Mastering Change Management in 2025 | Strategies for Success

So this is going to include retreats, training, communications and more. And then LeAnne is a senior manager on our change management team and really specializes in developing policy and procedure environments as well as governance to increase consistency and accuracy across organizations and teams. So let's hop over to our agenda and see what we're going to talk about today. So first we're going to go over an overview of change management. So that's going to include some of the topics I just mentioned. So employee engagement training, strategic communications, and overall change management for nonprofits. And then we're going to move into a communication training. So you're going to get to learn more about your communication style and really get to see an example of our training in practice that we would normally deliver for our clients. And then at the end, we're going to save time for questions. So as we go through these topics, think about how can change management, how your organization be successful in 2025, and then think about any questions that you have related to the content we provide or anything else related to your organization that you may want to ask. And we'll make sure to get to those at the end. If we don't get to your question, we'll reach back out after the webinar and make sure that we answer it. Alright, I'm going to pass it over to Katherine Nesser to get us started.

Katherine Nesser:Hi everyone. We're so excited to be here today. Thank you Bella and Ann and Candice for that introduction. Alright, we're going to kick off with a question. So we would love for you to use your emojis to respond to this. Let us know what feelings come up when you hear the words change management. And with that it might be things like these are big things that are coming or it's scary, or oh my goodness, this is too much to think about. Why do we even need to go through this change? So give us your emojis and let us know. I love seeing those come in. What do you hear when you think about change management? All right, and a couple of things that we want to let you know. So there are lots of ways that change management can be implemented into your organization. It could be through employee or board of director retreats.

It can be through implementing a new technology or software. Maybe you're going through an organizational restructure, you're having a change in leadership or a department head. It could be that you just need to document some processes. Maybe you don't have your procedures written down and you want to document those. It could be that you're going through an internal or a governmental required policy change or it could be that you're going through a merger and acquisition. So maybe you're combining with another organization. So love seeing these emojis come in. We've got some scary emojis, some heart emojis, some thumbs up, and all of those are great feelings. They're all things that come up when we think about change management. So with that, we are going to launch our next poll question. So this is poll question number two. Do you currently focus on change management in your day-to-day operations? And the answer is responses are yes, no sometimes, or I have no idea. And while we do that, I'm going to switch to LeAnne to talk to you a little bit about businesses and the status of businesses in change management and then we'll come back to the poll question responses.

LeAnn Ragusa:Perfect. Thank you Catherine. So change can be scary, but we know that all businesses must change in order to grow, but that can be really tough. We are actually biologically programmed as people to resist change because we tend to favor what we know. We tend to favor what is familiar to us. And as we saw through some of those emoji reactions, there was some fear there. There's a little bit of apprehension there. We don't like to go into that change because there's a fear of the unknown. But the truth is that all businesses have to change in order to grow. And now more than ever, there is competitive pressure in the market that may demand you to change and adapt to conditions at a much faster rate than what you maybe have historically had to do. And not-for-profits are not immune to this competition or competitive pressure.

And in fact, sometimes maybe in a position where change is even more critical than in a for-profit organization due to reliance on things like fluctuating donations, unlike a for-profit organization, the primary focus might be more on social impact rather than profit maximization. So there's kind of a few things there that makes nonprofits a little bit unique in terms of how they need to respond to change. So getting ahead of those pressures is going to allow us to manage that change effectively and it's going to allow for reflection of the past. It's going to allow us to plan for the future and ultimately drive for that organizational transparency that leads to business growth. Through clear communication, businesses can plan and transform for the future, and nonprofits can develop a stronger donor base. They can deliver stronger messaging to stakeholders and ultimately experience rewards across the entire business. So before we go any further, I want to pass it back to Catherine so she can kind of go through these poll results. Catherine, what are your thoughts here?

Katherine Nesser:I love seeing this. Sometimes that makes sense. Sometimes we use change management, sometimes we don't. We also see about half and half of our yes’s and no’s and we've got a few who have no idea. And that's okay. We hope that you walk away from this with some better understanding about change management and ways that you can really incorporate it into your day-to-day operations. So love your responses. Thank you so much for responding. And LeAnne's going to talk a little bit more about change management and our

LeAnn Ragusa:Services. Perfect, thank you Catherine. So we just talked a second ago about why we need to change. We know that we need to change in order to grow as a business. But before we go any further, I think we need to take a step back and actually define what change management is at its most basic definition. And this is a definition that is widely accepted amongst change management organizations such as Prosci, such as a CMP and others out there as well. Change management is the application of a structured process and set of tools for leading the people side of change. And you'll notice that people side of change is bolded there because that's really the emphasis to achieve a desired outcome. And so this differs slightly from project management. Project management is historically more focused on operations and change management's also concerned about operations, but we are particularly interested in the impacts to the people as a change occurs. And that change could be anything from a system implementation, it could be that new policy guidance that just came out and it's going to impact your processes, whatever it is, we know that we need to focus on the people side of that change so that we can really manage that change effectively.

So now that we know about the basic definition of change management, let's go ahead and talk about what this means for our team's approach. So at EisnerAmper, our approach goes beyond what some may call the traditional approach or what that's commonly being seen in change management teams. Because a lot of times when people think of change management, they may be thinking of a change event as kind of an isolated moment in time where you've got a change event that occurs. The change management team comes in, they respond by creating tools, training different resources to support change, and then ultimately that change management team steps away once the change is implement. Rather than viewing change as an isolated moment in time, we like to view change as an ongoing process that really requires strategy, requires assessment, requires careful planning, and all of that's taking place at the beginning of a project rather than just when the change is being rolled out. So each project decision early on in the project design phase should be made with change management consideration and with thought about the big picture impacts that are coming down the road and how that's going to impact your people. So with the strategic and structured approach, we can ultimately help individuals, teams and organizations transition from a current state to a future desired state and we can assess and overcome barriers to change early and develop tools and resources to manage that people side of change to ensure that we have successful adoption and ultimately minimal resistance.

All right, so let's take a moment to talk about some trends that are happening for nonprofits. And I'm curious if some of these are going to resonate with you guys. Let's go into some stats. So 65% of nonprofits are hampered by staffing shortages and one of the causes of staffing shortages in the nonprofit space is stress and burnout. Keep that information in your back pocket because we're going to circle back to that a little bit later in this presentation. We'll revisit that topic of employee morale and how that can be improved. Moving on, 77% of nonprofits have an increase in demand for current programs with economic downturns and regulatory changes and all the other factors that are happening today that have to be taken into consideration. There is a growing need for access to services that nonprofits offer to their communities. And this increased demand can lead to things like wait lists and delays. And this can really be really challenging to address when you're already experiencing staffing.

Also, three out of four nonprofits have eliminated staff and reduced services and some nonprofits are in a really tough spot where they're actually having to reduce or altogether eliminate services because of those stabbing shortages. And that's really tough whenever we're already seeing from the previous stat that there's an increased demand in programs. And finally, more than 66% of nonprofits do not have a leadership mentoring program. And nonprofits, just like any business, depend on their leaders to drive the mission, the vision, and the values of the organization. So this is not only important for your operations, but it's really important for your culture as well.

So now that we kind of have an idea and an understanding of some of the pain points that nonprofits are facing, let's talk about four areas of focus that you're probably already working to grow this year. And let's dive a little bit further into these and starting with social cohesion. And when I say social cohesion, I'm talking about your community centered strategies for growth. Your emphasis should be placed on fostering meaningful interactions with the community. We want to avoid those kind of transactional interactions with the community because we really want to establish genuine relationships with our supporters, with our volunteers, and anybody that is receiving benefits from the organization. Increasing donor support, and this is always such a hot topic for a nonprofit because funding for a nonprofit is critical. And typically you're looking at grants and you're looking at donor support. And donor support can be particularly challenging because you've got fluctuating needs for donor support.

You may have inconsistent donor support. And so driving and increasing that donor support is really important. And in order to do that, you have to understand who your target audience is and provide the right data and communications to your potential donor base as to why contributing to your nonprofit is the right choice. New fundraising techniques. So think about how you're going to be engaging the community this year and how to generate interest in the fundraisers that you have planned for 2025. So what is your communication strategy? How are you going to be generating interest for the event? And then finally, having a board that serves as community advisors and your board is a representation of your organization and it should be comprised of effective storytellers. So the board is going to be in the strongest position out of anybody to strengthen the community's relationship with your nonprofit's mission. I. All right, so we have moved on to our third poll questions. Which one of the following does your not-for-profit need to focus on in 2025? Is it social cohesion? Is it new fundraising techniques? Is it increased donor support? Is it a board as community advisors or is it something else? And you're going to have 60 seconds to complete that poll. While you're doing that, I'm going to go ahead and toss it over to Catherine so she can go into a little bit more detail about why change management is important for nonprofits.

Katherine Nesser:Thanks LeAnne. Alright, so we kind of gave you some background on change management and what that is. We've also dabbled into what's happening right now in the world of nonprofits. Change management is incredibly important for nonprofits and we're going to look at each of these areas. Research actually shows that 70% of change initiatives will fail if there is not a stable and efficient and executable change management plan put into place. So for nonprofits, the four areas that are really important for change management initiatives are going to be optimizing operations, building staff buy-in, mitigating disruption, and responding to external factors. So let's talk about each one of these optimizing operations. If you're managing change effectively, nonprofits can really streamline their processes, which is going to lead to improved efficiency and a real maximize of the use of resources, which we understand can be really limited or overstretched based on the size of the operation and organization that you have and how much that you have to get done.

The next one is building staff buy-in. So if you have a structured change management plan, the process is really helpful in getting your staff to understand why this change needs to happen. They can feel engaged in the change and that can lead to greater acceptance and commitment to the change and to a longstanding change. So change that's going to have a long lasting impact on your organization. The next one is mitigating disruption. A well-planned change program is really going to minimize your disruption to your ongoing operations. We understand how important it is that there's so much to do in a day and so much that are falling on the team members within a nonprofit. So you really want to make sure that if you're going through a change, you're minimizing your negative impact to your stakeholders, whether that's your functional or your department leads, your staff members, your leadership or your board of directors, and you want to make sure that you're mitigating that disruption during these times of transition of change or of a new initiative that's coming into play. And then lastly, change management can really help with responding to external factors. So we know there can be changes in governmental policies, in grants, in new technology, maybe even economic conditions or changes in leadership. Those all require nonprofits to be agile and responsive. And if you have a successful and efficient change management plan, you can really help to navigate these items as you're going through these transition periods. So with that, we will look at the poll responses to LeAnne's question.

LeAnn Ragusa:Perfect. Let's take a look here. Which one of the following does your not-for-profit need to focus on in 2025? It looks like there is kind of a three-way tie between new fundraising techniques, donor support and other items altogether not quite as much of a focus on board as community advisors or social cohesion, although that need does seem to be there. So very interesting, love to see this. And now that we've reviewed our poll questions, we will go ahead and continue. So Catherine, would you like to continue and tell us about how changes are disruptive and how we fix this?

Katherine Nesser:Yes. So we want to talk to you all about minimizing that disruption, which we've really hammered in on this presentation and how we can help with that. So our change management team at EisnerAmper provides support in three different ways, training and team development, strategic communications and employee engagement initiatives. So we're going to talk through each one of those so you get a little bit of understanding of what it is that we do and what you can expect from these services. So LeAnne's going to take it and talk about those first two items.

LeAnn Ragusa:Perfect, thank you Catherine. So as Catherine stated, we have three areas of focus that we want to discuss today. We've got training and team development, we've got strategic communications and we also have employee engagement. All of these are going to be critical for the success really of any business, but they are particularly important for nonprofit organizations as they're navigating those challenges and areas of growth that we discussed a little earlier. So here we have captured a list of tools and resources that are commonly created by our team to support these focus areas. And I won't read each one, but I do want to call attention to a few while we're on this slide. So starting with training and looking at Train the Trainer program plans. So the goal with Train the Trainer is to create a pool of competent trainers within your organization who can deliver training sessions to their peers.

And ultimately this allows for effective training to be conducted by your own staff. And we find that this is often a rewarding experience both for those receiving the training and the Train the trainer program, as well as those receiving the training from their newly skilled up trainer. So the trainer is empowered to take ownership of teaching processes to their team and those that are receiving the training feel assured that their are able to teach them the skills and the knowledge that they need in order to perform their job well. Next we have standard operating procedures. And this is something that is so important, but it is often so neglected because there just doesn't feel like there's enough time in the day to get this done. But this is something we strongly recommend prioritizing, and this is not just for the consistency in your operations, which is very important, but also in the event of an audit, you are going to need to be able to speak to your processes and that can be really difficult to do if they're not documented.

So I highly recommend that you get those processes documented. Next, let's move on to strategic communications. So under strategic communications we have internal and external communication language, strong talking points and messaging expectations are so important for building that donor base, for building that social cohesion and for your community ambassadors to tell the right story to your audience, lessons learned sessions. So you should be frequently assessing the responses to your communication plan and to your messaging to gauge its effectiveness. Lessons learned sessions are an established communication channel that allows you to reflect on those responses and talk about how you can tailor your message to maximize the impact of its delivery. Under employee engagement, we have board of director retreat programs and one of the pain points we discussed earlier is that 66% of nonprofits do not have a leadership mentoring program. A board of directors retreat is a fantastic way to deliver those leadership trainings while also making sure that your board is engaged with the organization.

And finally, we have mission, vision, and values exercises. It's so important to reinforce that mission, the vision and the values of the organization, and this helps you to make sure that your company culture is aligned and that you're operating according to the guiding principles of your nonprofit. Those exercises can be anything from an informal team workshop where you kind of just discuss the organization's purpose to something a little bit more sophisticated and detailed, like a SWOT analysis where you are analyzing the organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. I Alright, so let's dive a little bit further into these areas of service. We just talked about some important deliverables that may be part of your training plan, but how do we develop an effective training plan? So this slide here shows our five-step checklist for creating comprehensive training that fits the needs of your team. So first you have to start with a needs assessment, and this is where you're going to be identifying specifically what needs to be incorporated in your training.

And you're also defining the training objectives in this step of the process. This is also where you're gauging the current skill level of your team and you're also identifying any knowledge gaps that may exist and getting a feel for your team's change readiness. Next we move on to program design. And this is where you're designing a flexible plan that can be scalable and it can accommodate diverse learning needs. So you're going to want to think about incorporating those different learning styles, and it could be e-learning, that can be workshops, hands-on activities, peer learning, whatever it takes to make sure that you're accommodating all those different learning styles. And this is also where you're really starting to tailor your content to your audience and create relevant materials for your change. Moving on to implementation, this is where you're actually delivering your content and your learning objectives.

And in some cases it may make sense to pilot your training program. You can do that with a smaller group, maybe to some change champions that you've identified that are going to advocate for the change and can reinforce the learning outcomes with their colleagues and engagement and motivation. And you want to make sure that you are fostering a supportive environment where your employees feel supported and they feel encouraged to ask questions and do so in a safe space. We strongly recommend creating incentives such as employee recognition or rewards for participating and engaging in the materials in this step of the process. And finally, we have monitoring and evaluation, and this is where you're identifying what post-training support might be needed based on feedback from your training participants. So you're also assessing here what the knowledge retention looks like and you can do that through quizzes, you can do that through knowledge assessments, anything to help you understand where there may be learning gaps. And we find that this training program checklist is a comprehensive approach to creating a robust learning experience for your team. So if you have any questions about this approach, we'd love to see your questions in the chat, feel free to drop those in as we continue through the presentation.

All right, so now that we've talked about training, let's take a moment to talk a little bit more about employee engagement. And there are so many ways that you can engage your employees. We've already kind of talked about the importance of recognition in the previous slide and how incentives and reward should be considered as a way to inspire your team. But another approach to employee engagement that we have found to be incredibly impactful and rewarding are retreats. And you may already be thinking about an employee retreat or a board of directors retreat for 2025, but if you haven't, I do strongly recommend that you consider it, especially if you find that your morale is low or that your team doesn't seem aligned with that organization's mission, vision, and values. And so earlier in the presentation I had noted that 65% of nonprofits are hampered by staffing shortages and one of the reasons for those shortages is employee burnout.

So we're kind of revisiting that topic now. Our team finds that a well-planned retreat is an incredibly effective method for invigorating the team and can lead to outcomes that are kind of described on this slide. Things such as clear communication, skill development, being creative and innovative, building trust, that's an important one. It's a great way to focus on those mission vision values exercises that we talked about before. You can incorporate leadership training, you can incorporate team building creative workshops. It's also a great opportunity to develop a safe space for the team to share their feedback about the organization, about its operations and any opportunities that there may be for improvement.

So at this point I've talked to you about the importance of training. I've talked to you about the importance of employee engagement and what needs to be considered when you're developing those training programs and your employee engagement activities. So our final service area to review is strategic communications. And rather than tell you about this, Catherine is going to show you the importance of strong communication through a fun training where you get to learn a little bit about your communication style and maybe how to communicate with others as well that have a different communication style than you do. Catherine, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to you so you can deliver us some training on communications.

Katherine Nesser:Thanks LeAnne. Alright, we would be remiss as change management professionals if we let you walk out of this webinar without getting a training. We love doing a training, so we're excited to be able to talk to you about this today. So we are going to talk a little bit more about understanding your communication styles. I want to point this out. All communication styles are important and are needed. If you only had one kind of communication style in a team, you wouldn't get anything done because you wouldn't have this diversity of thoughts and you wouldn't have people thinking about different areas and different ways to approach a problem or a challenge. You have to have diversity in your communication styles to have a successful project or a successful organizational operations. All styles have their pros and we don't like to say cons. We like to say that maybe you have some things that you might want to think about when you know how you prefer to communicate.

We're going to talk into detail about each one of these. But one thing I also want to say is one is not better than the other. You don't have to be a certain kind of communication style to do a certain kind of job or join a certain organization or commit to a certain kind of volunteer opportunity. And your style may change depending on your audience. You really might have to be flexible. So if you stop and think about that, maybe the way that you communicate to your team or to your supervisor at work, that might be a different communication style than you take when you're talking to your children or you're talking to your spouse or your partner or you're talking to your family or your friends. It can really be based on the situation that you're in. So you may need to adjust your communication style for that specific situation.

So as you see on the screen, we have four different communication styles. We're going to talk about the innovator, the energizer, the systemize, and the associator. We're going to go into each one of these, but I want to point out one major difference in all of these at this point. So if you are someone who really focuses maybe on emotions and feelings, you may be two of these versus if you're someone who's really focusing on the data, you're going to be the other two. And we're going to talk a little bit exactly what that means. But I want to give you an example. So if you're looking at the upcoming quarter and you're going to say, Hey, I feel like we're really off to a great start, you are someone who's probably focused more on the emotions in your communication style at work versus if you're someone who says, Hey, I noticed that our sales are up by 7.2% this quarter, you're going to be someone who's really more focused on the data-driven aspect of communications.

And again, you might have to sort of edit or make changes in your communication styles based on the situation that you're in. So we're going to go into detail about each one of these. And one thing that I love to do is give an analogy when we're doing this kind of training so it really makes sense. So we are going with the race car analogy here. So let's talk about style number one. This is the energizer. If you are thinking about an energizer in the analogy of a racetrack, you are thinking about the driver of the race car. This is someone who's direct, they're fast paced and they're results oriented. They are worried about the now, what is happening right now in this moment. Characteristics of an energizer. They're direct and they're decisive, they're very energetic, but they may come across as impatient because they're so excited and they want to make a quick decision.

They have some great skills. So they're highly productive, they're an enthusiastic team member. They're really good at making decisions. They like to be decisive. Their priorities are action and accomplishment. What can we get done? If you're an energizer, there's a couple of things you may want to pay attention to. You can come off as a little maybe insensitive or impatient because of your decisiveness and your ability to make a quick decision. You also don't like the details. The details are too much for you. You want to make a quick decision. You want to know what's going to happen. You're focusing right on the now. So if you are someone outside of an energizer and you're communicating with an energizer, there are some tips to help you have better productive communications with an energizer. Brevity is really key when you're talking to an energizer, you want to talk in bullet points, focus on the results first and focus on the practicality of an idea.

This is someone that you're going to make direct eye contact with. You want to be really confident when you're talking to an energizer, you as visual aids, they're normally someone who wants to see what's happening. And this is also someone that you might want to do a walk and talk with, which what I mean by that is that someone who you might want to say, Hey, let's walk down to the kitchen together and grab a cup of coffee and talk about this problem. Alright, if you can think of an energizer in your life, give me a thumbs up.

I all right, we are going to talk about our next communication style, which is the systemize. Okay? If you are thinking in the race car analogy, your systemize is your coach. They are your person keeping track of everything. Oh, love seeing the thumbs up, come in. Thank you, I appreciate it. Alright, so your systemize, they're indirect and they're a little bit more slow pace because they're very results oriented. They are focusing on the past, the present and the future. So some characteristics of a system, they're analytical, they're very organized, systematic and factual. They have a lot of different skills. They like to focus on the organization of information. This is someone who's really less prone to make mistakes because of that factual and cautious way of thinking that they have. They prioritize facts order. And this is your person who likes the details. If you are a systemize, pay attention to a couple of things.

You may come off as picky or aloof because you're so focused on that factual and system aspect of decisions. Watch how you provide feedback. You may come across as a little bit critical due to your analytical nature. And if you are from the outside perspective and you're communicating with the system advisor, this is someone you want to focus on the facts and the data, you keep your discussion short and in logical order. They like written. This is going to be the person who says, what can I look at? I need to see what's written out here for me to make this decision. I got to look at the facts of this. And also don't rush them. Your systemizers, someone who might say, Hey, let me go back to my desk and think about that and I'm going to follow up with you tomorrow in my response to your question. And again, this is the coach. So keeping track of the past, present and the future. Alright, if you can think of a systemize in your life, give us a thumbs up.

Okay, the next one is the associator. When you are thinking about the race car analogy here, your associator is your pit crew. They are indirect, but they're really fast paced and they're relationship oriented. They're worrying about the past. These are your people. People, alright, they like being around people, they are friendly, they're warm, they're empathetic, they maybe can come across as emotional though or a little bit spontaneous or sensitive. They have some great skills though they're incredibly friendly and they are team players. They prioritize people and relationships. Pay attention to though, if you are an associate, you may come off as slow to make decisions or you may come off as a little bit unassertive or emotional because you want to make sure that everyone is feeling like they're part of the group, that they understand what's happening, that they are emotionally connected to a change or a challenge or a problem.

If you are communicating with an associator, a couple of things to think about. This is someone who really likes that personal talk. You want to build a rapport with them. They like to connect to relationships and people and tie that to the results. They like to discuss past results and successes. This is going to be somebody that when you talk to them, you may want to say things like, oh hey, I know you went on that family trip to Disney World. Tell me about that. Or Hey, y'all had a soccer game last night, or how is back to school going for your kids or your family members? That's one who's really going to focus on the people side of things. And once you develop that rapport with them, then they're going to be able to have more in-depth conversations with you and help to sort of resolve problems. Alright, give me a thumbs up if you can think of an associate in your life.

Alright, all right. And last but certainly not least is the innovator. So when we're thinking of this in the race car analogy, we are of the car designer. Alright? So they're direct, they are slow paced and they're relationship oriented, but they're focusing on the future. This is what I like to say is my person who thinks about somewhere over the rainbow look at all of these possibilities and all these amazing ideas and all these things that we can do. They're very charismatic and creative because they're so full of ideas though they can come across as a little bit difficult to understand skills that they have. They're creative, they're a visionary, they love seeing that big picture. They can think of all the different things that you can do to be successful in your organization. They're great at generating new ideas and thinking outside of the box.

If you're an innovator though, a couple of things to pay attention to, you may come off as unrealistic or unproductive because you can think of so many different ideas and so many things that you want to do. It might not seem relatable to somebody else into ways that you could actually put those ideas into play. If you're communicating with an innovator, allow them time to brainstorm. They want to come to a meeting with all the different ideas that they've had. Talk about the big picture and what a new idea can really mean. Stress, the uniqueness of an idea or topic. And this was someone who's really going to benefit if you follow up with them from a meeting with a brief to-do list. So a lot of times they're so focused on the future, they might need some help kind of focusing on what's happening now. What do we need to get done today or what do we need to get done within the next week? Alright, give us a thumbs up if you can think of an innovator in your life.

All right, and with that, we are going to move to our next poll question. So think about you in the majority of your work styles and your work environment. What communication style do you most identify with while you're at work? Are you the energizer, you're the driver, let's focus on the now. You're the systemize, you're the coach. You want to focus on the past, the present, and the future. You're the associate, you're on that pit crew, you're focused on the past and you're really caring about those relationships at work or you're the innovator, you're the car designer, you're always focused on the future and all of these big possibilities and ideas that you can have. And we will give you a minute for those responses to come in.

And I do see we have a question in the chat. I can go ahead and talk about that. So can you give an example of direct versus indirect communication? Yes. So someone who wants to communicate directly, this is going to be someone who's really comfortable telling you exactly what it is and that they feel about a certain situation. Okay? So they're probably going to be more of a verbal communicator in the way that they may say, Hey, I think we should do this, or I think this is the next step, or I think that this is the plan that we may we need to take. They may be someone who takes a little bit more initiative in meetings. They may be someone who wants to take notes or wants to do follow up, create meeting agendas versus someone who is an indirect communicator. An indirect communicator is going to be someone where you really want to focus on their body language.

They maybe might want to do one of these where they start to say something and then they stop or they potentially will maybe cross their arms in a meeting or they'll hold their head or something like that. An indirect communicator is going to communicate the way that they're feeling or way that they're expressing a certain situation a little bit differently than a direct communicator. Both are great, both are areas that you need in order to be successful. You have to have someone who's going to be forthcoming with their ideas versus someone who maybe is as well in the indirect sense that they may need some more time to think about an idea or they may communicate with you in other ways than just verbally telling you what it is that they're thinking.

Alright, so let's look at our poll responses. What communication style do you most identify with at work? Looks like we got a lot of coaches would make sense. If you are a leader in your organization, you probably do have to focus on that coach idea, the past, the present, and the future. Next we have our energizers and our drivers. So those are the people focused on the now. Again, that's a great quality. You are making quick, fast decisions for your organization and then a little bit less in our pit crew and car designers. But again, areas where you need all of these team members to come to the table and bring their skills and their communication styles that you can have a well-rounded and successful project or internal operations. So with that, I'm going to pass it back to LeAnne and she's going to talk about how to be successful in 2025 with change management.

LeAnn Ragusa:Thank you Catherine. And thank you so much for the training. I learned a lot about myself. I am part of that small group of the pit crew folks. I like to identify as the associator. I think that's my preferred communication style and I've learned a little bit about how to communicate with others. So thank you so much for that really informative training. So now that you have an understanding of how change management can be incorporated into your nonprofits operations, we want to make sure that you're prepared to take action on your change management strategy. So before we do that, we do need to address the common sources of change resistance. And there are many reasons why your team may resist change. So let's go ahead and dive into some of the common reasons so that we can be prepared to combat that. First is poor communication.

Your team needs to understand the why behind a change and needs to understand why it's important to them. Why is this new software important to me? Why are we changing systems? Why is this new policy recommendation going to impact my processes? What does that mean for me? Making sure that you get that strong message out there about the change before it's implemented can help you get that buy-in early. Inadequate training. We covered the approach to developing a comprehensive training plan, and by following those steps, you can ensure that you have a training program that is customized to meet your team's needs and that accommodates a variety of learning styles, misalignment with culture, and we've said it several times, but you really do need to think back to your mission, your vision, and your values, and take a moment to think about whether the changes that you're implementing align with the principles of the organization.

Fear of the unknown. As we discussed earlier, we are naturally wired to resist change. We want to stick with what we know because we tend to favor what is familiar to us. Strong communications and training will help us to combat that kind of fear of the unknown past change, fatigue. And this is something that's common in organizations that are really in a stage of growth or that are trying to modernize and too many change initiatives at once can be really overwhelming. So when possible, we do recommend maybe a phased approach to change so that it's a little bit more manageable, little bit more digestible and peer influence and dynamics. Social support from your peers can have really strong impacts. If you don't get your messaging right about the change, you may find that the peer-to-peer influence may make others resistant to changes. Again, this is just why it's so important to make sure that you have that strong communication plan and have that strong training plan ready to go.

This does bring us to our last poll question. So poll number five. Where do you see the most resistance to change in your organization? Is it with your board of directors? Is it with your staff? Is it with all of the above or is it with none of the above? And while you were answering that poll question, I am going to go ahead and bring us to the next slide so we can talk about how we can help your team to accept that change. We just talked about the reasons that your team might resist a change. So now let's focus a little bit more on what we can do to help the team accept the changes that you were implementing. So we've stressed this throughout the presentation, but your communication is key. Make sure that you're communicating a clear vision for the change and make sure that everyone knows exactly what's about to happen, what to expect, lead by example and show your willingness to embrace the change.

And also very important here is to make sure that your leaders are also supportive of the change because leadership support is so critical for buy-in, create change champions, we used this term earlier, a change Champion's going to be somebody that's excited for what's to come. They're going to be somebody that advocates for the change. They're going to be the person that supports their peers. As that change is happening, provide training and support. So make sure that you are providing training that is adequate and comprehensive and make sure that you have some resources to support the training programs like standard operating procedures, user guides, job aids, anything to really help reinforce the learning objectives. Answer questions honestly, create a safe space for questions and be transparent about the change. If you don't know the answer to a question, just be honest about that. That would be so preferred over just guessing or giving wrong information.

Find the answer and circle back whenever you have the information and recognize and reward adaptability. So make sure that you are incentivizing your employees and recognizing their hard work and participation. All right, let's take a quick peek at our poll responses to poll number five. So it looks like the majority of y'all aren't facing so much resistance from the board of directors or maybe that kind of leadership group. It might be more with your staff then there are others that have it all of the above. Some are experiencing none of the above. So you may have another stakeholder group that's really resisting that change. So hopefully the things that we've talked about here will help you overcome that change resistance so that you can start to move forward to new initiatives and being able to implement those well.

Alright, so if you are unsure about whether your organization is in need of a change or if it's time to create a change management strategy, think about whether you're hearing phrases such as morale is low or that process isn't documented. I don't know what to do. I don't have time to plan for that. Board of directors retreat. There are all signs here that your team is raising their hand and they're asking for help. So if you're hearing these phrases and you don't quite know what to do, we would love to have a conversation with you about how we can help you build a change strategy for your team. If this is something you're interested in discussing, feel free to drop it into the chat. We would love to hear from you. And that does bring us to the end of the presentation. We were so excited to get to talk with you guys about change management today. We do have a little bit of time left over, so I'm going to go ahead and toss it over to Candice so that she can maybe help us identify some questions that were asked and we can respond to those.

Candice Meth:Great. Thank you so much. And we do have a couple of questions. So the first one that I wanted to pose to the group is what role does leadership play in driving training initiatives for change management?

Katherine Nesser:Yeah, I can take that. Leadership plays an incredible role in driving change. A lot of the times a change decision is made at the leadership level, so they are normally the ones who maybe is initiating that change. It's a very important role though because the leaders have to be on board to get the rest of the organization on board for the change as well. Meaning if you have some leaders who are hesitant about the change or who aren't excited about the change or aren't into the change, that can really affect the way that the change strategy and the change transformation comes into play. So leaders are really the ones who set the stage for accepting and being excited about a change. And going back to kind of what LeAnne said about creating that open communication, you want to make sure that if your organization is going through a change, that your department heads your staff, your team members feel comfortable to ask the questions that they need to ask concerning a change. And a lot of times that needs to go through leadership. So having an open space for a change communication to take place. So very important the role of the leader in the change and being on board with that change.

Candice Meth:Great. And you touched on board retreats. What specific topics do you think should be covered during board retreats?

Katherine Nesser:Yes. So I think it can really depend on what the focus of the board is at that time. We always recommend a mission, vision, values, exercise, even if it's something that you have written out, we like to say, when's the last time that you maybe that or is there another way to think about it now or has an external factor maybe created a change in the way that you need to look at your mission, vision and values, other things that come up. We love doing communication style training, so something similar to what we did today, but more in depth. We also can do personality assessments. So potentially Myers-Briggs. I'm a certified Myers-Briggs trainer. In understanding a little bit more about your personality and the way that you approach situations, the way that you make decisions at work is really important. We've also partnered with other service areas within EisnerAmper to maybe have someone come in and talk specifically about tax implications of a certain law or a certain change that an organization is going through or to give maybe advice on managing finances. So there's really a variety of topics that can be included in those retreats.

Candice Meth:Great, thank you. We know that the pace of change has never been more rapid than it is today. What are some ideas to address resistance to training?

Katherine Nesser:LeAnn, you want to take that one?

LeAnn Ragusa:Yeah, I'd be happy to take that one. So I think it really goes back to making sure that your team understands the why, because it's very easy to resist something if you don't understand why it's relevant to you. And this is something that I don't know that gets communicated very effectively in all cases. So really addressing the why. And then also, and this is something we kind of talked about earlier, but I really do think it's important to accommodate different learning styles because not everybody is going to receive training the same, not everybody learns the same, so we need to make sure that we're taking into account how do we address somebody that is more of a visual learner. Maybe it's somebody that is more of a hands-on learner, so I don't want to just give a PowerPoint presentation. I might want to incorporate some team building activities. I might want to incorporate some one-on-one partnered activities. There might be some demonstration portions of the training where somebody is actually getting in there and digging into the system. So making sure that the why is clearly explained, making sure that the training objectives are clearly explained and then accommodating those diverse learning styles I think is going to be key to really addressing that change resistance.

Candice Meth:Excellent. Thank you so much. So we are right at the top of the hour, so I'm going to pass it back over to Bella for some closing remarks.

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