think COVID, for all of its horrors, actually showed leaders in a much more human light, and that did a lot of leaders a lot of favours.” Q3. Large-scale transformation programmes are common, but often fail. In your view, what should be the first priority for organisations when facing significant change? Lucy Adams: “Change management is a huge topic, but from my own experience organisations tend to go about facing change in ways that don’t actually work. For one thing, we tend to address it through a large transformation programme. “We had one at the BBC called Delivering Quality First — it had multiple work streams, it was centrally controlled, it had a project plan. Actually, everyone just felt exhausted and confused. Centrally controlled transformation programmes rarely deliver. “What does work is setting some clear outcomes that you’re expecting from people — what are the outputs, what are the results? — but allowing people the flexibility, the autonomy, to get to those outcomes in ways that work for them. You might also find that you get greater levels of innovation that way, rather than prescribing what it’s going to look like. “The second thing is reducing change down into small elements. It doesn’t have to be a big transformation programme — it’s about small, incremental changes. If we’re faced with something that feels hugely time consuming, with multiple actions, our inclination is to opt out. “But if we’re asked the question, “What’s the one small thing you could do?” — and we can put it into practice, and it maybe takes five minutes — it builds our confidence, it doesn’t take a huge amount of time, and we can continue focusing on the day job. That way, we can start to build change. “There’s also understanding people’s reactions to change. Most people react badly because they’re frightened: frightened of losing their status, can’t cope with uncertainty, worried about losing autonomy, or don’t know the people they’re working with. “You have to give people time to process that — it isn’t going to happen automatically because we’ve sent the newsletter, added in some financial incentives and some training. “This is where line managers come in — understanding how each one of their team are going to react, what buttons to press, which ones to avoid, knowing them as a human being. Change can’t be mapped out on a Gantt chart with a beginning, middle and end. “It’s more fluid, more personal than that. Line managers really understanding what makes people tick and helping them to adapt and adjust is where it’s at.” Q4. You’re a highly soughtafter speaker. What are the key takeaways you want leaders and HR professionals to leave with after hearing you speak Lucy Adams: “What I hope is, whether the audience is made up of business leaders or HR professionals, that they get both inspired to do things differently and that they walk away with two or three really practical things that they can put into place almost immediately. “I pride myself on that mixture of inspiration and action — inspiring, provoking, challenging, but also exciting and energising people. Then giving them tangible things they can take away and put into practice — that’s what I like to achieve.” Feature
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