How to Lead Teams Through Change

Iterating has become the business norm—but project teams are struggling to keep up with the relentless pace of change. How can change management professionals and project leaders help? We discuss this with: 

Sharon Casey, director, change management, Adobe, Austin, Texas, USA: Casey discusses how the persistent pace of change is affecting project teams and contributes to change fatigue. She also explains how change practitioners can support project professionals and teams going through change—sharing how her team’s “service tiers” offer assistance—and ways to ensure project teams and senior stakeholders buy into change initiatives. Plus, how artificial intelligence is helping leaders at Adobe learn to better manage change.  

Senkodi Murugesan, CPMAI, PMP, previously a project manager at Howden, a Chart Industries company, Chennai, India: Murugesan discusses how change has evolved through his career, how to find opportunities amid sudden change on a project, and he shares an example of how he led teams through a major tech change. He also explains why an agile mindset is crucial when it comes to leading project teams through change.

Key themes

[02:08] How the increasing pace of change affects teams

[04:02] Building buy-in for change—and avoiding burnout

[09:16] How Adobe change practitioners support teams during change

[11:18] Using AI to assist project leaders during change initiatives 

[16:15] A project professional’s perspective on how managing changed has evolved

[18:51] Helping teams through major tech changes 

[21:38] An agile mindset: A must-have for project leaders handling change

Transcript

Episode Transcript

SHARON CASEY

It’s up to everybody to own change management. It’s not just up to the change manager. It is a collective effort. You have to really think about who’s doing what, and then, where can we get help? 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Change management is a team sport. But how do you get everybody on board, get them all aligned and ensure they work together to deliver value? That’s ahead.

In today’s fast-paced and complex business landscape, project professionals lead the way, delivering value while tackling critical challenges and embracing innovative ways of working. On Projectified®, we bring you insights from the project management community to help you thrive in this evolving world of work through real-world stories and strategies, inspiring you to advance your career and make a positive impact.

This is Projectified. I’m Steve Hendershot.

In an age of seemingly perpetual change, the ability to manage it well has become an imperative. Yet many teams apparently aren’t ready: Accenture research shows 100% of C-suite leaders anticipate significant change is coming to their organization, but only 25% believe their teams are prepared to embrace it.

So today we’ll explore how you can cultivate a culture and process for developing change-ready project teams. Two project leaders share their strategies for building and sustaining buy-in, navigating uncertainty and maximizing value when it comes to change management. 

Before I introduce our guests, if you enjoy Projectified, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. Your feedback helps us keep making this show. 

Now, let’s get to the conversations. First we go to Austin, Texas, in the United States, where Sharon Casey is the director of change management at Adobe. She leads the change management center of excellence, which helps coordinate technology deployment for internal teams across the organization. Sharon’s team works to ensure that when that tech mix changes, the transitions are smooth and effective.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Okay, so talking about change management. The art of this looks a little different just because the pace of change seems always to be increasing.

And obviously, in your role, you are perpetually helping internal teams deal with changes of various sorts. So how does that ever-increasing pace—and the knowledge that it will continue to do so—impact your team members and the stakeholders that you work with? 

SHARON CASEY

Yeah, that’s a really good callout because it is ever increasing, and there’s no sign of it slowing down. There’s only signs of it ever continuing to speed up. Think about the different types of disruptive changes that are coming in with a ton of companies returning to office, or these big disruptions with AI (artificial intelligence) or just org changes. And then even just the small, little, maybe less transformative changes, but just the volume of the smaller changes is like death by a thousand paper cuts, right? So within our own team, we have to really look at prioritization, and how do we shift our focus to working on the biggest bets, and what is going to be the most supportive for our business?  

We rely on our program and portfolio team and our leaders to really give us that guidance so that we are really focused, because we tend to support many different initiatives. But you can only spread somebody so thin to still provide effective support. So we want to focus so we’re putting more energy, more attention on those big bets. And then with our stakeholders, we have the fun scenario where they are already burnt out by the time we get to them. They have change fatigue to the nth degree. So, we have to come into it with empathy and just understanding. So one of the first things that we do is ask them, what else is changing within your organization? We want to understand their organizational context and them as individual end users, so that we can really tailor our support to what’s going on for them, and what’s going on for their organization.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

How much thought is going into, is this too much for this team? How do you engage in ways that get burned-out people to the point where they can say, “Okay, I’ve got this one more in me”?

SHARON CASEY

So one of the ways that we’ve approached it is by cataloging all of the different change impacts across all of the different programs that we support, just to show that sheer volume. And then also our portfolio management team. I work to get them to add sort of a people impact layer to when they’re looking across our whole portfolio and doing that planning of, what’s coming up on the roadmap, so that we know which stakeholder groups are going to be impacted by these things. And so we can help influence portfolio planning that way. So it just gives that overall idea and how can we lead with our end users in mind and try to mindfully group things to avoid that thousand paper cuts phenomenon. 

A tactical way that we’ve done that—we have this one major transformation that we’re going through right now, but then there’s all of these kind of sister projects that are related to that. While there’s many different project teams supporting those little sister projects, for our end users, it all feels related or feels the same. So anytime we can, we’re pushing to consolidate these things or roll it out all together, because for our end users, it really does feel like one thing. So if you’re going to roll them out sequentially, that’s like a change. A change again, just when I was getting used to it. Another change again. If we can consolidate them together so it’s one big rollout, and then help them be willing by saying, “Hey, look, these things are actually bringing you this positive benefit to this transformation that you may be really excited about or you may not be really excited about, but actually here’s some real benefits that these sister projects are bringing in.” Not separating those in the end user’s lens at all. To them, it feels all unified as one experience.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Is there a buy-in challenge there, in that you have to get the internal teams to say, “Your patch isn’t going out by itself, it’s getting combined with these three other ones into an omni thing”? Or is everybody okay with that? 

SHARON CASEY 

Me personally, I feel like I’ve done my best to influence, and yeah, there are challenges with that. We’ve tried in the past, and it’s not always successful. Sometimes yes, but often things are limited by maybe a contract renewal deadline or something like that. And so there’s only so much wiggle room on timelines.

But what really was the game changer for us was the senior leadership for our end-user main audience came in and said, “All good, but hey, can we shift this major timeline out and really focus on that user experience?” And once the senior vice presidents were talking with the senior leaders, our CIO and CFO, things started moving, and we got this focus on the end-user experience. And that’s when all of these things were sort of allowed to coalesce and make this overall improved end-user experience. And we have those same business stakeholders leaning in and acting as true sponsors and saying, “I won’t go live for my business unless we have these user experience improvements.” So to get that buy-in and that sponsorship has been absolutely pivotal in our ability to do that.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

That’s great. And it’s also a good transition into my next question, which is whether it’s harder to get buy-in amongst users and stakeholders than it was before. We already talked about the pace of change increasing. There’s more change baggage, change fatigue than there has been. Is this harder or easier than it was? 

SHARON CASEY

I think harder in some ways because, again, the volume of change and just the pace of business and the disruptions that come with things like AI, good or bad. But I think in some ways it’s easier because we have learned how to better speak the language of the business. We have better engagement with our business leaders to make sure that our priorities align with the business priorities and what’s going to help us meet our overarching business goals. Then it’s this collaborative approach for what does get rolled out. It’s not us driving something or them saying, “We need this.” It’s a discussion of like, “Okay, what sequencing makes sense, and what are the parameters?” Right? But having really good visibility into that a long ways off helps drive those conversations so you can make those collaborative prioritization discussions. And that way, again, you have a better user experience.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

And maybe some empathy. I feel like if a user understands that you are not just forever pushing on them, but that you are being thoughtful, I think that at some point, at least some people probably think, “All right, they’re trying. Therefore, I will also try.”

SHARON CASEY

Yes, absolutely. And I think I’ve seen not just with that business leader example that I gave earlier, but also just a shift in general. Understanding of the needs of our end users is really critical in helping them better accept the changes that are coming. And then from a strictly change management lens, if people are still struggling, just understand why. Ask them why. Just go talk to them, right? People aren’t resistant just to be difficult. There’s something else going on, some contributing factor of why they’re struggling to accept this. And I think if you can listen early enough to adapt the solution to better fit their needs, that’s amazing. But a lot of times we can’t do that. And so if you are saying, “Hey, I hear you. We can’t change what’s coming, but here’s how I’m going to support you through this,” then you get a lot more acceptance. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

You talked about prioritization earlier. Your team can’t address every change happening across the organization. Tell me about the “service tiers” that your change management team has created and how they help project professionals.

SHARON CASEY

To help us scale, we have our tiered support model. We have high touch, which is where we have one or more change managers fully dedicated to a program. And so they act as like, two-in-the-box with the program lead.

They partner really successfully. We’ve established credibility for the change management function, and so we have a seat at the table. We’re in the governance forums. We’re helping create those governance models based on our stakeholder analysis. So we’re really, really partnered very closely with the program manager and the product managers. We’re developing the strategy, the plans, and implementing those plans.

We still have more demand than capacity, so we scale by offering a low-touch model, which is where we’re doing really more of a coaching and advisory role. A program team will say, “Hey, we need change management support.” If [that] doesn’t make the threshold for getting that high touch or it just isn’t at the scale that actually merits having a fully dedicated resource, we’ll give a change expert from the team to do that coaching and advisory. So they will help scope out the change and make some recommendations for what that strategy looks like, help create those initial plans. We’ll help them decide who on the program team is going to actually do the execution. And then we provide our kind of standard tools, templates, past examples. And then we keep an ongoing cadence with them where we say, “Hey, we don’t have capacity to join all the program meetings. However, let’s have a focused change management conversation on a regular cadence.” Whatever we decide is appropriate for that program. And then we talk through the change management challenges, what’s upcoming, how we might need to adjust those plans. We can review things as well.

And then we have no touch, which is a big library but also a basic toolkit to get people started that’s approachable, of tools, templates, best practices. That’s in addition to like our community of practice and our trainings and things that we do. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Let’s talk about AI. That seems like a way that you could theoretically—and are experimenting with using to—extend that capacity. But it’s challenging to figure out exactly the right way to do that. So how are you approaching making that work?

SHARON CASEY

We use AI to help us scale. One of the biggest things I hear back with [the] low-touch support offering is like, “Wow, that sounds great. I would love to have this, but like, I don’t have time to do the change management work.

I’m already trying to do all my program management work.” 

While we may not have capacity or the time to do that either, but maybe AI does. We’re really encouraged to experiment with new tools and prompts and things like that. So I have to give kudos to the company for being very AI-first in our thinking and ahead of the game in a lot of ways. We’re always like, how can we use AI to help us with this?  

So we’ve been partnering with our engineering teams to do that, and the one that I’m most excited about is about change impacts, because it’s very, very time consuming, right? I don’t think AI replaces all of that, but sometimes our product managers, they’re stretched 10 different ways. Our kind of scrappy internal engineering team that’s really doing a ton of AI experimentation has built for us some prompts that allow us to take transcripts from requirements gathering sessions, requirements documents, all those stories and put those as inputs with really sophisticated prompts.

And it actually gives us an estimate, right? But change impacts even by persona with degree of impact, type of impact—whether it’s people, process, technology, policy—they can pull out regional impacts from that. If it can do that, can we give it one more prompt to have it summarize change impacts by persona? The answer is yes, so we’re working on that now. You have to still validate those things. It’s not going to be the perfect solution, but it’s a really, really good time-saving start.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Great. You’re using AI to support your change team’s internal work in several cool ways. What about pushing AI out to stakeholders to help them with their change projects?  

SHARON CASEY

We are absolutely doing that. These things have to be intuitive, and you have to put them in the user’s hands where they are. One really successful example we’ve had is by creating a chatbot that sits within the UI of one of our main systems. So we were doing this massive system migration, and people don’t want to sit through hours of training. They want bite-sized, on-demand training and in-app guidance, right? There’s tools that exist that we use for that. But also doing our chatbot, we had it ingest all of the training materials that we created for things like job aids and our on-demand training. It consumes all of that, and then it can answer, how do I run this transaction through such and such process? And they can just ask their plain-language question and get back a plain-language answer right there without ever having to click out of the system that they were in. And we have an 82% success rate on this particular chatbot within this massive solution rolled out to many thousands of people. So we’re really proud of that. It actually cut down our help desk tickets by more than half, and people had a better experience. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT

How vital is a change management professional to navigating this process successfully? Is there hope for teams that have to DIY change management?  

SHARON CASEY

I have a large team, and we have dedicated resources, but even in this organization, most programs don’t have a dedicated change manager. Maybe they have low touch, but someone else on the team has to do the actual execution. We really rely heavily on program managers to take on a lot of that change management work. It’s up to us to make sure that we’re being very clear about roles and responsibilities and also skilling up people so that they can have this change mindset, this end-user-focused mindset, regardless of what role they’re in. 

Someone in your organization has probably done change management before, or there’s a different project that does have dedicated change management. Or reach out to your peer network. If there’s one thing for certain, change managers love talking about change management. So we’re here, your network is here, to help and at least provide that kind of advisory and those best practices. 

MUSICAL TRANSITION 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Not every attempted change is received enthusiastically by every project team member. Yet building buy-in and strengthening a team’s change capacity is essential for project leaders. Senkodi Murugesan, who just wrapped up a project manager role at Howden, a Chart Industries company, in Chennai, India, spoke with Projectified’s Hannah LaBelle about how he leads teams through change.  

MUSICAL TRANSITION 

HANNAH LABELLE

All right, Senkodi. Today, we’re talking all about change management from a project professional’s perspective. Let’s start with how has handling change evolved for you?

SENKODI MURUGESAN

When I started my career in project management, change was something I treated as an external event to react to or respond to, like new client requirements, market shifts, regulatory updates. So my role was to adjust schedules, budgets and resources to minimize the disruptions on the project. Over the last few years, I have seen change become constant and multidimensional, like technology disruption, hybrid work cultures and global uncertainties like supply chain crises. So instead of resisting or just accommodating change, nowadays, I focus on embedding adaptability into the project culture itself.

HANNAH LABELLE

So you mentioned a couple of those changes, maybe some geopolitical changes. Obviously, technology is a big one. How have you seen them affecting your project teams? 

SENKODI MURUGESAN

So when we handle a long-duration project, after some duration, if there are changes due to geopolitical situations like tariff changes, or there are some restrictions on import and export, this certainly affects the projects. So we had to put hold on the projects, or we had to reevaluate the risk of the project. So all these things are really affecting the project, as well as when such situations are coming, then the project team is also getting affected by those changes. 

HANNAH LABELLE

What do you do as a project leader if, all of a sudden, a change happens amid your project, and you have to address that during execution? What does that process look like? 

SENKODI MURUGESAN

We have to find the opportunities to come out of such changes. When you deliver such a change request or change is happening, the project team normally gets demotivated. So it is [the] project manager who has to stay in a positive outlook and take it forward to the team. So in those scenarios, project leads cannot make a directional decision. They have to get along with the team to find the solution. Because if you independently give direction, you cannot get buy-in from them. So we have to have a discussion with them, get their buy-in to accommodate the change. Then it’ll be a smooth flow. 

HANNAH LABELLE

You mentioned technology as one disruption you might face. Say there’s a new tech tool your teams need to use. How have you seen this change affect your teams, and how do you lead them through it? 

SENKODI MURUGESAN

I select servant leadership to handle the situation. We give necessary trainings to improve their skills. When we are introducing the new tools, we engage with them to make them understand the value that new tool is going to deliver to the project or to the organization. So we create awareness to them. We sometimes assign mentors to have a one-on-one discussion and give coaching to them, because people should not feel that new tools will take away their job. Because nowadays, such kind of fear is also there when we introduce new tools or new systems or new software.

Three [or] four years back, we implemented a new ERP (enterprise resource planning) system inside Howden. We planned to deploy [it] in two factories in India. But before that, their two factories were using another ERP system for a long time, more than 15 years. So when we started our plan to implement the new ERP system, there was a fear the new system will come and take away their jobs. Through a proper change management system, we created an awareness to the benefits of new ERP system and clarified the value it is going to bring.

So we had multiple sessions with the team of people so that we got their buy-in. During this change management process, we could identify their present skill, and we could identify what are the skills we needed to train them [on] to use the new ERP tool. So we gave specific training to them so they could easily work on the new ERP systems. Some people can get trained through online training. Some people need in-person training. Some people need a person to assist them through some period, then only they’ll get trained. 

HANNAH LABELLE

What else do you think can help project teams accept change? What are some strategies that you’ve used? 

SENKODI MURUGESAN

We have to consider the recognition and reward when it comes to change, because it is important when we handle the project, we frequently recognize and reward the people who undergo these changes and get along with the requirements—shout outs or monthly recognition in front of the team. 

HANNAH LABELLE

What would you say is the biggest misconception people have about leading project teams through change? And why do you think that that persists? 

SENKODI MURUGESAN

When change comes, some people think it is only affecting the scope, schedules and budgets, but it is not like that. When change comes, it first affects the mindset of the project team. So it is very important that we keep them focused when such changes are coming. So we have to train the team to have an agile mindset whenever we face the changes. People have to have an agile mindset to accept and work on the solutions.

Project management and change management is managing the people. Nowadays, you cannot use any directional or authoritative leadership.

It is very important we are to show the servant leadership and facilitate them. Changes are inevitable, so project leaders must have an agile mindset to handle the planned and unplanned changes. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

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