The first component of the change management playbook is integration leadership. The other components dig into what the integration leaders need to lead.
Complex change management efforts through points of inflection like mergers and acquisitions or restructurings go better with people giving leaders leverage by managing the change processes. These people have different titles in different organizations. Here's one set of definitions:
Leaders inspire, enable, and empower others to do their absolute best together to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose.
Deputies are second in command, empowered to act in their superiors' absence. As such, they are leaders themselves who may step in to manage some changes and processes.
Chiefs of staff give leaders increased leverage by managing them, priorities, programs, and projects, and communication. Where a deputy has some direct power, a chief of staff's power is all indirect as the voice of the leader.
A project management office (PMO) conceives potential programs and projects in line with enterprise-level priorities, helps prioritize and define those programs and projects with team charters, assembles resources, communicates and coordinates within and across programs and projects, facilitates key meetings, tracks milestones, analyzes results, and initiates appropriate process improvements.
Transformation, integration leader, chief transformation officers, as the M&A Leadership Council's Mark Herdon suggests,1 manage chaos as the key point of contact, accelerate process by helping executive staff manage, architect success by providing focus and direction, and personally drive the change on major issues.
Going into more depth on the last three, starting with some definitions:
Enterprise-level priorities include ongoing strategic, organizational, and operational priorities and processes and the one or two most important enterprise-wide endeavors.
Programs are the main longer-term components of those priorities, generally tracked and managed monthly.
Projects are the subcomponents of programs, generally tracked and managed weekly.
Tasks are the actual work that rolls up into projects, programs, and priorities. These are generally tracked and managed at least daily by front-line supervisors.
The chief of staff gives the leader leverage by managing the leader; managing priorities, programs, and projects; and managing communication.
Manage the leader's schedule or diary in line with the leader's priorities so the leader is spending time on the most important things and not spending time on less important things. A big part of this is managing distractions—either making them go away or dealing with them. This requires the chief of staff to be a close confidant of the leader, understanding their priorities and helping them think things through.
Decision rights matter. The chief of staff needs to be clear with the leader when they are:
Follow up for the leader. This is about influencing others' schedules or diaries in line with the leader's priorities so priority items aren't getting dropped or delayed by others.
Act as the leader's proxy or program or project manager as appropriate—especially with regard to things that cut across others' areas of responsibility. This is not about doing the work, but assembling resources, directing, and working behind the scenes to enable others to do the work.
Bring issues and opportunities to the leader's attention as appropriately gathered in conversations, emails, tweets, blogs, and so forth. Help the leader think through and implement their message and communication efforts.
There are six levels of delegation:
With this in mind, the chief of staff should help the leader assign levels to things, assist on level 1 and level 2 priorities as much as possible, and own all levels 3–6 priorities.
Meeting agendas run the gambit from simple to complex. The chief of staff should ensure there is one for every meeting or call the leader who is involved in. Every agenda should include:
The PMO's role is different than that of a program or project manager. A program or project manager defines project-specific objectives and goals, gathers data, schedules tasks, and manages the program and project's costs, budgets, and resources to deliver agreed objectives and goals.
The PMO remit is broader: part information technology (IT), part planning, finance, risk management, and resourcing, collaborating to ensure that all projects are delivered with high quality and achieve their defined outcomes. This is achieved by mapping out project goals, defining processes, workflows, methodologies, resource constraints, and project scopes.
Team charters are great ways to get teams aligned around direction, resources, authority, and accountability as described in Chapter 9.
Most change agents don't survive their own change. Of course, the organization was at a point of inflection and needed to change. Of course, they were brought in to lead that change. But the change process is often so painful and so many “good” people have to go away that the change agent becomes an ongoing reminder of bad times. Stepping into the brighter future requires a new leader.
Thus, the job of most transformation leaders is to manage the change and then go away so the ongoing leadership can tell everyone how glad they are the transformation leaders are gone and get back to the new normal.
These transformation officers act as the leader's proxy or program or project manager as appropriate:
The transformation and integration team is made up of people with differential strengths: