Selling Change

About the Book

A global auto manufacturer rapidly flattens its leadership team to achieve unprecedented success. A retailer on the ropes financially manages to turn a profit in less than a year. A fast, casual restaurant has multiple cross-country cases of sick patrons, but sales bounce back a year later. How did they do it? By effectively selling the need for change to the people and teams in their organizations. As an agile change leader, you will own multiple disruptive, strategic, and operational challenges on your watch. Will you be able to sell your team on the need for change? Will you be able to generate the levels of buy-in and commitment required to transform your organization across multiple often misaligned stakeholder groups? In Selling Change, change leader and former management consultant Robert E. Smith, PhD, provides a practical and sustainable playbook to tackle one of the most difficult challenges facing leaders today: generating commitment and buy-in to organizational change. Selling Change shows how leaders can prepare for and transition through operational shifts by generating highly engaged commitment to change. The principles of effective commitment and buy-in are distilled into the 2IsC model (impact, influence, and consistency) that lays out a practical and road-tested process for crafting commitment-focused change communications. Smith outlines approaches leaders must embrace to overcome emotional, behavioral, and mental resistance to change by addressing the following questions: Why change? Why now? Why you? Why your change? Without clear answers to these questions, organizational transformation efforts flounder. Effective change leaders have transformed organizations in a variety of sectors including health care, manufacturing, retail, and technology, redistributing billions of dollars of value. Building on leading research, lessons learned, and proven frameworks, this book gives change leaders everything they need to lead their teams through the journey of creating the next version of their organizations, allowing them to create the future rather than being disrupted by change resistance.

About the Author

Robert E. Smith, PhD, has over 15 years of experience designing and leading organizational change and transformation initiatives at a range of organizations including Fortune 500 companies, global private organizations, non-profits and U.S. federal government agencies. He is the founder of The Change Shop™, an integrated change management platform that helps leaders “put change in the bag” by building high-performing organizations through a suite of web-based change management solutions, leadership assessment tools, and change simulations. Smith was previously a Talent and Organization Practice Strategy Manager at Accenture, the world’s largest management consultancy, where he led talent/human capital-focused projects and built internal workforce analytics capabilities. He has consulted non-profit boards and held leadership positions at several multinational companies focused on human capital technology solutions and talent advisory services. Smith has published articles on best talent practices during outsourcing and technology implementations and presented his work at companies in London, Nairobi, and Singapore, the State of Ohio as well as universities including American University, Strathmore University, his alma mater University of Minnesota. He is a member and contributing advisor and panelist at SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) and SIOP (Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology). Robert lives with his wife and two sons just outside of Washington D.C. in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland. Learn more at www.TheChangeShop.com