About this Change Management course
This is a free change management course covering five introductory topics in this exiting field. This course will introduced you to a general overview of the field, it’s history, and explore what’s on the horizon. It will then finish with change management problems and opportunities, as well as next steps for change managers.
Course Navigation:
- What Is Change Management?
- History of Change Management
- Future of Change Management
- Challenges & Opportunities in Change Management
- Next Steps for Change Management
This free online change management course will navigate students to free videos, podcasts, and resources, as well as points to ponder. Each section is created to encompass two to three hours of learning material.
Whenever you see this icon, it is time to stop and reflect.
Knowing that this introductory course is just the first step in this nuanced field, each section in this course will direct students towards opportunities to invest further. To further studies and enrichment in this field, these suggestions offer books, courses, or certifications options within a wide range of time and financial investments.
1│What Is Change Management?
Change is one of life’s inevitabilities. It can be invigorating, inspiring, and exciting. It can also be scary, frustrating, and chaotic. For organizations, institutional change is often met with resistance and trepidation. But it is unavoidable; without change, there can be no progress or innovation. And with continual changes in technology, public demand, and wider global influences, organizations must learn to manage their own changes.
Organizations that are proactive, rather than reactive, regarding change, often find they move through changes with less turmoil.
CIO wrote an article that gives a good overview of change management; what it is, why it’s needed, and why it’s challenging. It’s written from an IT perspective, but the foundations still hold true, regardless of what sector you’re coming from. After reading through the article, take a moment to process this definition: “Organizational change management ensures that the new processes resulting from a project are actually adopted by the people who are affected.” Is this the definition of change management you expected to hear?
The Change Manager
While not all organizations have a titled change manager, there is always a person or persons who are the driving forces for change. A successful change manager will help their organization through the uncertainties in front of them. And, the fact is, we are all change managers on a regular basis. Sure, a change manager might be part of include a revisioning or changing of a mission, creating a new product line, or reevaluating employee expectations. But on a personal level, you’re your own change manager when you get a new boss, move to a new team, or start on a new project.
It’s About Mindset
We’ve discussed how, in some fashion, we are all change managers when it comes to our work. The thing with change is that something can look good on paper, but the actual enacting of the change is often where the biggest hurdles come, and often these roadblocks are a question of mindset.
Forbes laid out three major common mindset issues when it comes to change management. Big picture change usually starts and ends with an organization’s leaders. But if a leader says they want to see innovation but aren’t open to new ideas their team puts forth, this mindset undermines and hinders any change they are hoping for. If employees aren’t on board with where the leadership is going, that can make change management even harder than it already is. True, lasting change takes time, often much more than is anticipated or thought-through. Many change management initiatives are often considered to be short-time things, therefore lacking buy-in and sustainability. Consider aspects from your experience with change at work that could have been helped by a change in mindset.
Listen to this podcast on Creating and Sustaining Innovation in the Workplace. What changes or shifts can you make to help innovation in your workplace?
Leadership & Change
There is a distinction we should note between change management and change leadership. In this conversation, change management is planned, deliberate change, whereas change leadership is about the vision and is much more complex.
Watch how Kotter International helps delineate the lines between the change management and change leadership. As you watch, consider if you or your organization have been using these terms interchangeably. Where have you seen change management when there should have been change leadership? To dig a little further into this topic, read the John Kotter’s article about the differences between change management and change leadership.
The differences are important to note because many organizations are implementing change management without the change leadership needed to back it up. For the purposes of this particular free change management course, we will be considering both change management and change leadership together, since one is ineffective without the other, and in an ideal world, the two would work in tandem.
Further Thought on Change Management
John Kotter, who discussed the distinction between change management and change leadership earlier, is a professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School, as well as an author and a consultant with over 40 years of experience. He is perhaps best known for creating an eight-step process for leading change. To learn more about this process, you can download his Process for Leading Change ebook, which was just recently updated to reflect the current reality of COVID-19 and the economic recession. The eight steps in this process are made up by creating a sense of urgency, forming strong guiding coalitions, creating a vision and a strategy, communicating that vision, removing obstacles and empowering employees, creating short-term wins, and consolidating wins and strengthening change by connecting the change to the organization’s culture.
Further Investment beyond this Free Change Management Course
Subscribe to Change Management Review. Change Management Review is aimed at those experiencing organizational change and change management professionals. It covers trends, tools, practices, research, and more.
2│History of Change Management
Humanity has never known life without change. It’s a constant. And while change management as a discipline is quite new, arriving in its present form beginning in the 1990s and formalizing in the early 2000s, this history of how humans have dealt with organizational change is long and layered.
W. Warner Burke wrote Organizational Change: Theory and Practice, which offers an exploration into the nature of change. Take some time to read the third chapter of his book, A Brief History of Organizational Change, to give yourself some context for how and why organizations approach change the way they do today. What connections can you make between your organization’s attitude and approach toward change and what Burke discusses in this chapter?
Lewin’s Three-Step Model for Change
For many, Kurt Lewin’s three-step model for change is considered the classic, foundational approach when it comes to change management. This model, first published in the 1940s, looks at the process of unfreezing, changing, and refreezing. Watch this video on Lewin’s change management model, which gives a deeper look at what these steps entail. Consider if you’ve seen these steps in your organization, or in your personal life, when it comes to change. Do you feel like this is a useful way to approach the idea of change management?
It should be noted that Lewin has been criticized for this three-step model, with critics saying that it over-simplifies the process of change. Read this response paper to Lewin’s unfreeze, change, and refreeze model to understand the critiques of this model. After considering both sides, do you feel like Lewin’s three-step process makes sense as a foundational concept when it comes to change management?
General Electric and the Change Acceleration Process
Prior to the 1990s, academics were exploring how humans approached change in general. It wasn’t until the 1990s that change management as a term entered business vernacular. In the early 1990s, General Electric was at the forefront of this movement when Steve Kerr, who would become GE’s first Chief Learning Officer, and a team of consultants created the Change Acceleration Process. This process was made up of the best and most easily implemented practices for change models.
Read an overview of the Change Acceleration Process model and consider what seems effective or not when it comes to implementing it for change management in your organization.
It’s important to note that GE’s success with the Change Acceleration Process is unusual. Experts estimate that organizational change management success is only at 30 to 50 percent. What made this effort work, however, was the fact that it took people, GE’s employees, and the organization’s culture into consideration.
Further Thought on Change Management
In 2003, Prosci launched the very first certificate course, which used what they call the ADKAR Model. ADKAR stands for the five outcomes needed for lasting change, awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. Head over to Prosci to learn more about the ADKAR Model and download their free guides that will guide you through the process.
Further Investment beyond this Free Change Management Course
We’ve touched on a couple of big markers in the realm of change management in this course, but there’s so much more that has gone into bringing the discipline to where it is today. Prosci has an outline that hits on some of the big milestones in change management history and will give you some suggestions of seminal books and other works to read and study to give you a deeper insight on change management.
You can also take time to explore what degrees are available in this field, including online change management MBA programs.
3│Future of Change Management
When it comes to organizational change, many change managers, and others within organizations, find that this type of change just isn’t done well. We know that change is not going away, which means that change managers need to help their organization reimagine what change looks like and how it’s gone about.
2020 Change Management Trends
Prior to the global COVID-19 pandemic, change managers were already discussing the need for organizations to adapt to change in several specific areas, include an increased digital presence, an increased pace of change, and new skill trends. The Change Management Institute is an international organization that is an international nonprofit that works to promote and develop change managers.
Take some time to watch a presentation with Jane Judd, the president of the Change Management Institute, that discusses global trend predictions for 2020. Now, while this was recorded back in December 2019, pre-pandemic, the trends she covers are still relevant in our current reality and perhaps even more so. As you listen, consider how these change management trends have been impacted with the onset of COVID-19 and the changes that the pandemic has brought.
Change in the Era of COVID-19 and Learning to Pivot
It’s clear that COVID-19 isn’t going away anytime soon, and it’s had a profound impact on how the vast majority of organizations function. As a result, it is important that organizations learn how to enact change amid this new reality.
Forbes suggests five ways for organizations to better manage change in the era of COVID-19. As you read, consider if these are suggestions that you have already seen taking place or if they would or wouldn’t work for your organization.
Leadership’s role in change management continues to be of vital importance, now more than ever, as leaders are learning how to find meaning in an ambiguous and changing future for their organizations. The Center for Creative Leadership released a free webinar that lays out a framework to help leaders and change managers create structure and direction, figure out where to focus and what to prioritize moving forward, and building organizational resiliency. As you watch, consider how you, as a change leader, can use this information to implement practical steps to help your organization build its resiliency in an era where change is constantly on the horizon. What can you start now? In a month? In six months? A year?
Project Management Integration
The people side of change management is vitally important. But all effective changes need to have some structure to it. Change managers are increasingly looking to project management practices to help provide that much-needed structure. The integration of these two disciplines provides several areas of value. For instance, the project management side’s built-in structure means that it’s easier to proactively manage the people side of the change by having systems in place to identify, say, areas of risk. It also provides a common vernacular and set of tools to help make change increasingly achievable and more easily adopted.
Prosci has laid out several other values of this integration between project management and change management. The article also lists several prerequisites to ensure this type of integration is successful. Before you read, consider what these requirements might be, based on what you already know about project or change management. Do you feel that this integration with project management is a useful direction for the field of change management to head toward?
Further Thought on Change Management
Earlier, you watched a webinar from The Change Management Institute on predicted trends for 2020. But in December 2019, they also released another webinar with some members of CMI, discussing where they, as change management professionals, felt they saw the field headed.
Further Investment beyond this Free Change Management Course
Stay current and relevant as a change manager by joining a professional organization like the Association of Change Management Professionals. ACMP is open to anyone who provides change management services to an organization, uses change management tools in their role, or in some other way advance the change management discipline. As a member, you’ll receive discounts on conferences and the Certified Change Management Professional certification, access to resources and monthly webinars, and more.
4│Challenges & Opportunities in Change Management
Changing the Culture
So your organization has enacted a new change. How many at the organization believe that this change is going to stick or actually make a difference? One of the large challenges for change management is creating lasting change within their organizations. And this is a question that comes down to changing your organizational culture. This requires a structured approach to change, as we discussed earlier, which is helped by taking a project management-type of approach. It also needs clear and strong support and commitment from leadership.
Arthur Carmazzi is the creator of Organizational Culture Change Assessment, which is used to measure organizational culture. In this TED Talk, he gives a brief overview of his foundation for how to create sustainable organizational culture change in 80 days. What do you think about this approach? Based on what you’ve heard from him, do you believe that an organizational change that happens so quickly can actually stick, or no? What shortcomings do you see in this approach?
It’s All About the People
We have lived and continue to live in a world of constant change. And while some change for most people is exciting and hopeful, there is plenty of change that is quite the opposite. And, for most, organizational change brings about stress, fear, and anxiety. One of the major questions facing organizations when it comes to change is how to manage what has become nearly constant change in an easier and less stressful way—one that isn’t short-sighted, reactionary, and unsustainable.
Jim Hemerling is an organizational change manager, and in this TED Talk, he focuses on five strategic imperatives that help organizations manage change in our world of continual change. These imperatives all put people first. As you watch, consider these five imperatives Hemerling lays out and identify instances in your own experience with change management where they could have been useful, or you did use them and analyze how they helped or hindered your change goal.
One major area of change can be seen in how Millennials and Gen Z view work. For many organizations, a five-day workweek with the traditional nine to five business hours are still the norm. This is despite our ever-increasingly connected world, where employees can essentially have constant access to work at any time or any place. This has caused a rift in organizations between the old guard and the new. But many, including Hamza Khan, believe there needs to be a change in the way organizations manage employees, or rather, lead employees.
As you listen to Khan’s TedTalk on Stop Managing, Start Leading, what are some key areas of change that could be implemented when it comes to managing employees? Have you seen these in action? If so, would you consider them to have been successful or not?
We’ve looked at several approaches as to how to enact sustainable and lasting organizational change in a way to honor people. Rum Ekhtiar is the founder and partner of Rum & Co, a brand and strategy consultancy. But before that, he was a consultant at Citi and played a significant role in improving employee pride in the company.
Listen to Ekhtiar’s Internal Communications Podcast episode to hear his take on what makes this kind of change possible and lasting. As you listen, do you hear similar ideas or themes from other approaches we’ve already discussed? What do you think makes the work Ekhtiar doing effective?
So Many Paths to Take
One of the great things about change management is there are a zillion ways to go about it, as you probably already realized as you’ve made your way through this free online change management course. This is one of the biggest challenges as well. As a change manager, how do you know what kind of approach will work best for your organization?
One place to start is doing your research on the varied approaches. You’ll find many of them have major overlaps in both approach and execution. But it never hurts to do a bit more research. Explore this list of more change management models. What similarities do you see with other methodologies?
Further Thought on Change Management
Spend some time diving more deeply into the complexities of enacting organizational change with this change management course. This free change management course will take you around two to three hours to complete.
Further Investment beyond this Free Change Management Course
If Arthur Carmazzi’s TED Talk inspired you, spend some time learning about his Organizational Culture Assessment, or consider taking his course to become a certified Organizational Cultural Consultant.
5│Next Steps for Change Managers
Lead Well
For successful change to happen at your organization, you need to be a good leader.
Listen to this episode on New Management Practices of Leading Organizations from the Coaching for Leaders podcast with guest David Burkus. Burkus wrote Under New Management: How Leading Organizations Are Upending Business as Usual. Based on what you heard from other pieces you read or the TED Talk from Hamza Khan, consider this quote from Burkus, “You need to be a great place to be from, not just a great place to be at,” in how it relates to leadership and change management.
Thoughtful, Strategic Digitization
It was happening before, but digitization is more important than ever in the COVID-19 world. Many organizations hastily made moves toward things like remote work. As the pandemic has continued and it has become clear that this is a long-term situation, thoughtful, strategic digital change management must take place for organizations to succeed and thrive.
Here is an example of one three-point plan for making this change during COVID that includes considerations of adopting new technologies, getting very familiar with your data, and keeping customers front and center. As you consider this three-pronged approach and others we’ve looked at, brainstorm some steps you would include in your own plan following what you’ve learned. Pick and choose from what has been covered to find solutions that work best for your organization’s needs.
Create Your Plan
Now that you’ve come up with some ideas of what kind of process or steps would work for your organization, let’s put together an actual change management plan.
Here is a blueprint for a change management plan. It will walk you through the entire process of creating your plan, from identifying your goals to reinforcement to help your plan gain and maintain traction within your organization. As you’re building your plan, though, remember that change management is largely about the people.
Change Takes Time
It takes time to build competency in areas of change. As a change manager, like any discipline, this is something you probably remind those in your organization of regularly. But remember, as you’re learning new approaching and acquiring new tools, you’ll also need time and space to build up your competency in the change management discipline, as well as areas to actually practice and apply your new knowledge and skills.
Prosci has compiled a list of five tips to help and encourage you as you start the change management process. As you read, consider these points in relation to your own organizational situation. Are these areas you’ve already ventured into? What were some ways you were prepared and not prepared? What tools and knowledge do you have now that might help you better navigate similar situations?
Further Thought on Change Management
Consider signing up for the Coaching for Leaders free membership. This membership entitles you to podcast interviews since 2011, a weekly leadership guide delivered to your inbox, access to a curated library, and a free audio course entitled 10 Ways to Empower the People You Lead, plus more.
Further Investment beyond this Free Change Management Course
Earn a change management certification. Prosci offers one that takes three days to complete where students use their ADKAR Model on a project. It covers the fundamentals of change management and how to build a change management plan using the Prosci Three-Phase Process. It also gains you access to Prosci’s suite of change management tools and can earn you HRCI, PMI, and CCMP credits.
If you’ve been doing change management for some time, and are familiar with Prosci’s methodology, consider Prosci’s Experienced Practitioner Program. This is another three-day program. It does require learners to have the Prosci Change Management Certification and experience using their approach.
This is the end of our free online Change Management course. We hope it gives you a good background on the topic!