An Irrational Approach to Change Management
In Leading Change, Kotter talks about four aspects that must exist for a successful change program: A Compelling Story – because employees must see the point of the change and agree with it; Role Modeling – because employees must see the colleagues they admire behaving in the new way, Reinforcing Mechanisms – because systems, processes, and incentives must be in line with the new behavior, and Capability Building – because employees must have the skills required to make the desired changes.
So many change management programs go about telling a compelling story about how great the business will be, they spend time enrolling champions of the cause and promote their successes, they align financial compensation and metrics with the change, and they launch massive training programs to support the change. And yet, in most instances, beneficial change is still painful and slow.
Resistance to Change isn’t Rational
That is because resistance to change is almost never rational. People are smart and they understand the benefit to the business immediately. What we have found is that resistance to change doesn’t have its roots in a lack of understanding regarding benefits. Resistance has its roots in fear, embarrassment, and loss. These have their roots in people’s innate desire to be successful. They are probably built-in very deeply to our survival mechanisms from when being successful meant staying alive. For most of us, these deep motivators extend beyond ourselves to include the people we feel responsible for – our tribes. Our tribes can include our teams, our families, the company, our customers, and society.
Fear deals with uncertainty about the future. A person may realize that there is potential to do things better than they are currently doing it. But if the way they are doing it isn’t getting them fired and they aren’t completely certain they can be at least as successful in a new way, they will resist the change until their fear is addressed.
The important thing about addressing fear is that fear is in the perspective of the person who is facing the change that matters, not the people initiating the change. Historically, we keep doing what we have always done because it kept us alive.
Embarrassment deals with admitting that the way we have done things isn’t the best way to do it. People have a very strong drive to be right and to be appreciated. When you point out that they aren’t doing things the best way, they tend to become defensive. You don’t understand how things got that way. It sure is easy to come in after the fact and point out the problems. You must think they are stupid if you think they don’t understand the flaws in how they do work.
Embarrassment is dealt with by letting people tell their story. Let them know it is clear that they made the best choices they could over time. Its ok that things got the way they are because the got the way they are.
Loss is much broader. People have made an investment into developing the competence that they have been rewarded for and that gives them influence. Any of these points can be an emotional sticking point, loss of investment, competence, rewards, or influence.
Explaining how things will be better for the business on the new .NET platform doesn’t help the guy who spent the last 20 years becoming the absolute expert in the COBOL application. Explaining the focusing benefits of social marketing techniques doesn’t make the sales person who spent the last 20 years developing relationship more valuable. The manager who has thrived in chaos and been rewarded for it will resist the effort to put in stabilize the environment.
Everyone has Their Own Story
When we change the way we do things, we can’t replace the investment made by individuals in developing the competence that has led to reward and influence. We pull that out from under them. Loss is the most difficult challenge to deal with. We can commit to supporting a new investment, although it is difficult to replace 20 years of experience. People want to be valued. Try treating them with a great deal of respect and recognition for what they have accomplished. This will help with the transition, but won’t necessarily set them up for a complimentary level of success in the new way of things.
The bottom line is that overcoming resistance to change is critical to the success of most strategic changes. Typical change management approaches teach us to communicate, communicate, and communication again. But, notice how of the sources of resistance are all at a personal level. Explaining how the change will benefit the business, or the manager, or even the customer isn’t sufficient.
Next time you are facing resistance to change, don’t push – listen. The person resisting understands the benefit to the business. It is fear, embarrassment, or loss that is motivating the resistance. Often it is a combination. Often their fear, embarrassment, or loss extends beyond them to what they perceive as their tribe. Spending time understanding and addressing resistance at its root may seem like an unnecessary investment. However, the investment is almost always less than the cost of the resistance itself.
This article is an updated version of an April 2007 Synaptus entry. I was inspired to update and reprint this post based on this McKinsey Quarterly newsletter.
The McKinsey Quarterly-The irrational side of change management
Tags: Change Management
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Good stuff. You should put this into some kind of book
Good stuff Dennis. It’s critical that change agents and leaders grasp these underlying principles of organizational change. I find it useful, too, to fully understand and leverage Kotter’s change management process (or another similar approach). I summarize the process in my post “The Process of Managing Change” here: http://blog.softwarearchitecture.com/2009/05/process-of-managing-change.html.
strategic change management…
Great post. My approach to strategic change management says the quality of the first five percent determines what happens in the rest of the process. This same principle applies to many situations….
Spot on! We tend to do a good job creating the “parade” that begins change efforts but we don’t do to good on providing the support necessary for people to move and finish. We all have a mental map in our minds about how the world operates and as you noted, that map has worked well in the past. If a person is very competent today then there is a high possibility that the change will put them in a situation where they are no longer competent or the expert at what they do. We’re asking people to move from being that expert, doing things that have made them successful, to a new thing for which they have little or no experience.
We must provide the support necessary to shift their mental map and provide them with the tools needed to get to the new place. We need to help them finish.
Geez, this is getting long… feels like a new blog post may be in the works.
One final thought, those that have already made the leap, redrawn their mental map, have a very difficult time remembering the journey they took to get there. That is an important thing to remember; we can’t them complete their journey if we can’t empathize with their plight.
Just because someone is afraid does that make it “irrational?” It tells me that while they understand the business benefits, the organization hasn’t done a good job of describing how the change is going to affect the people in the business.
I saw this in a simple example at a “meet the CEO” session about a year ago. One person expressed understanding that project X would help reduce paperwork, but since her work included a lot of that paperwork, she wasn’t so sure about the project.
In more involved examples, the source of the resistance may not be so obvious. But if it’s there, it is the change agent’s job to find it and resolve it.