In most cases the day-to-day activities, meetings and tasks continue at the same time as change is taking place. It is easy for change to be a peripheral activity, something to fit between everything else, or something to complete when everything else is done. To influence change, help people prioritize.
Prioritizing is not just about helping people understand the urgency and importance of change. How does its importance stack up against everything else? It doesn’t work for the change initiative to be relegated to people’s free time, nor does it work for everyone to stop running the company so they can focus only on the change. What can slide, and what is more important than the change?
Unless people already had excess capacity, either the capacity needs to increase to absorb the work of change (either by adding people or adding hours), or the amount of work needs to be adjusted to fit the capacity. As a change agent, work with employees and managers to prioritize activities so the change can be done effectively and also given its due importance.
Who and what might you help prioritize?
Read more of the 99 Ways to Influence Change.