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Home  Business Consultant Finding A Great Change Management Consultant
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Finding A Great Change Management Consultant |
When you are planning to change your business yoy want the best change management consultant. What do you look for when recruiting such a person?
Change management consultants arent too hard to find; if they perform properly, they work themselves out of every job! But when youre planning massive restructuring for your company, you want the best change management consultant you can locate.
What To Look For In a Change Management Consultant
Any change management consultant you consider seriously should have three things:
Executive experience, preferably in your industry; - Experience bringing multiple companies successfully through a business realignment process, preferably the same one youre planning for your company; - Experience with managing change in companies similar to yours in both structure and industry.
In other words, the perfect change management consultant for your business would be one whos done exactly what youre doing with two or three of your competitors.
But thats not all you should look for in your change management consultant. He or she should also mesh well with your current management team. A poor choice in consultant would be someone that your key employees (note the multiple!) dislike. Your company needs to work as a team to successfully complete change, and dissention with your change management consultant will undermine everything youre trying to do.
If one or two key employees dislike your change management consultant prospect while everyone else likes him or her fine, you need to ask yourself whats setting this employee off. Is it really something about the change management consultant? Or is there a possibility that your employee is worried about losing his or her job during the process of your businesss transformation? You need to sit down with that employee and find out before ruling out that change management consultant; hes not there to be everyones friend, after all.
The Use and Feeding of Your Change Management Consultant
Your change management consultant will probably be able to give you a very good idea of how he or she can best be used by your company; this is a question you need to ask them during your interview process.
Change management consultants can be used for every stage of your companys restructuring, from helping you come up with a plan with timelines to organizing your committees to training your staff on change management to helping everyone adjust to the changes being made.
You need to ensure your change management consultant is kept in the loop. Change is hard, and some of your employees, maybe even those you would least suspect, are going to resist. Have an open-door policy for your change management consultant - and a closed-door policy for any private communication between the two of you. Private meetings for updates and questions about difficult situations are absolutely essential. Your change management consultant should feel comfortable asking to go to most of your companys meetings, and should be encouraged to get a feel for what everyone does. Part of what your change management consultant does is efficiency analysis; but in order to find redundancies and other structural problems, they need to have open access to everything.
With open communication between you and your carefully-selected change management consultant, your companys transition should go smoothly and calmly.
Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.managementpilot.com . Learn about change management, interim management, project management, corporate governance, management consulting and business development.
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