Change Management ⏱ Half day (3.5 hours) per cohort of 8–12 managers 👥 CN change practitioner (facilitator). 8–12 line managers per cohort. No senior leaders — they inhibit honesty.
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Guides / How-to / The Manager Enablement Workshop
How To — Change Management

The Manager Enablement Workshop.

How to run the session that prepares managers for corridor conversations

Purpose

To equip managers to handle the specific conversations their direct reports will have — not to brief them on what is changing. The output is a manager who can answer "is my job actually going to change?" at 4pm on a Thursday.

The CN approach
A manager briefing and a manager enablement workshop are not the same thing. A briefing tells managers what is changing. An enablement workshop equips them to handle the specific conversations their teams will have — before those conversations happen. The difference in outcome is significant. A briefed manager says "yes, things are changing, check the intranet." An enabled manager can sit with a direct report who is worried about their job and actually help.
Quick Reference — One Pager
Before you start
  • ▸Complete corridor mapping — know which managers are influential before designing cohorts
  • ▸Design cohorts deliberately: mix functions, separate line managers from their own managers
  • ▸Never put a manager in a cohort with their own line manager — it kills honesty
  • ▸Send a pre-read: the change narrative in plain English, the specific FAQ for their team
  • ▸Prepare specific corridor scenarios based on the resistance intelligence from discovery
Room / setup
  • ▸Horseshoe or round table — not theatre style
  • ▸Maximum 12 people — small enough that nobody hides
  • ▸No cameras, no recording
  • ▸Phones away for the role play section
  • ▸Flipchart or whiteboard for capturing their own language
Key questions

"What question are you most dreading from your team?"

"What do you personally find hardest to defend about this change?"

"What does your team need to hear from you — not from the programme team?"

"What would you need to feel confident having these conversations?"

"What are you going to say when someone says: last time we did this, nothing changed?"

Watch outs
⚠Managers performing confidence they do not have — probe it gently
⚠The manager who is clearly not on board with the change — do not call them out publicly
⚠Role plays that are too comfortable — make the scenarios harder than reality
⚠Finishing the session without a specific commitment from each manager
⚠No follow-up mechanism — the session is the start, not the end
Full Facilitator Guide in the CN Portal

Step by step. What to do when it goes wrong.

The full guide covers the complete session methodology, how to build and sequence the activities, what the outputs mean and how to use them, and specifically what to do when the session goes in a direction you did not expect.

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