Lesson 7

Table of Contents

1. How to Make Sure Your Change Lasts
2. Empowering Your Team for a New Era
3. Assignment 7: Final Quiz

Congratulations! You’ve made it to the last chapter of this course. Enacting a big change like this isn’t easy, so make sure you take a moment to celebrate. 

Phew! Are you feeling tired yet? You’ve been working really hard—and we promise, you’re nearly at the end. But before you take a rest, there’s just a few more things we need to cover before we wrap up this course. 

If you remember way back to our very first lesson, kicking off the change isn’t the hard part. Getting the change to stick is. “If we’re done launching it, and everybody’s like, ‘great, we did it,’ and things get hard again, what’s going to stop me from defaulting to my old ways?” says Lauren Erera, Principal at Weber Associates. 

So before you put your feet up, we need to make sure that you’re prepared to maintain the change you just made, so all that hard work doesn’t come to naught. You’ve done the groundwork, now it’s time to reinforce it. 

How to Make Sure Your Change Lasts

Now that you’ve sunk all this effort into making your change, let’s make sure you see it to fruition. You’re fighting your team’s natural inertia, so to avoid slipping back into old habits, you need to provide them with ongoing support and encouragement. We’ve already shared some ways to do this, including sharing your progress metrics and reminding them of why the change matters to them (the “what’s in it for me”—WIIFM). 

Beyond that, our experts have some final tips on making sure the change you’ve worked so hard on lasts. Here’s what they recommend. 

Build a resource library

Even if you’ve done training, people won’t remember all the details. That’s why it’s a good idea to build a library of quick and easily referenceable guides. 

“We all forget training, and when we want to do something, we want to do it there and then. So we need to be able to look at something that’s two minutes long and be able to follow the steps,” says Claire Walker, Head of Solutions at OneAdvanced.

To do that, she and her team created an internal resource hub for everyone to continually reference. “We created a lot of video and PowerPoint content, which now is available on our internal hub—because the external training is great, but it’s really by embedding it that it truly becomes part of the day-to-day.” That way, when questions come up, her team’s immediate impulse is not to go back to whatever they were doing before—it’s to quickly look up a guide and refresh their memory. 

Set clear boundaries and enforce them

Once your process is in place, you need to take responsibility for ensuring it’s applied consistently and correctly. 

“I take a very hard and fast rule that everything has to go through our new process,” says Natalie Giles-Grant, Head of Bid Management at OneAdvanced. “There are no exceptions, there’s no, ‘but can we just do this?’ And I think once you start saying, ‘no, this is what we’re doing,’ people go, ‘oh, okay, we’re doing that now.’ That just becomes the norm.” 

If you start to make exceptions to your new process, you’re just going to confuse your team. While it might feel good in the moment to help someone out of a sticky situation, in the long run, you’re just hurting them because you’re making it more difficult for them to adapt. Plus, once you make one exception, there’s nothing to stop others from wanting to get around the rules too—and before you know it, the whole new process starts to unravel. 

It’s normal to experience pushback. Articulating your “WIIFM” can help people understand why the change is needed, but you’re still asking them to upend a lot of familiar habits. 

“When we got RFP software, some adopted it early on, others got a license and didn’t really do much with it. But on the whole, you get to a point where you say, ‘we must do this,’” says Claire. It’s important to remember that being clear and direct with your team is the kind thing to do—otherwise, they won’t know where they stand or what they need to do to succeed. 

Keep reiterating your message

Change takes time—two months or more, remember?—so you need to be patient and repeat yourself more than you think is necessary. 

“It’s all about constant reinforcement,” says Claire. “I’d often be on leadership calls and a question or a topic could come up about the draw on somebody’s time. Like, ‘the engineering team is really, really busy’ or ‘this sales person can’t get this security questionnaire signed off’ and it’s reiterating that if we can get that into our RFP software, we can streamline that.”

While this kind of repetition can get tiring, it’s essential. “Sometimes it feels really hard and you think, ‘I’ve said this so many times before,’” she continues. “But eventually you start to hear people repeating it back to you and that’s when you know it’s starting to filter through.” 

Empowering Your Team for a New Era

Changing a habit is like climbing a big hill. At first, all you can see is how far you have to go. Climbing to the top is tiring and hard and it can feel like you’ll never make it. But then, almost without realizing it, the terrain becomes easier. You reach the top and can see over the other side. As you begin to descend, you don’t have to put in as much effort because gravity takes over. 

“We’re really seeing the momentum now,” says Claire. “I think my team has bought into the fact that we have more success. We have more time to do other things by using RFP software. And that leads to more consistent usage.”

In the age of AI, this ability to reach the “other side” is more than just a project goal—it’s a survival skill. Just think about how much has changed in the last few years: AI has uprooted the entire process (not to mention our daily lives). Who knows what RFPs will look like in another two years? By mastering change management now, you aren’t just fixing a single workflow—you’re building the muscle memory your team needs to adapt, no matter what comes next.

Eventually, the change you worked so hard to implement becomes the new baseline, and people will hardly be able to remember what things were like before.  

That is, until you decide to launch a new change, and the cycle begins again.