybody that had an appetite to learn about change. So we started educating this capability. And then as the projects came out, there's your champion network right there. Right. They understand the nuts and bolts. They raise their hand, they have the appetite. So there may be places where this already exists. And they might exist in the form of something that's not called a champion network. It could be an employee, business resource group, uh, it could be a task force or so just, I think, knowing the right questions to ask. So you don't have to start from scratch, but you're easily connected into the groups that can help.

Speaker A: Beautiful. Okay, we're to the last piece. And that was sustainment. Sustainment. All right. What do you mean by sustainment? And give us the best practice around Sustainment.

Speaker B: Yeah. You probably heard, uh, that people say, uh, an organization's always running towards the next shiny object. People say that all the time. Right. So what we see a lot is things kind of come out and they come out hard and strong. I've got the executive sponsors and they're communicating and they're training and it's going great. And then uh, nobody's kind of putting the structure in place for it to stick around, so they move on to the next thing. And what do I mean by that? So I mean embedding it into the culture, getting the feedback along the way from the individual as well as the organization. Is this, is this working? Whatever we're trying to be doing, telling those great stories that you're talking about, but leadership, holding people accountable for behaviors, and that's the one that we don't see formally put in place. And if there's no structure to do that, it's not going to just happen on a own.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, I, you know, I'm all about. Because there's only so much we wish everyone would follow. All our best practices. Right, Julie? If everyone followed your best practices, everyone would be super happy su super successful with, with their software. But again, humans are humans. I always like to say one to think about that, that most people can wrap their heads around with with sustainment is new hires. Okay, so we just trained everyone at the organization, but we all know we hire 100 new employees every month and they're going to need access to this software. So how are we going to account for the a hundred new people? What is our new hire process to make sure that they're educated on this new way to work. And usually you can get an HR person to align with you on that. And now you can have a little bit of sustainability with new hires. Right. Again, there's much more to what you're saying and I advise everyone to call, uh, Julie, get some consulting going and have her really walk you through this and help you what a real sustainment plan looks like. But if you're just looking to say, hey, I just, I need to tackle something, how can I keep this going? New hires to me is always one that a lot of people will buy

Speaker B: off and they forget about it. It's a great point. Kasey.

Speaker A: Julie, this is, this has been awesome. I have learned a ton. I love the book. If people want to buy the book, where do they go? Buy the book.

Speaker B: Yeah. So the people stack is available on Amazon.com or barnes and nobles.com on my website juliewhittenconsulting. Com.

Speaker A: Fantastic. And that's where they reach out for exploratory conversation to see if change, uh, management might be a, uh, good fit for them.

Speaker B: For sure. I do keynote speaking workshops and uh, change advisory services and I do write a lot of thought leadership articles on LinkedIn as well. I talk a lot about the bridge between personal and organizational change and life and leadership lessons.

Speaker A: You know what? I think that's the thing I always call out and why I fell in love with change management was just personally it helped me in all aspects of my life. Change management isn't a business skill, it's a life skill.

Speaker B: It is, right?

Speaker A: The more you're clear with your kids and you're aligned on what we're trying to accomplish and that you test their capabilities, you give them some freedoms and things, right? And then you're like, okay, do they believe that they're actually empowered? I actually believe that they're empowered. Then how do we sustain this? So this, this becomes a habit. So it's not a surprising to my kid when we do these things.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: That's one example. Or with your partner or whatever it might be like those frameworks are just life skill frameworks.

Speaker B: And they are, they are. I want to tell the world, Casey,

Speaker A: uh, I, I couldn't endorse you more in that and in the need for, for having that. I mean, walk yourself through change management if you want to have fitness goals. Woof. That'll rock your world. So Julie, last question. We ask all of our guests that have been on SAS therapy. We created SAS therapy because Todd and I are big believers in therapy and we, you sit down with, with someone who gives you information, who asks you very in depth questions. And then at the end, after you discovered a little bit about yourself, they're like, hey, I want to give you some, some, some homework, something to work on so the next time we meet we can see how we've progressed and what we learned today. So Julie, if you could give an assignment out to our guest today, what would be the assignment you would give to them?

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm going to go with a personal change because there is such a growth opportunity. So I, my advice would be to be curious, be grounded and be open as you receive any change and that will serve you well.

Speaker A: Ah, so good. I'm gonna do my last double click on that. Are you where you want to be in your life, in your job and your relationships? Like to just start and ask yourself, is this where I want to be? And allow yourself the time and space to be aware of what it is that you actually want. I'm going to double click with that. Uh, because if you, if you do that and sit down, you might say, yeah, I'm actually good in this area. Cool. Keep moving. But change only happens when you become aware that you personally want to change. Like, you want that for you, right? When you find your own, why then then you start to ask how, right? So, Julie, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for that. Thank you to our guests for listening. Please like and subscribe. SAS Therapy is the fastest growing podcast for software advisors, software platforms. We just increase viewage and leadership across the board. So thank you to our guests for listening, tuning in every week. Again, continue to like and share. Share this with someone that you're thinking about. Like, gosh, they could use this. We love that. And Julie, thank you for being our guest today.

Speaker B: Thank you. Awesome.

Speaker A: Goodbye everybody. SAS Therapy is brought to you by Brainstorm, the SAS platform for SaaS adoption. Learn more@storminc.com.