In this conversational segment, Christopher Parsons and an unnamed speaker discuss what makes a strong change leader in the context of AEC intranet and knowledge‑management implementations. The speaker emphasizes empathy, active listening, and providing the right information to the right person at the right time. They advocate building project momentum "one person at a time," treating each onboarding moment with care. The discussion introduces an "Essential Content Checklist" used to audit existing firm content and guide migration to a new intranet, illustrating how a champion project manager (PM) should involve HR and IT stakeholders in the process, listen to their needs, and avoid overwhelming them with technical details. The overall message is that change leadership is a service‑oriented, people‑focused practice rather than a top‑down, bulldozing approach.
What does, what does being a strong change leader look like to you?
Hmm. It looks like being able to listen and hear where people really are and respond. So being very open to feedback, having a lot of empathy. It also looks like bringing people in, the right person in, the right time with the right level of information. And I guess the empathy part is like when I say the right person at the right time with the right level of information, the way you figure out there's the right person, right time, and right level of information is because you have a lot of empathy and you listen and you're, you're treating people as people. One of the things that I coach our PMs to do is to build the momentum for the project one person at a time. A time.
Mm-hmm.
So every time we onboard someone to start working on their content, we treat that moment with a lot of care, right? I, I recommend, I coach people to treat that moment with a lot of care because their experience coming in and starting to build out the HR content or starting to build out their Revit content, that is change management, right? You're expanding this project out kind of one ripple at a time. And you can't just, you know, zoom out and come up at the last ripple, which is all employees, and be like, okay, now I'm gonna start caring about your experience as you're entering the platform, right? You do it one person at a time. I don't know. I, I think change management is a whole field. Change your leadership is a whole field. I, I don't expect anyone to be like a change leadership expert. We've learned enough from our, you know, work doing this and like codified enough best practices that are specific to this. Do an intranet implementation that we can coach people through, you know, a lot of the ins and outs. What the champion PM needs to bring to the table is that, like, empathetic perspective and willingness to, like, listen and to, like, actually really care about these interactions and not, like, kind of bulldoze past anyone.
What does it mean, like, in the example you gave? So you're encouraging a new implementation PM to— if they're onboarding HR, into synthesis, to treat them with care. What does it mean to treat an HR person with care when you're talking about bringing them in to putting their content on the intranet?
Yeah, it starts at the very beginning of the project. So one of the first things that we do with a team is we help them audit the content that they have across the firm. You know, maybe they have an old intranet and like, yes, that's going to come over, but chances are that someone has, you know, a calc sheet on their desktop that they send every new employee who gets onboarded into their department, right? We want to get that stuff on the intranet too. So the way that we help them get that stuff on the intranet is we have the Essential Content Checklist. You can find it on our website, and it's just a long list of like things you might want to put on an intranet. There's a lot of history to that. We can come back to it if you want to. One way to approach that would be that the intranet champion sits down, closes their door, and just starts going through and saying like, we have this, we have this, we don't have this, we don't have this. Not a good way to do it, right? I think the right way to do that, the way to care for HR in this process, the way to care for IT in this process, is to sit down with your HR person and look through the HR section of that checklist and say, this is what's happening with this project. Here's some things that our partner has said we might want to have on the intranet. Do we have an onboarding checklist that you'd want to put on the intranet? No. Okay. No worries, we'll take that off. Oh, but you want to build one? Okay, let me just make a note of that. All right. Do we have— do we have ESOP guidance that we have? Do we have that? Yes, we do. Oh, you've always wanted to put that somewhere. Great. Okay, let me make a note of that. So it's like doing just even from the get-go, like involving them in that process and like listening to them, right? We're not forcing the fact that they're going to move their content onto— over them, right? We're in service to them. We're going to help them. Replatform content and bring content together so that their job can be better. So like it starts there. And then when it comes to us having things scaffolded out and ready to onboard them, it's realizing that like they probably don't care a whole lot about how the internet works. So don't teach them all of that, right? What they care about is just moving their content from one place to another and getting it set up in a way that's going to be really effective for them to maintain and effective for people to find. So narrow our coaching to the things that they actually care about.
So on one hand, don't like isolate them and just go do all the work without consulting them. On the other hand, don't go too far about trying to bring them, you know, just like finding the right medium of how much they need to know about what we're doing.
Yeah. And then also treating them like as people. The HR people aren't a monolith. IT people aren't a monolith. All your content editors aren't a monolith. We're We tend to work with firms that are small enough where we don't need to create kind of a one-size-fits-all onboarding for those really key roles, right? It can be person to person.
