Change management process: 6 steps for teams & leaders

Change is an essential ingredient to help your organization succeed. As you grow, you'll invariably need to implement new tools, try new strategies, or break into new markets. Small changes may be easy to handle, but what do you do when you need to enact a sweeping, organizational change?

Without proper planning, implementing organizational change can lead to chaos, confusion, and reduced company velocity. Instead, you need to roll changes out carefully to make the transition as seamless as possible.

Simply put, you need an effective change management process. In this article, we'll discuss what change management is, the key principles behind it, and how to create a change management process for a seamless, organization-wide transition.

What is change management?

Change management is a structured process for preparing, supporting, and guiding individuals and teams through organizational transitions to ensure successful adoption and lasting results. During the change management process, you will:

• Prepare for the transition to a new change.

• Gain organizational support for whatever change is being implemented.

• Deploy the change thoughtfully over time.

The most important thing in change management is to approach change deliberately and from multiple angles. Think about how that change will affect members of your organization at different levels and on different teams before you begin.

Change management frameworks often include strategies to introduce change slowly, pilot with a subset of the company, or ensure stakeholder buy-in before a broader rollout. By following a structured process, you can best equip your team to prepare for and benefit from a new change.

Key principles of effective change management

These five fundamentals guide every successful organizational transition:

1. Stakeholder engagement: Involve the people affected by the change from the beginning through a stakeholder engagement plan. When employees feel heard, they're more likely to support the transition.

2. Clear communication: Share the what, why, and how of the change consistently across all levels of your organization through effective communication. Ambiguity breeds resistance.

3. Leadership commitment: Visible support from leadership signals that the change is a priority, not just another initiative that will fade away.

4. Structured approach: Follow a documented process rather than improvising. A clear roadmap keeps everyone aligned and accountable.

5. Continuous monitoring: Track progress, gather feedback, and adjust your approach as needed. Change management isn't a one-time event.

These principles form the foundation for the six-step process you'll learn next

Benefits of change management

With effective change management, you can introduce new processes without disrupting your team or organization. A change management plan helps your team realize the value of the proposed change by making it as minimally disruptive as possible.

With a successful change management process in place, you can expect:

1. A higher rate of success: By rolling out large changes slowly, addressing issues, and celebrating wins in the early stages of your change management process, you can drive greater benefit realization while also preparing the rest of the organization for success.

2. Reduced risk: According to McKinsey, 70% of change programs fail largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support. Implementing a process that addresses these common roadblocks will lead to less wasted resources and a better chance of success.

3. Improved management of future changes: Change is frequent in today's business landscape. By continuously improving your change management process with every new update, you ensure the next transition is even smoother than the last.

4. Consistency in managing change: You can streamline organizational change management when a standard change management model is in place.

5. Better alignment of practice and values: Your employees are your company's greatest assets, so framing a change in a way that aligns with their core values will help them be more receptive to the change.

Our tried-and-tested 6-step change management process

To help new teams adopt Asana, our Professional Services and Customer Success teams built an effective change management process inspired by traditional change models and informed by best practices from customers who successfully implemented Asana at their organizations. The resulting methodology, the Asana Way of Change, helps teams roll out new tools or technologies at an organizational level.

Whether you're implementing Asana or a different tool, here's how you can use the Asana Way of Change to help your teams adapt to the new process.

1. Define your "why"

Before you introduce a major change to your organization, you first need to ask yourself:

• Why are you doing this?

• What pain points is this change solving?

Not every member of your organization will be thrilled with the change, but having a concrete reason helps build buy-in. There are three elements to defining your "why:"

Craft your "why statement."

To start, document why you're implementing this organizational change. This "why statement" will be your compass for all of the work to come. Use this template:

For instance, if you're rolling out a work management tool, you might write: "Our company is implementing this new work management tool to improve cross-functional collaboration and visibility, increase productivity, and complete more projects on schedule."

Define your success metrics

You'll also want to define what success looks like for your implementation process. Sit down with your change management team to set metrics. You might want to include key performance indicators like:

• Deadlines to meet change management milestones

• Adoption or training percentages across the company

• Utilization rate across the company by a certain date

For example, to roll out a work management tool, you might have some of the following KPIs:

• We will start rolling out this tool to a small group on March 3rd. Employees will have the opportunity to opt in in mid-June. By July 17th, everyone at our company should be onboarded and familiar with the tool.

• Teams should send weekly project status reports in the work management tool, and work should be managed exclusively in the tool.

• 100% of employees should be active on the tool by July 30th.

Assemble your Adoption Alliance

Rolling out a significant change isn't a one-person job. You need a team of people, and your Adoption Alliance, otherwise known as your proxy team, is those people. There are three types of proxy team members:

• The Convention Setter: This is essentially a workplace influencer. Your convention setter(s) will help you define how you'll implement this major change across the company. They might lead trainings or answer questions team members have along the way.

• The Awareness Builder: This is a member (or members) of your company's leadership team. Your awareness builders may not be as close to the change being implemented, but they'll be the voice of support. The awareness builder should convey your "why statement" to increase team buy-in.

• The Product Advocate: These are individual contributors or early adopters who are excited to help build momentum for this change.

2. Discover your "now"

In order to implement broad-scale change, you first need to start small. Choose one workflow to implement in the new system first, so your Adoption Alliance can build practices and examples before rolling it out fully. Ideally, choose a collaborative, broad workflow so you can work out any kinks before implementing change.

For example, to roll out a new work management tool, you might select a team or department, like the Marketing department. Before introducing the Marketing department to your new tool, consider building demo environments to show how they might use it. For example, you might show them how they can run more collaborative marketing campaigns with the new tool.

3. Design your first workflow

This is your chance to test your new change on a single workflow or process. Your convention setter should hold training for the selected team or workflow. Make sure your product advocate is also on hand to help celebrate wins and document the process, working effectively.

At this point, you'll likely run into questions you haven't thought of before. Document frequently asked questions and their answers so you can use them when you roll this change out more broadly.

To illustrate, in the rollout of your new work management tool, you've already built demo environments for the marketing team. During training sessions, you should:

• Encourage participants to plan cross-functional initiatives, like the marketing campaign you demoed, in the new tool.

• Check in frequently to see how the rollout is going and answer any questions the team might have.

• Document their successes so you can use these moments to inspire other teams to adopt the new tool.

4. Enable your team and celebrate wins

While your proxy team is getting set up in your chosen workflow, make sure to check in with them frequently about their progress and celebrate any wins, even small ones.

Getting this momentum up front will not only help your change gain steam, but it'll also build an entire cohort of pro-change people who can become product advocates in their own right when you roll this change out more broadly.

5. Set up for future success

At this point, your proxy team should be up and running in the new operating model. To prepare to introduce this change to the rest of your organization, use this time to:

• Celebrate the team's early victories

• Collect regular feedback

• Monitor tool adoption

• Build upon best practices

Including FAQ documentation, help sessions, and a plan for continuous onboarding of new teammates in a central place will ensure long-term success.

6. Measure and expand use

Once you feel like you've worked out the issues in your first workflow, it's time to roll out your change initiative more broadly. Use the training sessions, FAQ documentation, and prep you've done with your proxy team to help guide the rest of your organization.

Depending on the size of your company, plan to hold office hours with your Adoption Alliance to answer any questions. Encourage your product advocate(s) to check in and celebrate wins regularly to help your new work management tool gain momentum.

Before you know it, you've successfully completed your change management plan!

Other change management models

Change management processes go back to the early 1960s. Here are three traditional models that organizations still find effective today.

Lewin's change model

Kurt Lewin, a German-American psychologist, is best known for his contributions of applied research to communication practices. Lewin's change model breaks change management into a three-stage process:

1. Unfreeze: During the Unfreeze phase, you will help your team or company overcome their initial change aversion. Not only will you analyze any aversion to the change, but you'll also begin to convince your team why you need it. At this point in Lewin's change model, your focus is on preparing your team for something new.

2. Change: The Change step is when you roll out the organizational change. Keep in mind that Change may be a multi-step process as you encounter unforeseen obstacles and slowly onboard everyone to the new system, whatever it may be.

3. Freeze: You've implemented the Change, now it's time to freeze it in place so the "new" way of doing things becomes the standard.

The ADKAR model

The ADKAR model was created by Jeff Hiatt. ADKAR is an acronym that stands for:

• Awareness of the need for change

• Desire to participate and support the change

• Knowledge of what to do to ensure successful change

• Ability to implement the change

• Reinforcement to ensure the change continues to be implemented in the long term

The 8-step process for leading change

Dr. John Kotter invented this method, which he outlined in his book, Leading Change. This process is the main inspiration for Asana's Way of Change. According to Kotter, the eight steps are:

1. Create a sense of urgency to emphasize the importance of acting immediately

2. Build a guiding coalition to guide, coordinate, and communicate the organizational change

3. Form a strategic vision and initiatives to clarify how the future will be different from the past

4. Enlist a volunteer army to rally around the change

5. Enable action by removing barriers in order to provide the freedom your organization needs to generate real results

6. Generate short-term wins to energize the organization to persist

7. Sustain momentum and be relentless about initiating change until your vision is a reality

8. Institute change until it's strong enough to replace old habits

When to use change management

You shouldn't roll out the full change management process for every organizational change. Change management is essential when the potential pushback is large or company-wide.

Remember that people tend to be averse to change. We like the current system, even if it's not the best process, and it can be hard to imagine working in a new way.

Here are a few examples of organizational changes you'd introduce with a change management process:

• New company-wide tool or technology

• Change in leadership or organizational structure

• Work culture or values updates

• Updated company policies, HR programs, or benefits

• Merger or acquisition

The most important thing to keep in mind when implementing a change management process is to be thoughtful about when and how you roll it out to your organization. For updates to policies or standard operating procedures, start with a policy and procedure plan template so teams can draft, review, and share changes in a consistent format.

At Asana, our Professional Services and Customer Success teams frequently help teams build a change management strategy to roll out a new company-wide tool or technology. With Asana, teams don't just have a tool to organize and complete work;

they're also rolling out a new approach to team collaboration through work management.

Make change management work for your team

No matter what organizational change you're rolling out or which change management methodology you use, a thoughtful, measured process is the key to change management. Help your team successfully adapt to any change by using a structured approach that puts people first.

Ready to manage your next organizational transition? Get started with Asana to keep your change initiatives organized and your team aligned every step of the way.

Frequently asked questions about change management