Tips for Managing Change and Resistance to Change When Using Competencies

By adding competencies to your HR programs, you are changing how the organization approaches the management of your people, so it is important to manage the people side of this change.

If you are going to start using competencies for learning and development or hiring, you will need to understand how employees and managers will react to the change and how you can better anticipate and plan for these reactions.

Here are three change management tips that you can follow:

Tip 1: Planning for the change

The first change management tip involves you determining how ready your organization is to receive the change. What is the organization’s capacity for change? As part of the project governance structure, you will want to ensure that you have a project sponsor or champion in place who can speak to all levels of the organization. You will also want to identify promotors or leaders across the departments who can speak to those impacted by the change. Lastly, you need to identify resistance, when it likely to occur, and tactics for how to address it.

Tip 2: Monitoring and overseeing the change

The next change management tip involves you developing a well-thought-out communication plan to help you to manage expectations and resistance. This communication plan will also help you to generate awareness and support for the initiative. You will also want to provide sponsors with talking points related to discussing the change. What are the key messages that you would like for them to communicate? You will need to develop training and coaching tools to generate awareness concerning what has changed, such as webinars, how-to-guides, and videos.

Tip 3: Sustaining the change

It is important to gather feedback on how well your communication is reaching the intended audience and make changes as needed. You can also begin to implement the measures for managing resistance that you identified when planning for the change. Finally, it is important to build on early successes and not wait until the project is complete to share and celebrate success.

It may not seem easy but by following these change management tips, you can help all employees to not only understand the need for changing how successful performance is described by using competencies but also their willingness to use them.

To learn more about managing change and incorporating competencies into your HR programs, check out our Using Competencies in HR Toolkit!