Roles in Organizational Change

Five roles recur in most change management texts, under varying labels.

• Sponsor: the senior person who authorizes the change, provides resources, gives it legitimacy and remains accountable for its outcomes.
• Change manager: plans and coordinates the people side of the change: impact assessment, communication, training, support and reinforcement.
• Change agents: people in the affected areas who help colleagues adopt the change, often as a network of champions.
• Line managers: lead their own teams through the change, translate it into local terms and handle individual concerns.
• Those affected: the people whose work, behavior or situation changes, sometimes called targets or recipients.

Daryl Conner's earlier framework used sponsor, agent and target, and added the advocate: someone who wants a change but lacks the authority to sanction it.

Roles in organizational change therefore divide the work of a change by responsibility, from authority at the top to adoption on the ground.

A role is a set of responsibilities within one change; a job title is a position in the organization. They rarely match one-to-one.

• One person can hold several roles. A department head can sponsor a change in her own area and, at the same time, be one of the people affected by it.
• One role can be shared. Large changes often have a primary sponsor supported by sponsors in each affected business unit.
• Roles depend on the change. The same manager can be a sponsor for one initiative, a change agent for another and simply affected by a third.

At Harbourside Council, the director who sponsors a new case-management system also has to use it. She holds the sponsor role and the affected role, and she may need support with her own transition before she can lead others through theirs.

Separating roles from job titles in organizational change keeps the focus on who must do what, not on who sits where.

The people affected are not passive: they know how the current work is really done, and involving them in design improves the fit.

Each role in organizational change covers a gap that the others cannot fill.

At Larchfield Logistics, a warehouse automation program touches three sites. The change manager runs a short role-mapping exercise:

1. Name the sponsor with authority over all three sites, and confirm that the sponsor accepts the role and its time commitment.
2. Identify local sponsors, one per site, where the overall sponsor's authority does not reach day-to-day decisions.
3. Brief the line managers of every affected team on what the change asks of them, before their teams hear about it.
4. Recruit change agents from each shift, with time set aside for the role.
5. Record roles in the change plan, with names, responsibilities and the support each person will receive.

The exercise shows a gap: the night shift has no change agent.

Assigning roles in organizational change is therefore an explicit step in planning, not something left to emerge.

• Treating the sponsor role as a signature. A sponsor who approves the budget and then disappears leaves the change without authority.
• Making the change manager the face of the change. The change manager supports leaders; people still expect to hear the reasons from those with authority.
• Bypassing line managers. Staff turn to their own manager first; managers briefed late cannot answer questions.
• Giving change agents no time. Adding the role on top of a full job leads to a network that exists only on paper.
• Forgetting that leaders are affected too. Senior people go through their own transition, often earlier than their teams.

Most problems with roles in organizational change come from roles that are named but not resourced.