There’s nothing that can invigorate a struggling company like a major change. Maybe it’s the adoption of a new strategy to boost revenue, the introduction of a new product or service, or the chance to acquire a competitor.
But when top executives rally their troops to forge ahead, many of them often find that the troops are neither ready nor willing.
Why the resistance to change — the one path that may be the best hope for a secure future?
When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. After all the downsizings, restructurings, takeovers or major strategic shifts in recent years, the last thing many employees want is more change. They may be angry and distrustful of management. Their self-esteem may be bruised. And they may not feel that they have any stake in their company’s success, given all their colleagues who have been laid off or whose careers have been sidetracked by previous company initiatives. The idea of yet another transition leaves them cold.
Questions to Ask Yourself
- Are you showing your employees that you understand the difficulties they will face in a major company transition like an acquisition, strategy shift or the introduction of new products or services?
- Are you giving employees the information they need to understand the business case for change?
- Are employees being given the opportunity to express and discuss their feelings about the transition?
- Are you inspiring employees with a detailed vision of the company’s future — and what matters in getting there — and providing both practical and emotional support as they work out their new roles?
- Are you involving employees at every level in translating the company’s vision into new operating procedures?
If you answered no to any of these questions, you’re not doing everything you can to ensure the success of your company’s new venture. To achieve your goals, you need to get employees to let go of the past and move forward as quickly as possible, both on an emotional level and in terms of the work they do. The best way to do that is to first weaken support for the status quo and then build enthusiasm for the new initiative, by following the steps in this article.
To achieve their objectives, the leaders of these companies need to get their employees to let go of the past and move forward as quickly as possible,
Get Premium Already a Premium Subscriber? Sign In
Purchase
Buy this article
Purchase one or more copies as a PDF
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1977-2011. All rights reserved.
This is a very interesting article documenting successful leadership decisions and follow through. It is even more instructional if looked at against the basics of basic need satisfaction psychology and practice of adaptive challenge leadership principles. All of these actions were successful because they supported satisfaction of belonging, power, freedom and fun. To the extent that they were perceived as possible by the participants, they also supported the survival need (higher probability of continued gainful employment). These individual leaders (whether they recognized or verbalized it or not) also recognized their situation as an adaptive challenge rather than a technical problem such as describe is described by Ron Heifetz and Marty Lenski in Leadership on the Line.
The actions directed by these leaders promoted inclusion, shared decision making along with the credit and or responsibility for the resulting successes (belonging, power, freedom to succeed or fail in pursuit of the shared goal).
For anyone looking for keys to additional insight I highly recommend the books Leadership on the Line by Ron Heifetz and Martin Lenski; and Lean Leadership From Chaos to Carrots to Commitment by William Lareau.
It is so tough to get employees to change without incentive. I recently watched “Freakonomics” which studied how humans respond to incentive. To me it requires some creative incentive to induce change.
That incentive doesn’t always have to involve money.
A great article on a very challenging subject. Getting people to let go of the past and move on is the biggest hurdle because their perceptions of change will be down to past experiences and sadly so many companies show little EMPATHY for their employees fears and concerns.
Having experienced multiple organizational changes I would say that honest open communication is key to reducing fear.
Empathy and Looking to the Future should help others see that change is positive.
Interesting article. I have just finished a government retraining program and you might be surprised to hear that the most resistant ones to change in our group were the “young” ones. As an older gentleman I find that people presume I am against change but actually we are the ones one who seem the most radical changes and developments in our life times.