Communications Outline for Managers

Are you a manager? This outline enables you to create an information packet to use in coaching sessions with employees on your team. The outline addresses the most important messages supervisors can send to build employee Awareness of the need for change. Often, this information gets overlooked during coaching sessions, but it is vital to helping employees most through the change process successfully. For the best results with coaching, use this outline along with the ADKAR Model.  

Communication Outline for Coaching Sessions

Your business drivers

• Explain the current business issues that create a need to change, and discuss the benefits and business reasons for the change
• Explain how these external and internal issues impact employees
• Talk about your customers’ needs or expectations that support a need for change
• Discuss how your competitor’s activity is creating a need for change

Your business performance

• Present the operational performance measures and trends to demonstrate the business problem or opportunity (and illustrate with charts and graphs)
• Show the corresponding financial performance and trends to demonstrate how this business condition affects the organization’s financial performance (and illustrate with charts and graphs)
• Compare performance with benchmarks or against performance goals (show contrast between where the business is today versus where the business needs to be)

Your objectives for the change

• Share the specific objectives that must be achieved with this change.
• Describe the conditions of a successful change (numerical goals that would indicate if the change was a success)

Your scope of the change

• Share who is impacted by this change and what organizations are not impacted.
• Describe which processes will undergo the most change and which processes will remain unchanged.

The impact to your organization

• Share the potential consequences to your business if no change is made. Discuss the business-as-usual scenario.
• Talk about the different options the organization has to respond to the change, and the associated risk of each of those options.

Details of your change

• Describe what will change in your business.
• If elements of the change (the solution) are known, begin to present the high-level vision for the organization.
• If elements of the change are not yet known, discuss when more information will be available and set expectations.