Connect organizational change directly to strategic goals by aligning new initiatives with your core mission and vision. Guide teams through change by clearly defining objectives, expected outcomes, and measurable steps to track progress.
Key Insights
- Anchor change efforts in the organization's mission and vision to maintain focus on long-term purpose and desired outcomes.
- Use SMART goals, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely, to ensure accountability and track progress effectively.
- Define clear action steps with deadlines and responsibilities to bridge the gap between strategic goals and day-to-day implementation.
This lesson is a preview from our Federal Change Management Certificate Program . Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
We're going to talk about how you connect change with achieving the strategic goals of your organization, and how you begin to get the implementation part of change in progress. As you begin to move past the planning stages, when you are starting to talk to people about all of the conceptualizing that you've already done on your own as you get ready to bring the change to your team, you're going to be explaining it, and you're going to be helping people understand why you're doing it, why it matters. And that all begins with the concept of mission.
This is where you start. So you're saying to everybody, remember the mission of our organization, and know that as we keep that mission centered, as we understand what it is we're here for, we want to make sure that we are being adaptive, that we're being agile. And as we remain adaptive and we remain agile, we understand that different processes and different ways of doing things are going to be necessary in order to continue to accomplish the mission of our organization.
That is why we're changing. That is why we're doing what we're doing. So your job at this point is to remember that that mission is the centering place.
While we're doing this, the change is going to help us continue to do our mission and accomplish our mission better. We have an example here that talks about data entry. If our mission for our office is accurate data entry in order to enable some other function in our organization, and if we have a lot of mistakes in our data entry, then we need to do something to get better at it.
So we have a process improvement. That process improvement allows us to do our data entry better. In addition to the mission, we are communicating the concept of the vision, what's happening, and why.
What is the end state? I talked earlier in module one about envisioning the end of the story. Well, this vision is the end of the story. Why are we going to do what, not only why we're doing what we're doing, but what does it look like when we've actually accomplished it? So if we pick up our example from the last slide and bring it forward here, we talk about what happens when we've implemented that process improvement for entering data.
We'll have fewer database entry mistakes, which again helps us accomplish our mission. When you've identified the mission and the vision, you've got good big picture information that you can give everybody, the reminder of the mission, the understanding of where we're going and what it's going to look like when we get there. But then there's the part in the middle, the hallway, so to speak.
We've opened a door. We know we're going to head toward the end of the hallway, but we've got to get through it. So how are we going to get there? The strategic goals and the action steps.
So the goals are the big picture. What is it exactly that we aim to do? We use what we call a SMART format to articulate those goals. SMART is an acronym.
You may have heard of it before. It stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. It is a terrific way to ensure that you are setting goals that you can hold yourself accountable for because you've committed to being able to measure them.
You've committed to a time frame for getting them done. So an example would be, as we say here, the mistakes will decrease by 25% during quarters one and two. Now, what we've said is we can measure how many mistakes we have stopped making and when we committed to making sure that we did that better.
The action steps are a more specific look at how we get to those goals. So what will each one of us do, and when will each one of us do it? So if we keep that example going through this part two, we've got the dates that we set. So on June 20th, we'll survey the team to discover possible causes of these database entry mistakes.
On July 15th, the change team will review the survey. And then by October 1st, we'll start training people on these new systems to make sure that they do it better, which enables us to get to that goal of mistakes being decreased by 25% during quarters one and two.
