Top 5 Benefits of Change Management Training

The past 10 years have seen seismic shifts in the business landscape. Volatility of supply chains has increased, there are huge uncertainties about the global political environment, markets have become more complex (and increasingly individualistic) and there is considerable ambiguity about the risks and benefits of new technology (think AI). We live in an increasingly “VUCA” world!

As a result, the ability to implement change in a timely and effective way has become a key success factor for all organisations. Change management capability and capacity supports organisations in achieving this. Applying insights from a range of functions to support leaders of change, change management helps them engage everyone affected by change initiatives, ensuring that the human side of change does not get overlooked and, as a result, lead to failure. Change managers bring insights from different perspectives:

• organisational and individual,
• operational and cultural,
• change initiative and strategic contexts.

As a result, they can help assess change impact, build workable change plans, encourage collaboration from all stakeholders, and link learning and communication initiatives. All this leads to change that will ‘stick’.

What you’ll learn on an APMG Change Management training covers five areas:

1. Understanding your organisational context and approach to change. This includes ways of ‘reading’ your organisation and the type of change, so that your approach will ‘fit’.  It also includes practical ways to structure your approach in an agile way that evolves with the change.
2. Understanding people and change. This includes human responses to change and how to manage them, developing and sustaining motivation through change and a great introduction to using learning to build people’s competence.
3. Understanding change leadership and teams. This includes what you should expect (and work for!) from change sponsors and others, building them as effective change leaders. You’ll also learn how to get the best out of teams in support of change.
4. Understanding stakeholder engagement and communication. This includes many aspects of planning for and gaining stakeholders’ support. It also introduces ways to use various communication channels well, engaging hearts and minds with your changes
5. Understanding the work of the Change Manager. This covers professional skills such as how to assess the impact and severity of changes, addressing resistance and change analytics.

Those going on to the Practitioner course will add professional learning in these areas including:

• building momentum for change and sustaining it,
• learning and instruction,
• coaching others to support change
• handling confict, and
• facilitation for collaborative design of change.

Beyond the knowledge and understanding learners will gain from the course, there are many benefits to organisations from having staff undertake this training. My personal ‘top 5’ would be:

In an increasingly volatile world, the ability of organisations to evolve and to implement sustainable change in an agile way has become a key differentiator. Having an organisational capability – and the professional capacity to support managers and leaders through change – significantly increases the responsiveness of an organisation to changing markets, supply chains, technology and economic circumstances.

It is also the case that good training in change management principles and practices provides highly-transferable leadership and management skills. Such training can be used effectively to increase the organisation’s leadership “bench strength”.

Whether consciously or not, organisations all have a culture; for larger organisations there are often multiple cultures in different functions or business units. Mergers and acquisitions frequently flounder, not on the practicalities of implementation but on the rocks of clashing cultures. Well-trained changed managers consider cultural issues (including strategic intent to modify an existing culture) and can help ensure that such issues are identified and accounted for in the process of change. This leads to a much greater acceptance of change throughout the evolving organisation.

Also, an increasing proportion of the most talented people, especially those in “Gen Y” and “Gen Z” want to work for an organisation whose culture and values they respect. As a result, both the operational impact of change and the process by which it is implemented can have lasting effects on the retention of excellent staff.

All change involves risk. Major changes create major risks. Organisational change capability and capacity is identified as a factor that can help reduce both financial and reputational risk. Effective management of change reduces the disruption such a process can cause, with its resultant organisational costs and human stress. This is achieved by engaging all those affected from an early stage, helping them (in William Bridges’ words¹) to understand a purpose for the change, see a picture of its future benefits, follow a plan through the process and own their personal part to play in it.

Line leaders frequently find change leadership highly challenging. Senior leaders who are expected to champion changes are often ill-prepared for their role as change sponsors. Appropriately-trained Change Managers understand the most constructive roles for change sponsors, line leaders, change teams, networks of change agents and those who are the ‘recipients’ of change – and how those roles interact. They are trained and equipped to support all those involved in a change initiative, helping sustain organisational effectiveness, wellbeing and psychological safety as a change process progresses.

Stakeholders inside and outside the organisation who feel they receive good, timely and transparent communication (both officially from the organisation and from their local line leader or organisation contact) are generally willing to listen to the case for change. Where they and the teams around them are involved in a collaboration to design, create and produce a change, there is typically a high degree of motivation and commitment to making change work, and to sustaining it in the long term. One of the functions of Change Managers is to develop and support this kind of collaboration (appropriately to the situation and culture of the organisation) so that all those affected by a change will invest their energies in promoting its success.

• Ideally, find a course where the certification is based on an objective, independent assessment (not just a trainer’s opinion) of participants’ knowledge and of their ability to apply it
• Choose the right training format for your organisation (for example: classroom, online, hybrid or self-study)
• Check the practical change management experience of the course trainers
• Use training providers who are accredited by an independent organisation. The APMG has a range of suitable training organisations you could select from.

Neha Sharma, a Senior Manager, discusses her experiences of APMG-International Change Management training and the benefits she gained from obtaining the certification.

Neha emphasises that change affects both the organisation and the individual. She notes that the Change Management training has been instrumental in helping her ask the right questions about change initiatives.

Louise Herring, a partner in McKinsey’s London-based Analytics Academy made an interesting comment about people and change in a video about the implementation of generative AI (surely a highly-significant source of change in the coming years):

"What change will be needed in the organization to unlock the benefits? What do humans need to do differently to accept, adopt, and scale gen AI? I see more effort needed on that front in many organizations." ²

What is true for implementation of generative AI is also true for other types of change.  Humans must ‘accept and adopt’ change; more effort to achieve this is required.  Changes where such acceptance and adoption occurs are carefully designed, effectively implemented and sustainably embedded in the organisation’s ways of working.

Change managers, properly trained and well developed, can help ensure that this happens. 

The Change Management Foundation course is typically delivered over three days, with no prerequisites required. It provides a comprehensive overview of approaches to change, how humans respond to change and how this can be managed, change leadership and teams, stakeholder engagement, and the role of the change manager.

As the practitioner course builds on the fundamentals taught at the foundation level, successful completion of the Change Management Foundation qualification is a prerequisite. The practitioner Change Management course is commonly taught in two days.

It builds on your knowledge of building and sustaining momentum for change, coaching others to support change, handling conflict, and facilitating.

1. Bridges, W., Managing Transitions: making the most of change, 1995, Nicholas Brealey, London
2. Herring, L., Change management will be critical to implementing generative AI, (Video), 17/10/2023, McKinsey, London