Phase 4: Reinforce

Reinforce

Program Managers are the backbone of the training organization and keep the many projects and programs that the design teams own on schedule, on budget and within allocated resources and budgets. It was critical that the outcome of this Onboarding project resulted in process alignment across Directors, Program Managers and the design teams they support enabling Program Managers to effectively and efficiently run design projects and manage programs. This required ongoing reinforcement messages and collaboration sessions to ensure that Program Managers had the ability to ask questions, review their work and align on the process.

Act & Reinforce
As Program Managers started their Onboarding Experience, they were given opportunities to network and build relationships in randomly assigned, cross functional Partnership Pods. These Pods gave Program Managers an instant network of peers to ask questions, review work and get support. This assisted in team building, trust development and a shared knowledge of how other teams in their department worked within the new process they were learning how to use.

Activities were designed in a way that brought the teams together to continue building trust, establishing relationships, learning how to work through conflict and hold each other accountable.

  • Dedicated social communication channels were launched to foster on-going communication between the CCT and the Program Managers. This allowed the CCT to reinforce messaging and share new information. Over time, this channel became self-managed by the Program Managers as a way to connect with each other, ask questions, celebrate accomplishments and provide support.

  • A series of Brown Bag sessions were organized as part of the Onboarding Experience and guest speakers were brought in to connect Program Managers with support teams providing them with an opportunity to learn about cross-functional teams and their processes. This supported the goal of building relationships and networking while developing knowledge of processes and procedures.

  • During this time, a secondary outcome was also identified as the CCT was implementing the program, Program Managers were also developing leadership skills that enabled them to support their teams more effectively. This led to an addition of the strategy in which the CCT identified a need to assess Program Manager knowledge after the program had concluded and the team determined there was an additional need to develop continuing education paths to support on-going skills and competency development opportunities for Program Managers.

Consolidate
As the defined Onboarding Experience came to a close, the CCT had one final deliverable to consolidate the learning and outcomes while reinforcing ongoing development and the team launched a Community of Practice, led and supported by the Program Managers. The Community of Practice was founded to provide a platform for Program Managers to continue networking and sharing in their on-going development, together. This transferred the responsibility from the CCT to the Program Managers and empowered them to own their development.

Summary

As a result of the merger, the Training Operations organization found themselves with a group of people who all did similar work in different ways with different tools, now all connected to one another. They needed to know where they belonged, who they reported to and what was expected of them. As a department, they needed to become effective in their work again and find efficiency gains that would reduce the amount of duplicate or re-work that was occurring and the teams they supported needed to understand how to engage with them to get support. The CCT understood the opportunity, aligned leadership and developed a strategy to do just this and launched a very successful onboarding experience.

The change model designed for this effort was based on the ExperienceChange seven step model (ExperiencePoint, 2019) and wove in the 4 Disciplines of the Organizational Health Model to layout a process that would guide the team through an alignment and restructuring initiative focused on bringing the team together while establishing new roles, processes and procedures.  With a strategic focus on the overall organizational health provided by the Lencioni model the team had an opportunity to align on the over-arching mission, vision and goals that were defined to guide and direct the team while the ExperienceChange model brought the team together in a common framework to align on the new processes and procedures to support the work they are responsible for. By combining these two models in an open framework change is implemented addressing the needs of the people as well as the structure of the organization.

References

  • Crosby, C. (2016). Strategic Organizational Alignment: Authority, Power, Results. New York, NY: Business Expert Press. 

  • Experience Point (2019) Global Tech - Change Theory. Gonzaga University Course materials

  • Cawsey, T., Deszca, G., Ingols, C. (2016) Organizational Change An Action Oriented Tool Kit. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

  • Lencioni, P. (2012) The Advantage. San Francisco, CA. Josey-Bass.

  • Senge, P. (2006) The Fifth Discipline. New York. Currency books.

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Phase 3: Communicate