The Art of Crafting Change Communication Products That Drive Successful Change Adoption with Sharon Connolly

In an industry like change management where large organisations require great support to successfully adopt change within their systems, effective communication is crucial. As change managers, we need to know what the important tools are that will enable us to guide our clients towards successful change adoption.

Today, I am joined by the incredible Sharon Connolly, change management expert and force behind Change Superhero. Sharing a huge range of practical templates and online programs, Change Superhero is aimed at supporting change managers looking for a helping hand.

Sharon shares how, in her previous role at CBA, she had to quickly transition a large team to adapt to the changes that came with COVID-19. The infographics she created for this role quickly became in demand, and Sharon talks us through how she turned these practical tools into a business that successfully meets the needs of many change managers and their clients.

Sharon explains the unexpected way she gained the skills she now uses every day to help her clients through deep, and sometimes painful, cultural change. We talk about the importance of written communication within organisations, and Sharon shares her tips on how it can be paired with visual tools to create effective materials to deliver information.

Different situations require different tools, and being aware of each client’s unique needs is vital in creating true engagement. With a deep understanding of her stakeholders, Sharon is able to recognise where to spend her time and which angle will successfully drive change adoption for a specific organisation.

I know that you will love the powerful lessons and insights that Sharon shares from her experiences, and I hope this episode gives you a new perspective on how to create powerful engagement whilst affecting change.

Kate: [00:01:00] Hello. Hello. Welcome to the New Way with Dr. Kate Burn. That's me. I'm so thrilled that you are here and joining me today. I have got a great episode that I'm bringing to you. I'm so excited to share this with you. Today I'm sharing my conversation with Sharon Connolly. Sharon is an Australian change manager and she's the force, the force behind Change Superhero, her business where she's created, and she shares a huge range of practical templates and programs for change managers looking for a helping hand. And let me tell you, Sharon is prolific. In this fun conversation, we cover a huge amount. We talk about how Sharon started Change Superhero, her tips for making sure your communication efforts are really impactful.

We talked about Sharon's workflow and where she gets her ideas [00:02:00] from, and we also talked about the most common mistakes that she sees change managers making, and this was great and I bet it's something that you have experienced. I sure have. So, I loved that part. Something else I loved. Towards the end of our chat, we really, uh, dove into Sharon's training ground for becoming a change manager.

It's not what you expect. Uh, and we talk about the transferrable skills that she learnt that she now uses every day as a change manager. You are never gonna guess what it is. I laughed out loud, so. Stay tuned to the end of the episode for that because you're gonna love the powerful lessons and the insights that Sharon shares from her experiences at that time. I'm not gonna keep it from you any longer. Let's dive into my conversation with Sharon Connolly.

Hello, Sharon. I'm so thrilled that we are talking. Finally. Finally.

First thing I have to dive in and ask you about is, have you really created [00:03:00] 12 courses and given away more than half a million templates since you've started Change Superhero? Amazing.

Sharon: The Templates has over 400 templates now, and the time that it would take to create 400 templates, it's just unfathomable. But Change Superhero's been going now for about three years. So that, you know, that's 1500 weeks, so I don't even do one per week.

Unbelievable that there's now 12. There's 12 and there's more, you know, there's more to come.

Kate: You are prolific. I'm amazed. The productivity is incredible because you are also working... This isn't your only gig.

Sharon: Yes. I don't have a full-time job at the moment. I'm doing a few contract consulting gigs, but for most of the stuff that I've done at Change Superhero, I have had a full-time job as well. Yeah, yeah.

Kate: I know you just said you know, three years in the number of weeks, so you're not creating one every week, but I mean, people should be taking holidays and rest days, and they're focusing on other things. [00:04:00] It's still incredibly, productive. You are prolific.

It's amazing.

Sharon: Kate, I take quite a lot of holidays. Yeah. Don't, don't be too worried about that. I take a lot of holidays. Yes.

Kate: This work must really be in your zone of genius. It must flow for you to be able to have created that many templates and the impact that you're having. I think it's so cool. It's so cool. So tell me a bit more about why you started Change Superhero.

Sharon: I didn't have an intention to start Change Superhero at all. And, it's so interesting because if you were talking, if you were coaching somebody, if either of us was coaching somebody, we would talk about having a goal, having a destination, something to really focus on. I didn't mean to start Change Superhero.

It mainly came about when I started to share some templates at the beginning of Covid. So I was working at CBA and like everybody else, in a changed position, I had to quickly transition a large team to working [00:05:00] online and at CBA we hadn't really started off as 365 and Teams, we dabbled in it, but it wasn't something that we were really doing and there was so many supporting skills that change managers could help with about how to manage online meetings, about how to deal with stress, how to deal with the isolation, about being empathetic to people who had kids at home, and I was creating these one pages for my team, and I just shared them with the change community online on LinkedIn because if I was having these challenges, other change and project professionals and administrators were having these challenges as well.

And I didn't really have that big a following on LinkedIn. I, I really didn't, but they sort of went viral and I just shared them. I said, here's a one pager, if anybody wants it, email me. I had no way of distributing them, no way of giving them to people. I didn't really have, well, actually I didn't have my own Office 365 and SharePoint and all of this stuff that you need. So I was emailing one by [00:06:00] one by one to all of these people, and it started to go crazy. And I was emailing them one by one because I was so mindful as well of not putting everybody's name on a mailing list and then spamming, cuz that happens on LinkedIn. You know, if you put 50 people on a mailing list and then one of them says, thank you, they all get all of these messages.

I'm like, oh no, I would hate that. So I was sending them out one by one and then people said, How do you do these? Where do you go to learn to do these? Well, my background ages ago was a Microsoft trainer, so I used to teach PowerPoint and Word and Excel and all sorts of things. But many years ago, and that's where my skill came from.

And I did not want to teach people how to use it. I didn't want to start this business, but I thought let's just do one course and to do one course, there's a big learning curve. There's a big setup curve because if you're going to do one course, what platform are you going to use to deliver it? How are people going to register for the course? How are they gonna pay for the course?

So I didn't spend a huge amount of [00:07:00] time, maybe two days. I created a website and I also wanted somewhere where I could, the, the bit for the website is I wanted to be able to upload the templates. At this stage there were probably 15 templates.

I wanted to be able to put them on there so people could go there and they could download them so that they didn't have to keep getting them from me. So I created a website and I thought, if five people book on this course that will be payment for the work that I have just put into this. Um, well, I think about 35 people booked on the first course and then another one and another one and another one. And I don't get that many people on the live courses now. I think we were all a bit more eager to learn and fill our time during the early days of Covid. And all of my courses are now online, so people will download them on demand and, and listen to them when they're ready to do so.

But that's how it started. Again, no plans to have more than one course. Every single Change Superhero course comes from a need, and I think that this is a lesson for anybody who's [00:08:00] trying to start a business, or even for us in our change plans. We have to be solving a problem.

Why are we doing this? Why did I want course two? And why did I want course three? I wanted course two because people would say, look, I, I'm loving creating these beautiful PowerPoints, but do you know what, I open an empty PowerPoint and I look at it and I just don't know where to start or I've got this 50-page business requirement.

How do I get that into a pack of 10 slides, and by sitting with the people and coaching them through how you put the content in and how you tailor the content for the audiences and how you deliver something that's not death by PowerPoint, I then thought, hang on a minute, I've just gone through the same thing with about five people.

A little light bulb comes up, I need a course. And then the next thing, Sharon, how do we turn that into ... can we turn that into a video course, you know, and people stuffing up surveys, big time, people taking up valuable time from their audience to [00:09:00] fill in a survey where they haven't asked the questions, which enable them to get the right results.

Oh, people are stuffing this up. Let's do a course. So this is how all of the courses happen, from a need, from people who have a problem and I'm fixing their problems and that's why they are successful. I don't just go, you know, let's just do a course on animation until somebody says, can you help me with animation? I'm struggling. Or until I see somebody making a complete dog's breakfast of it.

Kate: It makes a lot of sense to me and it really speaks to a need in this industry for that practical, very grounded, how can we use tools, important tools that are in these very large organizations that change managers are often supporting to support the change program, to kind of be communication tools, that kind of thing.

I can see your work really bridges those two fields and it's clearly... people are crying [00:10:00] out for information on it. I, I think it's wonderful. I'd love to ask you, obviously that communication part is really important for change managers. They're dealing with lots of different kinds of stakeholders, senior leaders, employees, uh, maybe even external, uh, stakeholders or partners or suppliers, through your work, what have you kind of come to learn as some of the key parts of making sure that communication is effective and really tailored for stakeholders?

Sharon: Probably going back to just reiterating what I just said, really thinking about what the problem is, fixing the problem and massively simplifying it.

I think it's so easy to take something that somebody else has already done. So if somebody, if one of my stakeholders, so an SME or a leader sends me some comms and they've written it in an email, it's really easy for me to improve on that email to see where they've said it in 25 words and they really only needed [00:11:00] 10. What's difficult is to be the person that starts that email to get their thoughts down on paper, and that's why I actually love ChatGPT, because when you are stuck, it gives you your start. Now I use that and I take what they have written as if a leader has given that to me. And I think thanks very much for the inspiration. Let me now tailor that to the audience. Let me now think about what's in it for the reader. What do they need to do now? What do they need to do next?

So it's really easy to simplify something that somebody else has started. I think the other thing as well is that in 2023 and probably for the last five years, is that we've moved to, in our communications, in our dress, in our attitudes, we've moved to the lack of formality and people really need to get rid of the, in order to, for your retention, you know, that, that very formal way of writing. And if we [00:12:00] just look at TV advertising, or print advertising, everything, you know, hey and hello, and just an informality and a very much targeting your audience, whoever they may, may be, talking to your audience on their level, then dropping that formality. Yet, as soon as people start to write, as soon as they get behind the keyboard, they, they decide that they have to put these extra words in and they decide this level of formality. And you see it everywhere. You know, I put things on LinkedIn sometimes, like sitting on the ferry where I take a picture of the sign and they say, you know, for your attention, please note....You've just taken up, just write, be careful, be careful. Don't fall over the side. It's this formality, um, that we can drop. And that's across change plans.

Just tell me what you're gonna do. Tell me what you're gonna do. Tell me why you're gonna do it, and tell me how we're gonna do it together.

And so much of the training that people have [00:13:00] around change, there's two things. Number one is theoretical. What we do is, we have to internalise that theory and we have to take it on board, but actually we do stuff that's just common sense. And the other thing which really gets me, most writing that we see most articles and most training is about cultural change, about organisational change.

Yet you open Seek. You know, you look at the jobs and you look at the jobs that most change managers do. We do contract change, we change a system, we change a location, we change a process. Very few of us actually do that deep organisational change that they teach us. So there's a massive disconnect and I think this is where I the gap in the market as well. I'm teaching you what I need to do as a contract change manager who comes in and I'm hired to be a gun and I'm hired to hit the ground running and get stuff done within a three-month or six-month contract. [00:14:00] Yet most of the learning we do is about that deep cultural painful change, and that's not what most of us do.

Kate: Mm. Yes. That's a really interesting point. For example, in a digital transformation or in a project based space, cuz I think a lot of contract change management work happens Inside of a project, or it's funded as a project, you know, like in that kind of thing. And a lot of it has to do with digital transformation or digital change.

And yeah, I completely agree that the work that you do and using digital tools, uh, in ways that support the change program, whatever that might be, yeah, I think it's really pragmatic, very grounded and very helpful for people. You've just talked a lot about written communication and I think that written communication is actually becoming more and more and more and more important in any organisation, but something that I noticed with Change Superhero is a big focus on the visual [00:15:00] communication on using these technical tools to create infographics or one pages and that kind of thing. Tell me a little bit about some of how, what people need to keep in mind when they're creating those kinds of materials.

Sharon: Well, there are a couple of things. First of all, don't just stare at a blank sheet of paper. Look at what somebody else has done. Look at what somebody else has done well, you know, if you're sitting in a doctor's waiting room and you open the magazine, look at it from a different lens.

Look at how, particularly advertisements, are grabbing your attention and think about what you're remembering from that ad. Get your phone out and take pictures of things in magazines, newspapers, any type of advertising that grabs your attention. They do it for a reason. You know, the way that they use pictures and special offers and things.

These are people who are qualified and study the way that people retain information for the most part. So just think that's a great way of showing 10 top tips [00:16:00] for getting fitter this winter. Take a picture of it and then when you need to do 10 top tips for your new system, recreate it. So number one, just stand on the, you know, stand on the shoulders of people who have done this before.

And I do this, uh, very rarely is anything that I do original. It might be a merge of a couple of things together. So that's one thing. Learn from experts. If you're going to create a little video, watch TV ads. They've got 15 seconds to make you want to buy something. How did they do that? Copy that and do that in PowerPoint or whatever other tool you've got.

The next thing is, is it pick where you spend your time. So I walk into a meeting room with five bullet points. I walk into a meeting room with nothing, just writing on a flip chart. Think about where you spend your time. Don't spend hours doing an infographic that one person is going to see. Make sure it's either going to be presented up so you're representing your personal brand and making yourself look really good.

Or is it going to many [00:17:00] people in the organisation? We have evidence. You can just Google it, that people retain things better, most people, not all, but most people retain things better. Uh, they remember it. They take more notice, um, if it is graphical, but the thing is these can take a long time. So spend your time wisely.

Think about where, where you're gonna get the most return for putting that effort in. And of course, why would you start from scratch when you can go to my website and you can just, yeah.

Kate: Of course. And we'll link to, um, your website and your LinkedIn and, and everything. So it's really easy for people to get to something.

Sharon: Lots of stuff out there that you can just take for free and you can, you can start with it.

Kate: Mm-hmm. And I agree that's something I do too. Marketing experts are paid very highly to create incredible campaigns on a whole range of fields that have got nothing to do with organisational change.

But there's so much to learn from there and so [00:18:00] much inspiration and blending those different ideas together. That's called innovation. That is a new, uh, way of thinking. Something I love that you've, that is underpinning every tip that you have shared is a deep understanding of your stakeholders. So you clearly have that as an absolute fundamental to begin with, because without that information, there's no way you'd be able to make the calls about how to spend your time wisely.

Sharon: There's two things that comes from. First of all, my early career was in training, and this was when we didn't have webinars. Actually, out of interest, I delivered my first webinar using WebEx for Hewlett-Packard in 1993. So this was brand new technology then 1993, so that's how long I've been delivering webinars. But the main stakeholder understanding comes from two places.

First of all, when you are standing and you are teaching eight people in a room as it was at this stage, [00:19:00] how to use Word or Excel or PowerPoint, and this is when they came along for a full day course and a full day learning, actually, they might come along for three days to do introduction to Word to be the trainer, walking around the room and assisting people to use the product, to deal with their hang ups, what they say that they couldn't do, why they can't come to the course, why it's not relevant to them to deal with as a trainer, to deal with a trainer and teaching individuals is where you actually understand, or where I learn the objections that they've got have got nothing to do with what I'm teaching them. It's loads of other stuff that's going on. And you also learn to, in a classroom walking around to listen to conversations that are going on all over the place and to try to translate those into what the real problem is. I I always used to say, as a trainer, you have massive ears cuz you are trying to, and, is stakeholder engagement.

So that's one thing and that's very relatable on a technical thing. But the [00:20:00] other thing is super interesting and most people wouldn't realize this. I left IT training and then I changed career and I was a personal stylist. I was an image consultant for about 12 years. And I would have to say, and I didn't even know what change management was, but I would have to say this is the biggest change management that I have ever done because you deal one to one. You think about it, you deal one to one with an individual who has come to you. Normally they've come to you in a desperation mode. They've seen a picture of themselves. They've turned 30, 40, 50, gotten divorced, their kids have left home or whatever.

They've looked at a picture of themselves and they've thought, oh my God. That's not me. That's not me. And then they come to me for help on their image. So this is so painful. So painful because you are actually changing people at their very core and their very heart, and you're also changing the way that people around them react to them.

And not all of them will positively react to their new hair or their [00:21:00] new makeup or their new dressing, and some of them will react very positively. You've also got in this, and I didn't know these words in terms at that time, you have to do bite size learning with them and you have to drive adoption.

So, because if you don't reinforce the behaviour for somebody who all they do is buy black T-shirts, then when you are gone, they're gonna buy black t-shirts. if you want to deal with resistance, try going into a woman's wardrobe and removing 17 pairs of jeans and 15 black cardigans, when she's told you that she's fed up her dressing boring, and then you are trying to... You know, try being one-on-one with somebody who's tears and tantrums and stuff, and you're trying to hold, hand hold them through this change and this transition. That is really change management.

And I didn't know words like driving adoption and, you know, resistance and I didn't know about change methodologies and ADKAR. I knew at the very [00:22:00] core about the journey, the step-by-step journey that you would take somebody on. And I knew that you'd have to keep checking in with them to make sure that they were okay.

And it wasn't until I came to Australia and started to work in the corporate world that I realised, okay, so what we are doing is we're doing a change impact analysis. We're doing stakeholder engagement, we are setting a bite-size learning plan. We are doing communications to drive adoption, and then we are doing a, you know, a post-implementation review. I was doing that at the very cliff face with individuals, seeing the raw emotion there. So it's interesting how your life skills come together.

Kate: That's a wonderful way to think about it. And so true because of course, changing your sense of identity is the most core personal people can make. Yeah. Amazing, amazing. Look, I just have one more question for you and it's about through all of your experience in the change management space, what are, you know, the two or [00:23:00] three mistakes that you see people change managers making most commonly?

Sharon: Number one is change managers have massive imposter syndrome. There are things that we do as change managers that come really naturally to us. Most of us, not all of us, but most of us are really good at sitting down and having a conversation and doing what I alluded to, understanding what's really going on, listening to people and understanding, what's really going on? Many of us can also take a huge amount of information and fairly easily condense that into a quick reference guide or a deck. There are skills that we just do that we underestimate. Just because something comes easily to you? Yeah, just because we can do it, it doesn't mean that it's not hugely valuable to somebody else.

And change managers sit there with imposter syndrome thinking, I'm not worthy of this role. I'm not worthy of that seat at the table. And a lot of the time I think that's because we [00:24:00] undervalue what we can do easily. And, and I think that that's the biggest learning for change managers is to, so many of them I do coaching for, they can't see the wood for the trees. They think that they haven't got it all under control. All they need is a little framework to sort of pin their skills too and to get rid of the imposter syndrome. And I mostly say to them, you got this, you got this. Let me just give you a little ladder and you're just gonna Climb up these rungs one at a time, but you are doing the climbing and you know how to get to the top of that ladder.

Kate: Amazing. So very insightful. It's absolutely true. I see people on our team, this is a conversation that we'd have, oh gosh, at least once a week, probably more often, most of the time where I think all humans, uh, we don't value the things that are easy for us to do. We more value the things that are personally challenging for us to do because it's not in our skillset. But actually, when you're doing things that are easy for you to do, that's a sign you're doing the right thing. You're in the [00:25:00] right place, you're in the right role.

Sharon: Well, this is a whole other podcast and you can get to somebody else. But the massive difference is that of what women have imposter syndrome about and what men generally don't. Men have an arrogance and a self-belief that if they can do something and it comes easily to them, then somebody should pay for that. Um, and they're very happy to put that out there and women do the opposite of that. But that's Hmm. podcast. That would be very exciting.

Kate: Ooh, I'm gonna chew on that. I'm gonna think about that with the people I work with. Thank you so much, Sharon. This has been a fascinating conversation. You have shared so many golden nuggets for people. We're definitely going to share how people can get in contact you on LinkedIn and your website. What's your preferred way for people to connect?

Sharon: Oh, either. The great thing about LinkedIn is that you'll see everything just connect to me. You'll see everything as it comes up. It'll come up in your feed. If you are a regular LinkedIn user, I have a [00:26:00] newsletter. Um, there are currently 100 uh, little tips and tricks that you can get via email, so you'll get a shortcut, uh, into your inbox. And then I let people know when I've put new free templates out there and when courses are, so there's the website, which I'm sure you'll share at changesuperhero.com.au. Sign up to the newsletter, or that's where you'll find free templates and you can also access all of the courses.

Kate: Amazing. Thank you. We'll direct everyone there. This has been such a great conversation and I , I feel like we could just talk all day. I wanna hear more about the stylist experience, but thank you very much, Sharon. Have a great rest of the day.

Sharon: Lovely to talk. Thanks Kate.

CONNECT WITH SHARON:

Website: https://www.changesuperhero.com.au/ 

LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/sharonconnolly

CONNECT WITH KATE:

Website: https://www.everchange.com.au/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ever-change-and-communication