My Practical Tips for Becoming a Change Manager

Discover key practical steps to help you transition into a change career and become a change manager, plus an action plan to get you started. 

I wanted to bring together in one article the advice I give about how to enter the change profession. After joining me on my change management courses, I regularly receive follow up calls from those who have discovered their “tribe”. These are course attendees who have realised they are not alone in their interest in how to make change happen and that their passion for supporting people during change at work is shared by others.  

To help you find your “tribe”, this bog contains practical ideas for things you can do now, in your current role, to transition into a change career – and eventually become a change manager. 

8 practical steps to becoming a change manager 

Be a guerrilla change manager 

You do not have to leave your current role to become a change manager.  Every organisation is implementing high levels of change. Even if you have no formal responsibilities for change, you can still get involved.  

Find the time for change 

Balance your day-to-day responsibilities with making change happen. The need to do our jobs whilst innovating how we do them to keep up with everything that is changing around us is difficult. How you achieve this gives you valuable experience in change management.  Effectively you are using yourself to understand the pressures and develop the empathy you need to support others with this difficulty.  

Understand how changes create transformation  

As the number of changes rise, complexity increases because some changes enable others and some are dependent on others. Knowing what changes are taking place and being able to identify how they fit together is a high value skill for change managers.  

Your existing organisation is a fantastic training ground because you can understand the context of the changes, and you can use your experience to appreciate whether the driving forces used to justify the changes are true. You can use your specialist knowledge of what is happening in your industry to critique the scope of the change and challenge yourself to re-write the change documentation (in private of course) so you can learn ‘behind the scenes’. 

Portfolio management is vital to understand the interconnectedness of changes and how to help those affected understand what to prioritise. Learn the basics of portfolio management using your knowledge of all the changes taking place in your department, division or the whole organisation. Create your own version of the portfolio and challenge yourself to find as many inter-dependencies between the initiatives as possible. Ask yourself how you would resolve these links so one initiative does not hold up or duplicate the scope of another. 

Regular horizon scanning to seek out drivers for change inside and outside the organisation ensures that the full portfolio of changes taking place is current and complete. Practice your own version of horizon scanning by reading about what other organisations are doing, using the financial press and management journals. My favourites are searches for “change management” in the Harvard Business Review and Forbes and the Financial Times. 

Practice, practice, practice 

Change management is formed of techniques that shift those involved from how they currently work to  new and different ways of working. You need to master the most common techniques.  

Every practice opportunity builds your range of answers, so you are clearer about what to look for next time and what results to expect. No two changes are ever the same, so breadth of understanding about how a change can evolve is essential.  

Tracking your results, comparing them with the results from other changes builds your depth of understanding.  

Prioritisation techniques are essential 

Every organisation suffers from more ideas for change than the resources to make the changes happen, so being able to prioritise is a critical skill. Practice different prioritisation techniques including MoSCoW and benefits-led change approaches so you can guide those affected by change to identify their most valuable work.  

Being able to cut through the “noise” and identify what actions will make the most difference in achieving the change is vital if you are to help all those impacted by change cope with the extra work that change creates. 

Build your change impact assessment capability 

A core skill to manage change is knowing the full scope of the change. Practice techniques that question the knock-on effects and potential side effects of the “official” vision for the change.   

Appreciating how changes trigger the need for lots of changes in the processes people follow, the quality standards they apply, the measures of performance they are judged against is vital for understanding the full scale of the change.  

Understanding the full impact enables you to better appreciate who is affected by the change, which helps you with your stakeholder identification.  

Stakeholder analysis skills 

Identifying the full breadth of all those affected by a change has become more difficult as each change is connected to others. If we change one thing, we find that it has a knock-on effect to other changes taking place elsewhere, leading to an explosion in the number of people affected.  

Being able to find those who are most affected along with those who are most influential in persuading their colleagues to change is essential. Out of vast numbers of people who have an opinion about the change, you must identify those whose involvement leads to success. 

Build trusted relationships  

Change is a people-skill. Change only happens when we each decide to work differently. To be a successful change manager you must genuinely want to support and encourage people as they deal with their anxiety about leaving behind past skills and experience and take the risk in developing new ways of working.  

Learn motivation techniques and appreciate the importance of positivity in building your own motivation and helping to develop it in others. This means understanding how our brains react to change, and how you can reframe initial negative reactions to positive views of the change using an understanding of brain-smart communications based on neuroscience.  

Practice techniques and build your skills in influencing and persuading others to do things that they are initially unwilling to try. This is strongly connected with techniques for identifying and prioritising the benefits of each change. 

Your action plan 

• Learn how others are managing change – read the results of the latest Capability for Change survey 
• Join a community and hear what others are doing to build their change experience. The Change Capability Community hosts lots of change management events which are free to join 
• Build your change management skills – watch this video for ideas about the right training for you and use this chart to confirm your choice 
• Journal your experiences of learning about change as part of your profile building on LinkedIn, so you when you want to make the transition to a full-time change role, you have lots of examples that the algorithms will use to recommend you for jobs and to share in interview  

One final takeaway for your change management career 

There is no need for you to leave your current role. Use the guidance above to develop your skills and experience for change using the change initiatives taking place in your current organisation. Apply what you learn from change management training courses to existing changes; volunteer for roles in change initiatives including becoming a change champion; and coach your team in change techniques, because there is no better way of strengthening your knowledge than explaining it to others!