Podcast: Heather Ritchie on Change Management

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This episode brings an expert in change management, Heather Ritchie, to talk about skills. But, skills are more than a set of things you’ve learned. Skills are what your team, and your organization, need to work together and thrive.

Heather is a consultant with Build Consulting and has over two decades of experience in the field. She has led change management efforts in nonprofit, academic and corporate sectors, serving in a variety of roles from senior leadership to educator, coach and consultant. Heather brings a passion for connecting social purpose with the strategy, tools and technology to make the world a better place – on budget, on time, and for measurable impact.

Our podcast is designed for audiences with varied experiences with technology. In this conversation with Heather Ritchie learn the role of skills in change management and strategies to motivate your teams to develop the skills they – and your nonprofit – need.

Transcript

Kyle Haines: Welcome back to Transforming Nonprofits, where we explore topics related to nonprofits, foundations, and associations, and we talk about how to get better at technology, perhaps with technology really only being a Trojan horse for something much larger. You guessed it, transformation.

In this episode, I talk with a colleague, Heather Ritchie, who has been managing change for our clients and getting them ready for that change, making sure they have the right skills and are ready for the change ahead.

So with that, let’s talk about change. Let’s talk about nonprofits. More importantly, let’s talk about Transforming Nonprofits.

Heather, thank you so much for being on Transforming Nonprofits today. You are a difficult person to wrangle. You have been incredibly busy, and I really appreciate you making time to meet today.

Heather Ritchie: Happy to be here.

Kyle Haines: This is a little unusual for me because, and you should be really honored, you’re the first colleague from Build that I’ve ever had on Transforming Nonprofits. I’ve kept people at bay, and you are the very first. So hopefully you recognize and appreciate the magnitude of this moment.

Heather Ritchie: That’s because I’m your favorite and I’m the best employee at Build.

Kyle Haines: That’s exactly right.

I think one of the reasons that I haven’t asked people on is because I want to be sure that when we’re talking about things, it doesn’t come across as a big commercial for Build Consulting.

You and I have been talking about topics related to change management recently. I think your perspective and experience is super interesting. And so, I don’t care whether it sounds like a commercial or not, but we’re just going to chat about change management if that’s okay with you.

Heather Ritchie: Sounds good.

What is a Skills Matrix?

Kyle Haines: Where our conversation started, as I remember it, after you did a webinar for us about a skills matrix, we were talking a lot about skills matrix, and I realized that I probably had some misconceptions about it.

But before we talk about that in any more detail, for people who have no idea what a skills matrix is, and we don’t have one in front of us, can you talk a little bit about what a skills matrix is, just as a grounding exercise for people listening?

Heather Ritchie: Sure. I would say a skills matrix is a tool that I’ve often used in an Excel Document that looks at skills, competencies, and interests of individuals and teams or groups in an organization. And I would say, at its core, it’s a tool for building thoughtful teams or thinking about how more effective and efficient you can be by investing in people.

And that’s why I really like them, and why we’ve talked about these things is because I really believe in the people side of change management. The skills matrix is a structured way an organization or a team could look at their people.

Kyle Haines: You know, that’s probably what was the prompter. Before you came to Build, I remember you came from an organization where you were hyper focused on people and skills. Can you share a little bit about your background for folks listening who don’t know you? Because you bring a really interesting set of experiences to the role. It’s beyond just technology, but I really homed in on something you just said about the people side of it.

Heather Ritchie: Yes, I can. So, before I was working at Build, I was a professional development and trainer for a school. I was working with over 70 instructors who each had different styles and different skill sets coming into the profession.

I really had to lean in to learning about each of them and finding what their strengths were, because you’re not going to make every instructor a cookie cutter individual. They are diverse and they all have their own styles.

How Does a Skills Matrix Work to Identify Individual Strengths?

Kyle Haines: Well, that gets me into my next question, because I think when I started thinking about a skills matrix and when our conversation started, I was thinking about skills in perhaps a limited way. I was thinking, I’m really good at CRM as an example.

But as we talked, I began to realize that some of the skills that I bring to projects, to bring to work, that are part of who I am, are the things that I’m innately good at.

And one of those that I learned early on is that I’m good at architecture. And what that means is that I’m good at envisioning things, and it means that I’m good at designing things. And that’s something I bring innately, even though I’m not a trained architect.

One of the things as I thought about my natural skill being architecture, I realized a skill matrix can get to a level beyond a specific aptitude, but what people are naturally inclined to do, beyond what they’ve been trained to do or what they have work experience doing.

Am I thinking about that right? And how does a skill matrix maybe help with that?

Heather Ritchie: Yes. So, the way that we’ve looked at it at Build and the way I’ve looked at it in other places is, it’s not just your skills that you have been training yourself on. It’s also what you’ve leaned into throughout your life.

I might come to work and think, “I’m a great public speaker.” But somebody else might think, “I am not a great public speaker.” And some of that is a level of innate ability, and some of that is something that could still be nuanced and learned a little bit more.

But then you also have specific things like, “Hey, I use this project management software, and I use monday.com, and I’m an expert user of this, and I can teach other people how to use it so that it’s better for them.”

I think it’s both and, and it’s also interests.

I mean, if you assign me something and say, Heather, you have to go work on this, and I am totally not interested in it, then I’m going to have a different level of effectiveness, efficiency with doing that work. Now, sometimes you have to.

But a skills matrix can help you as a group look and divide the work and conquer it by saying, “Hey, here’s so and so who is really good at architecture. So we’re going to give Kyle the stuff that relates to architecture. And then Heather is really good at project management software. Well, Heather, do you want to lean into that a little bit more?” “Oh yeah, I really like that. Let’s do that.”

So that’s a way you can use it.

Challenges to Using a Skills Matrix

Kyle Ritchie: So let me tell a story about a client that I was at where they asked us to perform the skills matrix exercise. And I’m not sure it went particularly well. They started to refer to us as the Bobs, which for anyone who’s seen Office Space, there are two consultants that are management consultants, that it’s clear that they’re doing this analysis so that they can reduce headcount.

What are the things, recognizing that people might feel vulnerable, what would you advise an organization have in place before they jump in to having a skills matrix?

Culture

Heather Ritchie: So, a couple of things with what you just said.

First, I think the culture of the organization is critical to the success of using a skills matrix. So, as you pointed out in Office Space, if the culture was already bad, a skills matrix is not going to do a whole lot for you.

Other people have said, “Oh, we’ve only used a skills matrix when we’re trying to exit people.” That’s not the way that I’ve used them. So, I would say that one of the first things to consider is the culture of an organization. Because if you have a difficult culture, then using a skills matrix is not necessarily going to make things better. You need to have a space that is open and feels safe for people to have these conversations.

Some of the things that I would advise is maybe doing a change readiness assessment to see, like, do people have bandwidth, or do they feel like this is going to be a priority for them?

Because if it’s not, then the first thing you want to do is some change management to make sure that this is going to be a project or a mini workspace that people really can lean into.

The second is, I would think about a company culture of coming together and really saying, we’re using this for supporting you, and here’s how we’re going to do that. And so that’s going to help the people say, “I can come to this space and say, I’m not really comfortable with doing X, Y, or Z, or I’m not really as good as my colleague in doing this other type of work,” and finding where you can have the best impact.

Change Management

Kyle Haines: I may have just had an aha moment, which you never see with me, so that’s remarkable. But I’m curious if this is right. I talked about Office Space and the Bobs and how their exercise in that movie was really just a Trojan horse to get rid of people.

Using the Trojan horse metaphor, and everyone knows Kyle loves a metaphor, does the work that we do around technology, selections and assessments and implementations, can that be a bit of a Trojan horse? And bear with me for just a moment.

Can you use that as the opportunity or the entry point into saying, this is going to profoundly change how we work. We really want to understand your skills and leverage that in the course of a project rather, and then see, is there anything that we can use from this to answer broader questions about skills? Or am I overthinking this?

Heather Ritchie: No, I think that that’s exactly what this can be used for. I mean, again, where I’ve used this is for things like board recruitment or for building a project team or helping when somebody leaves a department, and you want to rethink the role.

So if you’re moving from – kind of the example we used in the webinar was – if you are in a help desk break fix kind of mode for technology staffing, and then you decide you want to have your technology team actually do product management and project management, because in the realm of IT everything’s in the cloud now, that’s a different skill set potentially.

You can help grow your people into that space by looking at who has what innate skills right now, who has a background in certain things, and who has interests in learning and scaling up. I would say it’s totally part of these assessments and when we’re transforming our technology department or whether we’re implementing something to find out who’s going to be on the team and do we have the right people.

Creating Space for Honesty

Kyle Haines: The next question I have is a hard one for me to ask without making it all about me and taking five minutes to provide the context. But I think I was fortunate in the last 15 years to learn more about the things that I’m good at, but also to learn about the things that I’m not good at. And I think for me, it was a little bit of a journey, because I used to think I had to be good at everything.

And if you discovered that I wasn’t good at something, I was vulnerable.

Because I had this belief that I was supposed to be good at everything. In my work with you, I think that you have incredible skills in getting people to talk honestly and candidly.

And I’m wondering, am I right that a big part of this exercise is creating safety for people to be candid and honest?

Is that true, and how do you do it? What’s your secret, Heather?

Heather Ritchie: I would say that is totally in line with what you have to do in order to use a skills matrix assessment well.

Leadership

You have to have somebody who’s trusted lead the work in the organization.

One of the ideas of how you could structure this with a team is that the leadership in that team meets one-to-one with people and says, “Hey, we’re going to do this exercise, this is what’s going to be on it.”

Build Together

Or even better yet, you help build what your department or team needs together for strengths and for skills and for interests… If you build that together, then they have the buy-in and also you all can talk about things along the way that makes it more comfortable.

Make a List

The leadership could also come with just this list of things. And I would say you bring it to the individuals first. You have a conversation with them first. And you can also meet with them after they look at it and say, “Do you feel comfortable with sharing your level of expertise in these different areas?” And that opening is going to be your first space for creating a safe space.

The second one is bringing everybody together and being transparent about why you’re doing it and what you hope to achieve with the list. And then going through it and letting people participate at the level where they are.

So, some people are going to say, “Hey, I’m an open book. I have no idea what Teams is and how to work in that area, but I’m willing to learn.” Somebody else might be a little less open and say, “I’m interested in learning more about Teams,” but they may not share that they’re not experts in it.

And just lean into both of those to let people join and share.

Make Skills Assessment Ongoing

And I think the other piece is, if this is an ongoing conversation, as you continue it, then people become more accustomed to it and more trusting.

I think about it years ago in education, we had people come and observe us. I had people observing me once a week for 12 months out of the year. I got so used to being observed, it wasn’t a big deal.

Then I worked at a different place where people did observations, and they did it once a year. And the amount of anxiety that produced for people was huge.

So, I think it’s also about how often you’re connecting with your team on their skills and interests and competencies.

Timing Using a Skills Matrix

Kyle Haines: That makes sense.

Can I ask, I don’t think it’s totally random, but a question, maybe it’s a little random, but in listening to you talk, when I think about the way that Build works, the way we might do a technology roadmap, and then we might do a technology selection, it seems to me that the skills matrix needs to happen early in that type of technology change.

And I can think of a number of reasons why that might be the case, but there is something in what you said about, what are the skills that your team needs?

That really seems like a conversation you can’t have once implantation starts, because you need to start up-skilling people, getting people ready for the change. It just seems like this happens pretty early. Like what, who do we bring to the table? What are our innate skills? What are our actual skills? All of those things.

Heather Ritchie: I think we’re always more successful if we look at all the people being involved in a project or the work in a department.

I’m always thinking like people first and think about who we have at the table and what we need to do. And I agree, the earlier you can get started on that, the better.

I think you probably need to make sure you have people that have developed relationships with individuals before you jump in and ask them if they’re good at using technology.

But in general, we’ve found that you go in, you have conversations with people, and you say, “Hey, what’s working or what’s not working with your technology?” or “We know that you want to change the IT.” And they’re immediately going to tell you, “I’m the super user,” or “I rarely touch the system, and I can’t even think about getting into that because it would take me so much time to learn.”

I guess what I’m saying is, along the way, you’re getting pieces of this information that, yes, you can build, and then you can kind of verify it with people as you go. But it should help you develop your training plans. It should help you develop your communication plans.

It all relates to change management.

Kyle Haines: Yeah. This is super interesting. I’m wondering if my wife wished she had done a skills assessment with me earlier on in the relationship rather than at marriage, right?

The implementation phase is too late to do the skills assessment. It should have been at the, is this guy somebody I want to be with?

I really appreciate you joining today. To me, it’s just a continuation of the conversations and my evolving understanding that this is more than just a spreadsheet, like this is more than just a one-time activity. At least that’s what it sounds like.

To me, it sounds almost like a secret decoder ring that you can use to help people do the work they’re interested in, that they have an aptitude for, that they’re willing to invest themselves in.

Establishing Trust

And I don’t think I’m overvaluing this. You’ve named a bunch of things that you think need to accompany a skills matrix. And I just want to pause, because the thing that’s lingering for me is this idea of trust and how important it is to establish trust.

But I’m wondering, are there other things that you think are really important as organizations listen to this, digest this, and may want to rush out and download a template and just plow into it, which I think we’re saying, don’t do that. That might be the one thing that you do, but there’s a number of other things you need to do. I’m wondering, what did we miss?

What are things that you think are important for organizations to think about?

Heather Ritchie: I think I agree. Don’t just go and give everybody an Excel document. That would be bad.

I would say the other piece to this is, you are investing in your people by doing this type of work. And so, I think at its core, organizations and people need to think, is that what I value?

If you just want butts in seats, if you just want somebody in the role, then don’t waste your time with the skills matrix. Right? Because you just want somebody to be in the role so that they can do whatever they’re being told to do.

But if you want to actually build teams and build departments with efficiency and holistic concepts of what you want to get done, then that’s when the skills matrix is really important.

I would say you have to have a vision of a unified team. You have to have an interest in building your people. And you have to have the ability to say, hey, we’re going to work as a group. And by working as a group, we’re going to be stronger. In order to do that, are you all willing to be a little vulnerable in spaces to help us figure out where we can support you as an individual?

I think that’s the core of it, is that organizations, especially nonprofits, have to invest in their people because that is who’s doing the work and they’re doing it because they’re passionate, not just for a paycheck. And so, this is that added value that an organization can provide by saying, “I’m not just going to give you a paycheck and say, thank you, I’m going to value you enough to learn about you and support you in growing as you help grow our organization.”

Kyle Haines: I think that’s an incredibly powerful point to end on. I think that that’s what I heard you say is that for non-profit organizations, people might languish in a role that they don’t belong in because they have such a deep connection to the mission. They have a willingness to languish, not advance, not be at their best, because they have such a deep connection to the overall mission, and that that’s not enough.

That for nonprofits and foundations and associations, for them to get the best out of people, it can’t just be the mission and we have a butt in a seat, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s the wrong butt in the wrong seat. It’s really got to be connected to this entire conversation that we’ve had today.

Heather Ritchie: Yes. I think that nonprofits do more with less every day. And that’s why I’ve loved working in nonprofits for 20 plus years.

And the ones that I see or have been a part of, that have been really successful, are the ones that look at their people, value their people enough to say, “I’m going to invest in you and not just utilize your skills that you come to me with. And I’m also going to make it a team environment. I’m not just going to dictate what everybody does. We’re going to build something that we all believe in and work towards our organizational vision and the passion for why we’re all here.”

Kyle Haines: That’s amazing. What a great way to end this episode of Transforming Nonprofits.

Heather, you have accomplished everything that everyone preceding you has. And that is, I’m going to be thinking about this topic for the next week, wanting to run off and do Skills Matrix everywhere. But it seriously has been an incredibly informative conversation. I really appreciate you making time to be on this episode.

I know that we’re going to get lots of questions about this because I think that there was so much wisdom in what you shared and so much opportunity to really align people in ways and make them feel like you’re invested in finding them meaningful work beyond the meaning they derive simply by working for a nonprofit and being connected to the mission of that organization.

Heather Ritchie: Thank you for having me. This was fun. And I do hope that people listen and think about how they can work with their people more, because people are fun and awesome.

Kyle Haines: They are. Thank you again for being on this episode, and I’m sure I’ll see you in a meeting in the next hour or so.

Heather Ritchie: Bye.