6 Keys To Agency Change Management with Andrew Dymski

All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. This is Gray MacKenzie. I am your co host and I've got another co host with me today, Andrew Demski coming back on to the Agency Journey podcast.

What's up, guys?

Co founder here at Zen Pilot. Welcome on, Andrew.

Good to be here, Gray. Nice to be back in the studio with you.

Well, I've allowed you back for a couple reasons. One, it's just fun to talk to you and we don't do as much of that as we used to in the day to day. Two is you and I are going to be doing more content together, more of, hey, we're learning all this stuff. We're doing a bad job of translating that out to the general world. We can tell and impact a lot more people with the cool stuff that we're getting to learn from the dozens of agencies who we're working with on a day to day basis. And then thirdly, you get some really good thoughts on change management that I'm excited to talk about. So today that's what we're going to center on, is change management. What are the keys to change management in an agency context? Andrew, maybe you can set the stage by just talking about the type of change management that we're leading teams through daily.

Yeah. So in our context here, we're helping people handle a massive change, which is like what is the system that they operate within every single day, the place they go to to find their tasks, to collaborate with their team, to communicate out with clients. So that's, there's a massive amount of disruption when you go through a change like this. And so it's helpful for us to kind of take a step back and think about the process overall as to how do we prepare a team, well for change. And so these steps that I want to walk through here today, that could be the context that you use for a project management migration, which is what, you know, our team here at zenpilot does each and every day. But it could also be, you know, you're going to change your CRM or you're going to change the tool you use for taking client notes or you're going to do any number of things. These steps are kind of universal because they're, they're based on engaging humans and humans don't like to change. We're, we're stubborn folk. So what?

Very, very true. There any. Well, maybe we'll get to this later on. I was going to ask you questions about kind of the funny, funny stories from the trenches around change management and the teams who adapted to it well, but we can do that afterwards. Let's talk about the keys. And you've got six keys outlined here. So take us through, can walk us through. How do we lead our teams? Well, through change management.

Yeah. And the first two of the six are focused purely on leadership and how leadership engages this process. And I think the first step is giving people a platform or a channel to express their pain or frustrations. We need to engage the team and hear the team in terms of what. Where they find friction in the process so that we can acknowledge where they're at. If we're a team that just kind of moves forward with our initiatives, I say our from a leadership perspective and sees a need in the business, puts a process in place or a tool in place or a partner in place to solve that and rolls that out to the team. Adoption is gonna struggle because they're not engaged. And so step one, we've got to engage the team by giving them a channel through which to express their frustrations, their pains, their joys, whatever it. So some ways that we've seen that work in our process is we use an intake survey, and we survey every member of an agency team at the beginning of our process and let them grade different areas of what it's like to manage projects and communicate as a team and share things out with clients and all those different things. And so they get an opportunity to kind of share their perspective from the seat that they sit in on where. Where they're at in something. And so I think it's important, number one, to collect that feedback because if you try to move forward without first listening, you're going to struggle to get people on the bus. And if, if we're going to really make change, we've got to get people excited about that at the beginning so they embrace the suck. Because there's going to be a suck period in any transformation. We've got to get them geared up and ready so that they can see the green on the other side of the fence as they're moving through that. So that'd be my first recommendation here.

Yeah. How much of that? I feel like often this is done. I really like using the survey, but that's from my firsthand experience. But often this is done out loud or like all hands team meetings, tell us what's going on, When's the right place to do this? Hey, we're all live on a call together, in an office together. And when's the right place to do use a tool like a survey or hey, Give us your notes on what's happening.

Yeah, I prefer the notes or the survey side of things. Just because you get like the squeaky wheel gets the grease in the all hands setting and those who are. You've got your talkers in your group and you've got your quiet folks and if you only make decisions based on who the talkers are or who the complainers are in your team, you're going to be stuck kind of always bending to their will and their whims. Whereas if you can shift it and you can ask people to do work up front, you're going to get the change suggestions from the people that are the most engaged and are the most thought out in terms of what they want to see come out of a, an implementation or a fix or whatever it might be. So I would definitely provide channels. So I would lean on surveys, forms for people to submit ideas in. I would lean on one on ones where it's conversational. But in a small context, all hands could be a review of issues that have been identified to kind of like help prioritization maybe. But I wouldn't use that as your primary source for vetting things because that's just kind of mob rule. When you get in there, where does.

Vision or I guess in terms of scoping what you're getting feedback for is this just hey, generally in our business, where are their challenges? How much should you set a vision for? As an example, by the time that we're surveying a lot of team members, they've already identified together as a team that we've got a problem around project management or around operations and we are serious enough about making a change that we might implement another project management platform. And we think that there's a good chance that that's going to be the case or we already know that's going to be the case or what we're doing now doesn't work. So how much scoping should you do? Where does kind of vision fall into this?

Yeah, I think there should be channels for both general receivers of Intel. What systems do you have in place in your business to have constant feelers out to your team that can bubble up issues or insight into things that can be improved. So one of the things we help our clients do is put a process development form in place. Here's a channel that everyone on their team can go to to submit an idea for something that they want to see improved across the organization. Something that I do internally when we're running one on ones with our team is always asking the Question. What could we do to help you do your job better? What would help streamline the way you do your work? And just having those little things in place where you're constantly sending out radar or sonar pings and then seeing what comes back is good from a general basis to inform the leadership team if there's issues that keep showing up on your leadership team meetings and you decide, okay, we need to solve this. We see this bubbling up in client after action reports and all hands meetings. People are just venting. We've identified as a leadership team that this needs to happen. Then you've got more of an initiative based sounding board that needs to go and there maybe you put together a special survey or you have special one on ones around that particular topic that you've identified as a team. How you get to that identification as a team? I think that could be the general roll up. It could be those one on ones. It could be a special form you have in place, but have different tools out there. So you're listening to the team and to clients as well because the clients will bubble those things up for sure when they're going through a process with you.

Let me ask you this. And then we can move off of this one but around like how we receive that feedback. So when we're working with a team on the op side, the survey that we put every team member through has a little bit more than half of the questions are quantitative. At 1 to 5, how much do you agree with these statements? You know, things like we set healthy expectations for our clients, we have documented process for delivering client work and we hold each other accountable to it. The tools we use, project management, internal comms, file storage, et cetera, are well organized and up to date. So people are going through and saying, hey, I think we're excellent. Like we're a five here. We set great expectations. Oh, we're a two in terms of our tool organization or things don't fall through the cracks. Here we're a one like stuff's constantly falling through the cracks or whatever. The second component of that survey then is a qualitative and a more open ended in this specific area around project management, what's working well, what's not working well around account management, what's working well? What's not working well for you because you've sat in the seat of giving those surveys, coordinating the conversations on the back end, following up where needed. Which of those is more helpful to gather feedback and then kind of how do those two play together?

Yeah, I think that they're both beneficial and they both play together in that the like when you're putting number scores on questions, that helps us like identify issues across the board. And then once we see a yellow card or a red card show up on a survey, we can then dive into that. And that's where the open ended comments are super helpful because that helps you flesh out the context. Some people may give a low score just because we could always do better and then other people may share more constructive feedback of here's some things that we could do to improve. I think if you only read, only read the comments like you kind of lose the forest for the trees, but if you only look at the numbers then you miss like the detailed steps that hey, we could fix that really quickly by just addressing this one thing that came up in five of these different open ended comments. So I would say they do play together pretty tightly. So having them both in place as you gather information is going to be helpful for you and that stuff. If you do it in a one on one, you've got, you got the conversation to extract that additional insight. But if you do it in a survey, just make sure you've got both the, you know, the, the number scoring and the open ended questions so that people can provide context to their, to their answers there.

Cool. All right, well, we could just talk about that piece for a long time, but let's take it to the next level. We got feedback. What, what comes next?

The next thing is to make a decision. And so this is, this falls in the leadership team's shoulders and that means you provide channels, you listen to feedback, you get clarity on that so that you know what people are trying to say. Then you bring that back to your leadership team and you make a call. And that is not a decision that should be made by committee. Bringing it forward to everybody to make their call is going to handicap you because as a leadership team you have the closest eye on where the business is trying to go. And the rest of the team may just want life to be easy. And your job is to find the balance in between where you can grow a healthy business with healthy margins, you can maintain healthy and happy clients and you can facilitate a healthy and happy team. So you need to balance all three of those things together. And so a big problem that we see when it comes to change management is when teams allow the entire team to have a direct say in what we're going to do in like a straight democracy vote, oftentimes they make votes that are just poorly informed because they don't understand all the impacts of what an initiative might have on the business. And so sometimes teams think that they can take on more than they actually can at the end of the day, different things like that. But I would just say when you, when it comes, when you've heard the feedback, make a decision as a, as a leadership team and don't open that up to everybody. Once you've made your decision, stand behind your decision, and then the other four points are going to be how do we effectively roll that out? Well, so the team's ready to receive that.

Yep. Makes sense. That happens all the time. I may even get to have those conversations more than you do, just in day to day conversations with folks who are considering working with Zen Pilot. Hey, I've seen ClickUp and I've seen the stuff that you've built and I've talked to other agency owners who've worked with zenpilot and I've seen the impact. But I've got this project manager who does not want to move off of basecamp and that's a conversation that winds up going to, okay, well, what, what do you really want for the business? Like, do you want the result and the outcome and if so, how. What's their plan for giving you that outcome that you're struggling with right now on Basecamp? I don't care what the platform is. You can use whatever platform you want. But what do you actually really want? And getting clear on that is the, the most powerful activator for folks. Okay, so once you're, you're clear on that, you've stepped up and you've done what you as an owner, that means you take ownership and you own things. And you as a leader means that you're leading and making decisions. Once you've made that decision, what's the third step in your framework?

Yeah, it is beginning the process of communicating out to the team what is the change that's going to be made and how is it going to roll out? So from a high level, we want to map out the journey of what does this path ahead look like? We want to start that journey mapping by saying, number one, what does the end state look like? What are we going toward here? And that's meant to be a rallying cry. So connect that vision to their day to day so that they can see why are we doing this? If you're doing something and your explanation for it is just so that leadership can have better reports, you're going to struggle to get buy in from the team at the End of the day, you want to paint a picture that everyone is excited to drive toward. So do the work, do the preparation to paint that picture well and lay out the step by step journey of where are we going first and then what are the milestones that we're going to walk through together as a team? Whether it's just a self implementation if you're working with a partner, or what are they going to lead us through if you're doing this with a consultant, you know, they're going to guide us through these different steps. How are you getting to where you're trying to go? Just give them a high level view so that they can understand what to expect. And then once you've got that high level view in place, that's step three. Step four is to drill into that high level view and begin to articulate what expectations you have from each member of your team when it comes to participating in this change. I think this is a step that a lot of people miss, especially owners who have a lot on their plate. Leadership teams that have a lot going on, they can set the high level vision. They can say, hey, here's what we're doing, here's why we're doing it, here's who we're working with to make this happen. Go get them, team. And then the rest of the team kind of gets off the call and they're like, cool, they got it. And maybe they'll tell me if they need me to do something. And then it's only at the 11th hour that they realize, oh, this is going to impact my world in XYZ ways. So you want to, right after you share that high level vision, go down to the details and articulate through your management structure what is expected of each person, what are the outcomes that they can expect and then what are the inputs that you're expecting of them? Is there learning that they need to do? Is there stuff that they need to build out? Are there habits that they need to change? What is the impact in their day to day? And with those two things in place, you're helping to set the vision and outline the expectations so that there's no surprises.

How do you do that when it's fuzzy? You don't. You haven't figured out either because you can't figure out or because this is your first time leading this initiative, which for almost all of us, other than what we do for clients, a lot of these initiatives are, hey, this is my first time building out whatever it is, changing up our finance system. I've Never moved from Advantage to QuickBooks before. That's a scary thing to do. If you've done it before, then you would have already done it. In this case, probably. What do you do when it's fuzzy?

Yeah, well, first you spend time doing your research and doing your due diligence and your homework. You want to be an educated consumer before you just jump off of a bridge there. So do your research and understand at least an idea of what the steps are going to be that you're going to take. You may not know what each step is going to look like, but you can know what stones you're going to try to step on. And that's another case for like finding a partner who's done it before you. There's always going to be an investment when it comes to making a change inside of your business. That investment usually boils down at the simplest level to I'm going to invest a lot of time and time researching and testing or I'm going to invest money in finding somebody that has done this before and has a proven process for this. Both of those paths can get you there and both of them have pros and cons. But just know that there's going to be a, there's going to be a price to be paid for this, either in research and in testing or in researching a partner and paying for their services to help them lead you through that process.

Is there anybody who comes to mind who like you talked about, understand that journey and communicate it really clearly to the team? Well, this is a traditional service provider or not. Is there anybody who stands out to you as like, wow, this is the best or one of the most memorable, like ways that someone's communicated to me what's coming next?

That has to be the Domino's Pizza Tracker Gray. If you've ever ordered a pizza from Domino's Pizza on their app or on their website, it shows you exactly what's coming, tells you that you're in line, tells you when your pizzas toppings have been put on. Like we hear that come up a lot in our process as well, that people want that same level of reporting to their clients so that a client can just look in a dashboard and see, okay, where's the website at right now? Or where's the app at in its development cycle? But that's like the quintessential example there. They've done a really, really good job of taking a simple process of waiting for your pizza and putting a little tool in place that lets the team log in and Check and see. Okay, where are we at in the process? It doesn't teach anybody how to make a pizza, but it lays out where they're at in the overall timeline.

I've not heard you bring up Domino's in a while. This is like an old example. How long. When did Domino's roll that out? Are we coming up on like 10 years of them having it?

I don't know if it's been that long. Time does fly when you're. When you're in the trenches eating pizza, but it's been out for a while. And my last Domino's pizza has been a couple years ago, and it was still.

That's great. I think that's a really good example that a lot of people can relate to. All right, so three, understanding the journey of change, communicating it out to the team, and then four, is setting clear expectations for each individual member and communicating that on a direct basis for what that means for them. What's the fifth step?

Fifth step is monitoring adoption. This is essentially the launch phase. Once you get the green light to go, whatever your change is that you're trying to manage, take an active. Take a period of time to actively monitor how the team's doing in adopting to those new processes. You laid out expectations individually to the team. How are they doing and living up to those expectations? There's likely going to be some questions and some friction and some pushback as the rubber meets the road in those different situations. Push into that, lean into that and have an intentional plan in place to engage in that. And if issues do pop up, whether they're individual or global, just triage those issues. Expect that to happen. You're not going to hit it out of the park the very first time. So that would be the fifth step. And that rolls right into the sixth step, which is before you optimize anything and you change any aspect of what you've just implemented, make sure that it's not a user adoption issue that you're facing. Spend time like sitting with issues before you fix issues. When you're rolling something out to see, is this the system failing or is this people that are just that are just learning to adopt to the new system. Sometimes we can see people make drastic changes in the midst of big change and that just breeds confusion. And it really under it like swipes at the confidence that the team has in your ability to make this launch successful of whatever the thing is that you're changing. So don't optimize too quickly. Doesn't mean you don't look, but just make sure that it's not a user adoption issue that you're optimizing for.

Yeah, both of those make sense. So I'll say these back one more time. First piece is gathering feedback, letting people express their pain. And also I think on the flip side, what's working well, but listening to the team and we talked about surveys and the way to do that. Secondly, making decisions as a leadership team based on that or the team who should be making that decision, whether that's explicitly company leadership or explicitly some other appointed team to go do that or even individual to go do that. But don't just run a pure democracy around decision making for everything in the agency. Third is understanding the journey of change at a high level and communicating that to the team. The Domino's Pizza Tracker. Fourth is setting clear expectations for each team member and communicating that individually what their role is going to look like in that. And then five and six that you just wrapped up. We're monitoring adoption and triaging issues as you're going through launch and then optimizing once you've made sure that the problems that you're facing and the friction that you're facing, anytime you try and make change, there will be substantial friction. That's why we're recording this podcast episode that that's not a user adoption issue causing the friction. Yeah, I think framework's really helpful for folks. What are the common. I mean we so like we've gone through re implementing eos with a professional implementer here this year. We're whatever, seven months into that process right now and we've had to go through the change management that comes along with hey, we're changing up what our scorecards look like and what our meeting structure looks like. And in some cases that's just minor tweaks because we were kind of running on a modified EOS framework before and in other cases that's a more major change. We'd see this for teams show up when they are trying new sales processes, certainly around project management, the way that they're delivering services to clients, adding new services on, changing old services on the operations front with new policies getting rolled out. Are there any favorite examples you have of like, hey, here's a team who's managed the change. They've done change management really, really elegantly and well, if so you're allowed to name those ones. The second example are the flip side of that, the folks who've really struggled with it and I would probably not name them, but hey, if you want to name and Shame. Go for it.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of teams that manage it really, really well. And what the common underpinning is, is clear ownership in that process, that there's a ringleader inside of any change initiative who's there to spearhead it. And that can be a member of your leadership team or it could be someone else, as long as there's leadership team backing to that person. That's just the common thread that we see is there's someone there who's managing the details, who's going back and forth and engaging with people to collect feedback and doing the homework. In our situation, we're the guides to other people. And so we've got. We're kind of prescribing each step of the way so there's not any testing involved for the agencies. We have the proven process, but there is a lot of context that needs to be gathered by the internal teams. And so there's always an internal champion who's driving things forward. And the teams that do really, really well in our change management cycle are those that engage and show up and do a really good job of going out to the team and coming back to us with questions and are kind of the runner there. Whereas the teams that struggle are the ones that really just let democracy rule and have everyone kind of do their own thing and then just hope that it all comes together at the end. Or they have a couple of people where it's kind of a committee of champion. So if I could say one common thread, it's who can be the person who can champion your change initiative? That could be a micro change or it could be a really big change. But make sure that there's someone there at the end of the day who has accountability, who can put the project plan together, who can help architect that high level view, help set up and facilitate those one on one conversations, can engage the team through the adoption and rollout phase and then who can know the process well enough to see the difference between a system failure and adoption failure in the ultimate rollout?

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, this has been really good. I want to talk more about champions and we'll dive into specifically, we get asked all the time about our work with ClickUp and this role that we call the click up champion. Like what makes a great ClickUp champion. But in any process, like you mentioned, there will be that champion. So I want to talk more about characteristics of that person in another episode. But this has been great. Thanks for coming on and being willing to share today and this has been the six keys to agency change management. Thanks, Andrew.

Thanks, guys. Good to be back in the studio.