Episode 23 - Unlocking Change and Leadership with Daniel Lock

Music. Welcome to the Supercharged Change and Comms podcast. I'm Chris Bradley and I'm back with Pete Hodges for a set of special episodes featuring some of the voices you see most often on LinkedIn.

First up is Daniel Locke. Daniel is a highly experienced change leader who helps business leaders unlock and land change. He'll have seen his infographics on LinkedIn including Leadership Green Flags, AI for Change Management and Psychological Safety for Change Management amongst many, many others. You'll have also seen Daniel talking about unlocking the power of LinkedIn. So you'll hear more about this as we progress our conversations.

But first, from a wet November in Exeter, England, let's find out how Pete is doing in Barcelona. Very good. Thank you, Chris. Good to be doing this again. I am looking forward actually next week to be in London for a few days. So I shall be leaving the sun and coming back to the grey. I can't wait for it. Obviously, I miss home every day.

But enough about me and the weather so Daniel good to meet you I wasn't sure for a long time whether you were German or Australian so I'm glad that I finally confirmed Locke could be a German surname I think so could you tell us a bit about yourself and where you're from?

So I am in fact Australian and living in Germany Schuttgart right now the reason for that is my wife who is German and from here we now have two children and we wanted to give them the full Deutsch experience we were living in sydney i'm actually from adelaide in australia but lived in sydney since 2012 where i met my wife and then we you know got married we had kids covid came and went and we were like wow gee, you know the kids are at that age where we if we

sort of let it go if i did not took on a big project in sydney we would miss the window and so you know we decided to give it a go and just move move across which was awesome and the kids are now speaking fluent german and you know big life change for everybody and yeah i miss the good weather of sydney speaking about weather.

Similar but so i mean i guess that is a nice lead in because you're i'm sure you posted the other day that since moving to germany you'd had to change what you deliver or what you do in your career and so perhaps that's a good opportunity if you tell us a bit about what do you do now and that then we can get on to the the topic that we're going to talk about today yeah so so in Australia, I've been involved in project and change for about 20 odd years and project

management process improvement, even business analysis, IT project management. And eventually around 2012, 13, I moved into all change and found my home there and have been doing that ever since. And I...

Deliver workshops and have you know had my own sort of side thing going because mostly day rate contracting in sydney is the work i was doing there then as i moved to germany i wanted to, it was an opportunity to sort of reset my career in a way away from when i was working in banking finance big global banks and things like that big big erp projects and things like this that are quite quite significant but i wanted to create something of my own such as the

world allows for it now with kind of the things we're doing for example so i started posting on linkedin which i had done a little bit before that but then aggressively posting on linkedin and building up a network because i didn't really have one in meaningful network this side of the world either, and i just started posting i created a credit of a coaching program for for change managers started collaborating with change practitioners around the world

picked up some clients and then throughout that time became quite good at linkedin and we can touch on this if you like and And I had a lot of people asking me if I could help them with their LinkedIn. And then this has in and of itself become a little bit of a business in and of itself, which is something I'm very much enjoying. But I'm still involved in the change world as well. So it's a very interesting kind of career, portfolio career, you might say, that I have now. Yeah.

I haven't appreciated that by being good at social media, then other people come and speak to you as well. But I definitely can see from, you know, some of the, either way that you approach it, but some of the material you've been sharing and also the success you've had, that that might be something that people would want to do. It speaks for itself, doesn't it? Yeah.

If you're working in the way that you're self-employed and want to generate more business so that's a key tool to do it okay right so one of the things we wanted to talk about though and i hopefully this relates to to what you deliver in terms of change coaching is what you see in leaders that they can that they can improve from a change point of view so are there common common themes or things that you see when you're trying to help people with that coaching

that you could give us tips to less size yeah so certainly for leaders and sponsors of projects i mean they are just so critical to projects and project success and all of the stats bear that out inside is the common sense so it's nice when anecdote and data line up the thing is with some lead many leaders most leaders if not all very rarely dedicated to the project that they're working on and so often they're asked to be sponsor and lead change on top

of 50 hour week they're already doing and that is true for the middle management it's true for the front lines the front line leadership as well it's rare that leadership get the capacity allocated to them to lead change and furthermore it's very rare that they have any real meaningful training in leading change of the size that they're always that they're leading and the projects that i've worked on that have been the most successful is where that space has been created and it's

been the number one priority for the key leader, And those projects, all projects are challenging. All change projects are challenging. But they are the ones that go better and do, you know, have far better results for everybody involved is when this key leadership is involved. So it can't be understated and it can't be under-emphasised. And part of, like, going into a new project is assessing that.

The level of leadership commitment and conviction, anecdotally mostly, but, you know, you can pull some data to support that and then looking at and then putting that in the context of previous change that's happened in the organization and then starting to say well, this could be this is this could be challenging because this leader doesn't have the right support or bandwidth to support it and and being able to face into that talk to it straight now.

Some projects, they just are what they are. And that is why things need to be dealt with. But certainly, it's a key factor.

The other thing I do, I do coaching of actual change practitioners as well. And so the other thing that I find with change practitioners is probably three main things that I think that change practitioners sort of struggle with or three areas of capability that I think that they need to lean into to get better at. Number one is the business acumen and just really understanding that all projects are there to deliver ROI.

For a business and you need to talk about language of risk and of return on investment that leaders and sponsors talk and that's kind of do you for any change practitioner it's going to help them tremendously in being able to have a bit of voice in the room being in the steerco.

The other thing is being able to communicate succinctly and rapidly and with you know emphasis and power and conviction so a lot of change factors are i don't know why why this is because you'd think that we should be good at communications and so on, but just struggle with whether either I'm not a PowerPoint person or there's someone with its PowerPoint and they're trying to get away from it or I'm not good at presentations or they don't speak up in the meetings and so on.

And I think it goes hand in hand with number one, just lacking confidence in their position in the project. And so I counsel them like presentation skills, both in the way you structure presentations, not on paper, but, you know, the structure of a presentation. And also the presentation quality. They're really important corporate skills and that if you can nail those, you can go a long way in terms of promoting your own. Music.

Teams because the first the first bit of trust you need to witness those those shared relationships you work with every day and then i'll say the third thing is which goes again hand. Music.

In hand with these others there's just self-confidence i just think this it seems to lacks there's change practice it just seems to lack self-confidence in so many ways i don't know why it is i think we all have imposter syndrome we all have that experience that to some some degree so there's a lot of self-confidence that i think that's um is missing and and look change management is often not fully understood by organizations in many ways and organizations need to be of a certain size and

complexity to warrant it and so i just think that people allow themselves to be sidelined and it impacts their confidence and it goes to point number one is talking business to business acumen and then under and making the case for change management that it in fact reduces risk delivered risk delivery risk and it also increases roi through improved adoption i'm so glad that said that because that was exactly a conversation i was having with someone this morning and i was going to raise as

a question actually my question was going to be as a change practitioner if you have a sponsor maybe they don't have enough time but essentially if they don't care about change management so if you i don't know if you're assigned as a contract to do a certain amount of days per week to provide change management to that project that they couldn't really care if you were there or not how do you how do you add value what do you spend your day doing.

So i mean the way i would approach that is i will roll up my sleeves and just start working on the project and understand you know who's impacted by how all this stuff and then start talking to and then start you know building solutions to solve for that and you've got to do that in part by building confidence with your colleagues and peers but if they don't care whether i'm there or not well then you've got to ask yourself the question do i need to be there,

Like ultimately, and if there's no real, sometimes you get allocated to projects and there's really no significant change impacts to people. Like, but, you know, the audit people say that they need to have a change manager on a project of a certain size and so you're there.

And so, and then you really got to ask yourself the question, do I really need to be here and have a candid conversation with all of the people that you, you know, the bosses and so on that you work with and get alignment on whether or not you need to be there. But if you do need to be there and you've got a hostile project manager that you're working with, so to speak, or a little bit belligerent or ignorant, then you've got to – and this is the nuance of doing projects in organisations.

You're working in a political environment, and so you need to be sensitive to that. Power bases, the nature of your relationship, your position in the organisation, and start to flex where you can flex and then bend where you need to bend and have straight conversations all round to say, you know, I'm not getting the support I need to implement well.

So and this is one of the things that I found when I was doing change coaching for you know change people is still currently doing it it is, The willingness to, the nuances of getting change done in a political environment that goes to all of these issues of power base and power structures in an organisation and your position inside that. Not so much about skills. I mean, there are issues around skills, which I touched on earlier, around business out-of-command and presentation skills.

But they are career skills that go with anything. It's just about, you know, building them out in the context of all change. Certainly, the nuances of getting projects done in a political organisation is a very interesting kind of dilemma to face, and it requires a lot of nuance to encourage people through it.

I like the reference to the self-confidence, particularly when you're talking about the comm skills, because I suppose they're succinct and rapid, I think, were the words you used to survive that.

It's quite interesting because I think coming back to the point that Pete was making, as well as some sponsors the project mission expect you to be able to do everything and that you're a one-stop shop for your comms for your training for your impact assessments for you know supporting benefits helping the business understand where their change comes from but actually the self-confidence piece in there can also in my mind mean that you recognize when you need to get the external

help in in the same way that i say change is a discipline that we're just guardians of at that time comms training you know benefits realizations they're the same things they're specialists in their field so the smaller succinct projects where you may be finding that you're where a sponsor or project leader thinks you're not needed it's probably because to your point i don't change isn't well understood change management as a practice isn't well

understood so they just think you're going to come in and do an impact assessment they go well we don't need that we probably do but you probably don't need it to the same extent as if you were going to go and change you know significant end-to-end system whereas if you were. If you had that self-confidence to go, yeah, but I can see the presentation aspects or your events, your stakeholder engagement, or helping your business understand.

A lot of change has cause and effect, right? So people change focuses on AdCar. The business change is the cause and the effect. We're making this change. It's coming over there. There are things you're going to have to change, but that's not in the scope of my Project Manager's project.

We still have to help you with that. And that's the point around supplements is recognising the bits where you are at strength or where you need to call others in or where you can recognise elements you not need to do things, but you can see the other aspects. Would you say that's right?

Very much so. And this goes to the nuance in how you co-op resources and across an organisation to get things done. No project has all the resources that you need. I was a charge director on a large ERP project for a finance company, global finance company in Australia, headquartered out of Australia. I had 35 people in my change team, 35, including the SI partners. Still wasn't enough. Like, just horrendous.

So you never have the resources you need. You're always under resources and you've got to co-op people in the organisation to support you in that. And then it's about having conversations around priorities and making the case, which goes to communication and business acumen is making the case for what you're trying to do.

And what I found in that project in particular, that wasn't whilst a global company it wasn't mature in its project and process and change practices or project practices let alone change and so i had to educate people on what the basics of change management and why it was important and and that was like senior leaders or business sponsors and so on i had to do that repeatedly to to enroll them and like this is why i want to do this this that and the other and it's not

just because i think it's a good idea here's my rationale here's the reasons here's the business cash for that here's why you should make that a priority this is why i want these resources and i want you to i want you to make them available for me and you're not going to get any budget from the project to do it but it's in your interest in the end and so these are the kind of conversations that need to happen all through the organization on a regular basis so that is really

leaning into you know influence without authority, it that you have with an organization and it doesn't matter where you are you never So how I've seen you are, you're always going to have to use that influence with authority throughout an organisation to come up with those resources. It's a place I love, which is leading those you don't manage. I just think that's a skill of any change role, right? You have resources which you need to call upon.

You have business managers who have to influence their teams. You have to manage into your programme or your project right up, back into the benefit space. You don't manage any of these people, but you still need an output or an outcome from them. are leading the show manager. I think it's a fantastic phrase.

I always like that. Change people need to be the connectors in an organization as well. I often find myself being the one that's like, did you know so-and-so is doing that thing? I've never heard of that. Okay, you should talk to each other and find out. And I think that does come into that influencing and just joining. I mean, that also should be what managers do and talking to each other.

Totally. I think one of the other important things while we're on this topic is the relationship you have with your program, project manager, program manager, project director, whatever that relationship is. That you set up from the beginning a peer-level relationship. And whilst they probably have the lion's share of the responsibility for the project financially and the technical outcomes, you want to set yourself up here and you're there to support them and them winning.

And that equally, from you, you will need resources and time and attention. And so that becomes really important. It's the first key relationship you need to set up and you want to set it up as best you can on an equal footing. And I found over time that I would have excellent relationships with the project managers I would work with. And we were very much a very close team.

And I hear a lot of people complain to me that they feel like they're one down or to their program director, program manager and stuff like this. And I really think that's an important issue that you need to lean into in an organization. so that the power dynamic is not getting in the way of effective working relationships. Very important. I think I find that also depends when you come into the program or project.

If you're there from the beginning, then you're all, even just from what you know and understand about the project or program, is that you'll start at the same time. Whereas other things, if I've come into something two, three years down the road, I'm never going to have the same level of knowledge just the project manager so they always kind of no but if you start asking pragmatic questions.

And saying you know where are we up to what's been done before and you start having intelligent questions about you know towards business acumen and things like this strategy you know who's been and you start asking really intelligent questions they will immediately go okay this guy or girl is what we're talking about yeah and they're asking intelligent questions they're not asking me dumb questions they're not making me repeat

everything they're not going to go and you know to try and redo all the stuff that we know that doesn't work you know you know they're going to build on on what's already working they're going to support me they're not going to throw me under, under a bus either because you know when you come into a project halfway through there's a lot of stuff that goes wrong and there's you know corporate and everybody's pointing happy to point fingers so

you you got to be sensitive to all of these things and and then that will set you up with a very good relationship with your program director program manager project manager or whatever that relationship is. And from there, you'll be able to.

Be effective in your role and then talk a bit about the future yeah okay that's where i was going yeah yeah yeah go on then you can well actually before i jump onto that i just had another thought as well actually just listening to your experiences there daniel as well and in the last season we were comparing whether you know change was different in cultures so, we had gilbert from australia and others from other parts of the world too and we were just asking where

what they felt was you know the culture of change in their organization or in their country and how they would describe that so life for me i can't remember the chap from america but he was this dog thank you yeah dog flory he was describing it'd be a lot more like a microwave culture where things have to happen instantly they don't have the long bounding to make the change happen or what have you it was kind of like property and it has to

get done and we have to move on whereas you have a culture over in singapore they have a bit more time but there's they have their nuances as well depending on your rank and role and what have you have you noticed actually difference between Australia and Germany from Sydney to Stuttgart? Well, I don't have any current clients in Germany. I was for a third party firm doing a little bit of work for a global pharmaceutical company.

And to be honest, for global corporates, I have not noticed a big difference at all. And typically in change, we're working for big organizations. So I haven't noticed a big significant difference, to be honest.

But from company to company, certainly in my work in australia i've noticed differences for sure and yeah you need to be sensitive to those things so for example just in the banks in australia like you've got so the big four banks the retail banks, they are old banks and then there's the then there's the more dynamic financial services companies that are part banks and part you know investment banks. Music.

And they operate in very different different very different ways i think culturally done a little bit of work in singapore and which i really enjoyed actually and that was interesting and a little bit different because you had a lot of people from india again this is banking so there's people in from india malaysia singapore china even all getting to get you know and there were definitely those issues that you hear about in terms of deferring to authority not speaking up those two

things you need to play into that you need to actually put in you legitimately need to put in structures so that so that information actually makes its way to you. So that becomes really important. So you do need to play into that and be very sensitive. Whereas, you know, working in investment making in Australia or America, they'll probably tell you, excuse my language, that you're full of shit pretty, you know, to your face. But in Singapore, they're not going to do that.

You know, so you definitely need to play into that. So, but from, and so sort of cultural assessments, and like I've never done in-depth cultural assessments and things like that, but you go into a project because people would tell you straight away, like our company's special and it's difficult because of these reasons. And I like to say, okay, thank you, got that, put that over here and then assess for myself and see if that rings true.

Often, one of the first places I'll look for with respect to data is just look at the last, the most recent staff perspective surveys. Most companies do on an annual basis and you can start to see where are the problems there. If you're plugged into LinkedIn, you get a sense of what the gestalt is on a global scale. And so then, you know, it's playing into those kinds of factors.

I do think that most change people want to be brought in from the beginning and work on a project, you know, throughout because it gives them the most scope to make the biggest impact. And I think that makes sense, all the sense in the world and to the degree that, and I think this is one of the reasons why Australia is set up sort of so advanced in terms of change management is the regulatory culture down there.

It sort of ensures that change is brought in early, whereas perhaps in the US and other, maybe to a lesser extent, some of the mid-tier firms in the UK and Europe are not brought in as early. And one of the, but this just goes to the business acumen. So people aren't going to spend money on you and your services unless they've got a hair-on-fire problem anyway. So it's kind of goes to part of the nature of the work is just dealing with problems is pretty normal.

Sometimes you can read it. It's how things get prioritized. So I was going to ask a bit about the future. Where do you see change management going in the future? and what sort of challenges do you think for people leading change that might be coming out 5, 10 million years ago?

Yeah. So the first one is we need to have a deep empathy for sponsors and those, so people leading change, both the direct owner of the change but also, you know, those influential business unit leaders that we need to, you know, we need their endorsement as well. Real deep empathy is just so important in the change unit and you've got to understand that from the business acumen point of view, and then be able to deploy that empathy from top to bottom. Like it really becomes super important.

Music. And so the change practitioners that have both got this blend of like empathy, ability to empathize, which is not to sympathize, but it's really to get other people's world and then be able to come up with solutions to solve these problems in a language of business is critical. It's a critical skill that change practitioners need to develop.

Number two, in a broad sense, behavioral science, neuroscience, these kinds of disciplines in the last 15 years, sort of since 2007, I think, have continued to evolve and develop and inform how change is rolled out in an organization. Change management is definitely less structured and hierarchical, process-driven than it was.

10 years ago it's much more agile it's much more reactive in a good way you know sensitive to issues and then adjusting and adapting as required to ensure that the result is achieved so that's important so in terms of the future i see just more emphasis and more integration of behavioral science neuroscience into change disciplines and processes that are that are taught how are you see organizations do that i see it talks about a lot so do you have some

examples of how you're using things like neuroscience in practice so on a personal level i've i've read i'm not a practitioner i'm in any sort of disciplined way i've not taken informal training but i've been deeply reading in the in the in the popular press anyway of neuroscience and in particular of behavioural science. And so you've just got to be sensitive to the way that people think about change and, you know, experience change in a very behavioural sense.

And the other one is, like, not to go to too many psychological models and think you can actually deal with the human and their behaviour because then it gives you, it sort of opens up the problem space a little bit and it's less about blaming the other person for the character deficiencies and instead dealing with behaviour because sometimes the solutions are just behavioural. You're trying to get people to do a certain thing on a website and you just

can't get them to do it. through any means of training. Whereas if you could just remove the click or remove the need for the problem altogether, then it's sort of a behavioural solution to a change. There's lots of ways to express that. But I do see increasingly that, and I was working with a behavioural science for a change management firm there for a while recently, and they've really lent into the training aspect. And I think that's the way forward, very much so.

I really think that integrating those best practices and the science of that into actual change is where it's all going. And the second aspect I'll say is integrated change at a global context is something that is not quite there yet. It's evolving slowly, but the next 10, 15 years, 20 years, I think organisations are aware. Organisations are pretty good, have awareness of at least, PMOs, project management officers and enterprise PMOs, and they have PPM tools to support it.

I think people will increasingly have CPM tools, change portfolio management tools, that software that will collect and process data throughout the organization and have data that's plugged into it. And then it will process and interpret that. And with the aid of change analysts and change managers to make good decisions about change within the organization, not limited to projects driving change. But actual like, you know, transformations cascaded into projects.

But also the business as usual change and considerations that are out there, having that integrated more full view so that good decisions can be made around it.

So those two factors are probably the key direction of the future I'm seeing within all change.

The utopian vision they have of capability model that shows all the processes people technology everything across the organization how it all connects and then if you're going to do something how that impacts all the people and processes in those different areas but that's a piece of work that's happening where i'm at at the moment so yeah the capability modeling has been done at the highest level and broken down into the levels

beneath it starting off at portfolios daniel so you would have enabling which would be your comms your hr your finance those type things your facilities property services what we have is something called national capability but essentially that's our science our technology and our research and with our products and services you have a value chain that goes across all of those left to right enabling underpinning those of course and then each of those boxes within that kind of value chain

each have a responsibility towards a series of actions or behaviors or processes and the idea being is that rather than try to change an end-to-end process which is likely being repeated or elements of it being repeated four or five times in four or five different places in the organization you should just be to change one of those capabilities for the good and not have to go all the way back to the beginning and change your whole product

suite does that make sense i don't know if i described that very well okay yes yeah and that's made us think slightly differently about how you manage the change in there because you're not necessarily doing full end-to-end change anymore or you're changing a skill set or a behavior or a process. And the piece you were talking earlier, Daniel, around about that neuroscience piece and the understanding, and that if you can't change behavior to remove the click, remove the click.

I love that. I mean, I'm stealing that. That's going on LinkedIn later. But instead actually bringing that audience in as early as you can to identify what processes are or are not working, what would be the pitfall or the trampoline opportunity to change that element. What you're actually doing in that same process is breaking away from a methodology which is waiting for a type of communication that makes people aware of what's coming.

Because by that point, you've probably already made the decision about what you're changing. Whereas if you bring on back to what you're saying pete around the capabilities and you start to engage your end users be that customer or an employee or whoever and actually start to you know.

Collaboratively capture the ways of working the challenges and the opportunities you're involving them in the change long before and therefore your adoption starts a lot earlier and you identify the opportunity to identify benefit risk or the ripples into the business where other processes upstream or affected are reduced, right? So I love that. I think telling that story is really interesting. I don't think we do much of that out there.

I think we focus so much on adoption of a process or a change or a technology. We miss these opportunities of how we can make life so much easier for ourselves.

100%. Bringing people in early is critical, and obviously people tend not to resist what they have a hand in designing as well. It certainly reduces that automatic resistance or reactance. I do think that it's a nuanced conversation because when you bring people in early, it wastes people's time inevitably because you will have less certainty about the nature of the change and you'll work on things that won't go ahead or become problems.

And so it's not a panacea. It is probably the best alternative though.

And so I just think that sometimes the business can have, unrealistic expectations of the amount of uncertainty that projects actually work in you know if you've got a business that's an operations department that's very structured you know they have they have you know they measure everything they know exactly what to expect and they staff to those measures and volumes that they are expecting and then you you know and you bring

in a project and one of the things you used to hear a lot i think it's a bit less so now was you know you should be able to estimate better you know nobody like within what tolerance and And so this is a whole conversation around estimation and science of estimation that you start to start to go into, and that I think people are increasingly clear about now. That the degree of uncertainty and how do we get around that.

And that's why Agile became so popular in the last 15 years is to try and deal with uncertainty in that way. I mean, what people could see whilst you were talking is that the three of us are all smiling and laughing at that point around estimation. It's just the challenge, isn't it? It's the biggest challenge. The Agile piece is interesting as well. Do you see Agile as hanging around for another 10, 15 years, Daniel, from what you're hearing and people you're speaking to? It's a good question.

I mean, the problem is it sort of descends into buzzwords, doesn't it? I mean, Six Sigma and so on. And it also loses a bit of its meaning and intention also. And not every project needs to be Agile per se, although elements of the practices get brought in, And so you end up with kind of waterfall. There was a great meme I saw on LinkedIn recently where it was the posh and Bex, you know, meme where he's like, you know, tell the truth, tell the truth.

Yeah. It was about agile. That was brilliant. Yeah. You saw that one? Was it agile? Is it an agile project? Come on, tell the truth. Yeah. Okay. It's a waterfall project with a standup. People did the bits on me because I didn't know. I didn't recognize Bex. I thought it was someone else. I was like, who is this? It came from his documentary, didn't it? Because I think Victoria was talking about how she got dropped off at school or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In a Ben's, she goes, I got dropped off at school. Like everybody else needs to tell the truth. You were dropped off in a Rolls Royce or something. So it was, what was my point? So Agile, I think, you know, is, I mean, all of the practices and the ideas behind it are awesome. And then there's the whole, you know, sort of emphasis of Agile change as well, which, again, is great.

But I just think it's awesome for courses. Not every organisation is ready for it and set up for it. So you've just got to work for and change practitioners. We work across many different projects and organisations throughout our career. And so you have to work with what you've got.

And i and i agree in terms of kind of the principles about, reduced documentation and so on and so forth but it's not always possible so you just got to kind of work through you know you need to document you need to do what you do and and do what you don't and be pragmatic what's um what's on your wish list if you could i don't know pick three three things that leaders would do differently in the future what would those be if you had changed who that would be.

So you mean by like sponsors and senior leaders? Yeah. Yep. So the first one is to make your change practitioner your confidant. So where I've had that relationship with sponsors, it's been powerful and we've been able to drive awesome results.

And so, and really having a very close relationship with the sponsor, not to say that you're the most powerful person in the project team, but I mean, you know, you've got a close relationship with the sponsor and they are listening and you're there to educate them on your expertise and then for them to make decisions and guide and help so that they can make effective decisions.

Decision and so for leaders to really lean into that relationship and empower their change people to to be that person for them is really important and to select for that as well when they are engaging in change so that becomes really important and then the other one is to get deeply engaged, with so that they can go to the front line and really see what they're what the front line is dealing with with respect to change and all the way up and down the line and then third

is to make the time so you know if they've got a project that's effectively a third of their budget and time you know should should a third of their time allocation each week be allocated to that and so i think senior leaders and to the degree that they can alleviate their other responsibilities so that they can focus on a given project or program is crucially important because like i said at the beginning

of this podcast more often than not sponsors a are they're not trained They're not trained. The STCO participants aren't trained around all change or even in projects generally. They're not trained in change, let alone project management as a sponsor, and they just don't really have the capabilities and have the space, and they're doing it on top of a 50-hour week already, and so it becomes a 60-hour week or more for them.

And they're ambitious and driven and they're conscientious, and so they take it on. But if they can stop, pause, and lean into those experts in the project and chain space to help them and guide them and then create some space for themselves, then I think projects would actually do a lot better in organizations. Do you think delegating helps alleviate?

Delegating? Absolutely. As a sponsor, so building, because that's part of what the ProSci talk about, isn't it, with their ABC thing, is that like building a coalition and making sure that you can spread the load a bit. And definitely I see that as either you have the sponsor so they won't delegate, make decisions ever and holds everything up. Or you have someone who's too controlling, never lets anybody else make any decisions, so there's basically no point delegating.

But I do think, as a skill, maybe for all sorts of managers and leaders, that's something that people can really benefit from. But often, I don't know, when you come across, say, sponsors that just work far too much to possibly ever deliver all the things that they want to, they're never going to, you know, the organization won't let some sponsors let up some of their responsibilities because it would be legally problematic if they did. So we're now getting into organisational culture and,

in the human condition. Here we go. Look, in an ideal world, you focus on a few things at once and you drive those forward, you get them complete, you move to the next one. In organizations, there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of competing priorities, political agendas, and so that is the reality of what you're working in. But you asked me the question of what I would love to see in my fantasy world. Of course, yeah, I mean, I completely agree.

Daniel, what's the next for you, though? What are you working with at the moment?

So i am working on some collaborations i think it's probably the way forward with me for my change work equally because there's this sort of coaching business around change management marketing that's happening as well which i'm very excited about and then what do i do with the change work and the change that i've been doing i think that's going to look like a lot more like collaboration sort of global conversations that global collaborations and

there's some conversations in play that I think, you know, that are currently in play now and that will continue that way. And still putting some structure around those, exactly what they might look like, to be honest. And whether it's training, coaching, masterclasses, those sorts of things is what I'm looking at doing in the change space. They're very much in a collaboration with other experts and prominent people in the field.

I mean, the likelihood is you want to see Daniel's stuff on LinkedIn is great.

One of the pitfalls of linkedin is you can't download the great imagery daniel puts on so the art of screenshotting comes into play it's details are all on there so if you want to catch up with daniel even learn stuff right i'm not making this up you can go in and read like the ai one i thought was really useful as an infographic about ai on there and how that embeds with change management there's stuff on there about just checklists about

you know simple and effective behaviors that change leaders should be you know undertaking get yourself on to have a look Daniel's website and contact details are on there and we'll also post them as a link in our conversations as well as we go forward for me Daniel it's been great loved having you on thank you for finding the time for us please do keep putting that great stuff on LinkedIn because it helps me every single

day awesome thanks for having us Chris Pete awesome to meet you feeling good. Music.