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Stumble it!Managing change means managing people’s fear. Change is natural and good, but people’s reaction to change is unpredictable and irrational. It can be managed if done right.
Change
Nothing is as upsetting to your people as change. Nothing has greater potential to cause failures, loss of production, or falling quality. Yet nothing is as important to the survival of your organization as change. History is full of examples of organizations that failed to change and that are now extinct. The secret to successfully managing change, from the perspective of the employees, is definition and understanding.Resistance to change comes from a fear of the unknown or an expectation of loss. The front-end of an individual’s resistance to change is how they perceive the change. The back-end is how well they are equipped to deal with the change they expect.
An individual’s degree of resistance to change is determined by whether they perceive the change as good or bad, and how severe they expect the impact of the change to be on them. Their ultimate acceptance of the change is a function of how much resistance the person has and the quality of their coping skills and their support system.
Your job as a leader is to address their resistance from both ends to help the individual reduce it to a minimal, manageable level. Your job is not to bulldoze their resistance so you can move ahead.
Perception Does Matter
If you move an employee’s desk six inches, they may not notice or care. Yet if the reason you moved it those six inches was to fit in another worker in an adjacent desk, there may be high resistance to the change. It depends on whether the original employee feels the hiring of an additional employee is a threat to his job, or perceives the hiring as bringing in some needed assistance.
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A promotion is usually considered a good change. However an employee who doubts their ability to handle the new job may strongly resist the promotion. They will give you all kinds of reasons for not wanting the promotion, just not the real one.
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You might expect a higher-level employee to be less concerned about being laid off, because they have savings and investments to support them during a job search. However, the individual may feel they are over extended and that a job search will be long and complicated. Conversely, your concern for a low-income employee being laid off may be unfounded if they have stashed a nest egg in anticipation of the cut.
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Your best salesperson may balk at taking on new, high potential account because they have an irrational feeling that they don’t dress well enough.
If you try and bulldoze this resistance, you will fail. The employee whose desk you had to move will develop production problems. The top worker who keeps declining the promotion may quit rather than have to continue making up excuses for turning you down. And the top salesperson’s sales may drop to the point that you stop considering them for the new account. Instead, you overcome the resistance by defining the change and by getting mutual understanding.
Definition
On the front end, you need to define the change for the employee in as much detail and as early as you can. Provide updates as things develop and become more clear. In the case of the desk that has to be moved, tell the employee what’s going on. “We need to bring in more workers. Our sales have increased by 40% and we can’t meet that demand, even with lots of overtime. To make room for them, we’ll have to rearrange things a little.” You could even ask the employees how they think the space should be rearranged. You don’t have to accept their suggestions, but it’s a start toward understanding.Definition is a two-way street. In addition to defining the problem, you need to get the employees to define the reasons behind their resistance.
Understanding
Understanding is also a two-way street. You want people to understand what is changing and why. You also need to understand their reluctance.
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You have to help your people understand. They want to know what the change will be and when it will happen, but they also want to know why. Why is it happening now? Why can’t things stay like they have always been? Why is it happening to me?
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It is also important that they understand what is not changing. Not only does this give them one less thing to stress about, it also gives them an anchor, something to hold on to as they face the winds of uncertainty and change.
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You need to understand their specific fears. What are they concerned about? How strongly do they feel about it? Do they perceive it as a good or a bad thing?
Manage This Issue
Don’t try to rationalize things. Don’t waste time wishing people were more predictable. Instead, focus on opening and maintaining clear channels of communication with your employees so they understand what is coming and what it means to them. They will appreciate you for it and will be more productive both before and after the change.
By F. John Reh
http://management.about.com/
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\\ tags: Business, Management
July 24th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
People don’t naturally fear change. They distrust and distrust managers who use the top-down command and control approach to managing people and in that state employees are highly resistant to change.
Top-down concentrates on producing goals, targets, visions, orders and other directives in order to control the workforce and thereby achieve organizational success. Concentrating on giving direction prevents these managers from doing much of anything else. Thus top-down treats employees like robots in the “shut up and listen, I know better than you” mode, and rarely if ever listens to them. By so doing this approach ignores every employee’s basic need to be heard and to be respected. This approach also makes top management ignorant of what is really going on in the workplace thus making their directives misguided at best and irrelevant at worst.
In top-down, nobody listens to employee ideas, nobody values their opinions, and nobody gives them any recognition. The only way that the workforce can deal with managers who treat them in this way is to disengage and ignore their behavior. In the workplace this is seen as being sullen, uncommunicative, having a poor attitude, low morale and/or apathy.
(During my first 12 years of managing people, I used top-down and was never aware of how bad my leadership was. It was not until I started really listening to employees that I began to understand.)
In this way and others, top-down demeans and disrespects employees sending them very negative value standard messages. The standards reflected in this treatment “lead” employees to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with the same level of disrespect they received. No one can become committed to company goals while being treated so poorly.
This is the road to very poor corporate performance as compared to the results that would be achieved using a better approach. Top-down managers are their own worst enemies because they “lead” employees to the very worst performance. (In “The Human Side of Enterprise”, author Douglas McGregor named this “Theory X” and named the other extreme “Theory Y”, but he did not provide how to achieve it.)
In order to cause employees to embrace necessary changes and be very high performers who love to come to work, first get rid of all traces of a top-down approach. Everyone wants to do a good job, but don’t want to be ordered around like a robot.
Next, start treating employees with great respect and not like robots by listening to whatever they want to say when they want to say it and responding in a very respectful manner. Responding respectfully means resolving their complaints and suggestions and answering their questions to their satisfaction as well as yours, but most importantly theirs. It also means providing them more than enough opportunity to voice their complaints, suggestions and questions. Spend your time making your support reflect the very highest standards of all values by resolving their complaints and suggestions thus “leading” toward the very best standards.
And realize that the highest quality and most respectful “direction” is the very least since no one likes to take orders or really needs them except in emergency situations. Anyone routinely needing extensive orders should not be on your team.
This treatment leads employees to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with great respect. Listening and responding respectfully also inspires them to unleash their full potential of creativity, innovation and productivity on their work giving them great pride in it and causes them to love to come to work. In this state, they will be eager not fearful to make needed changes, even to be proactive about change. This is our natural state.
You will be stunned as I was by the huge amount of creativity, innovation and productivity you have unleashed. To learn how I escaped top-down after using it for 12 years, read an interview of me at
http://www.extensor.co.uk/articles/int_simonton/interview_ben_simonton.html
Best regards, Ben
Author “Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed”
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:45 pm
As a human resources professional, over the years I’ve been surprised by some individual’s reactions to a small change. Eventually I’ve accepted that people react…no matter what the change. When I made that basic assumption, then I was able to better prepare myself and the managers when communicating any changes to their employees.
I specifically like one point you made…not only communicate the changes, but what is not changing. What is not being changed provides an anchor for the employee to balance out any anxiety they may have with the change.
Thanks for the post.
Pat