A reporter once asked Dale Berra, son of baseball great Yogi Berra, and a major leaguer himself, if he was similar to his father. To which Dale replied, taking a page from his oft-quoted father, “No, our similarities are different.”
I thought of this comment the other day when a client I had worked with several years ago contacted me about speaking at an upcoming leadership event.
“Sure!” I said, “I’d love to work with your organization again. But tell me, are you facing the same problems with organizational change as when I last addressed this audience?” He quickly replied, “Oh no, it’s nothing like before. Sure, we are still trying to get people to embrace change, but the change is completely different!”
Over 20 years ago, I began researching, writing and speaking about managing the “human side” of organizational change. At that time I thought it was a topic that would be a top priority — for a few years (until we’d all mastered the strategies and techniques of change management) — and then the focus would shift to more current organizational challenges.
I was wrong.
Two decades later, dealing with change remains the crucial organizational challenge.
In a recent survey by the Conference Board, 539 global CEOs were asked to list their top concerns. In Europe and Asia as well as in North America, organizational flexibility and adaptability to change consistently ranked at the top of the list. Only revenue growth received a higher ranking.
What I overlooked in my assumption of change mastery is the radical way change would, well . . . change. Many leaders did become proficient in managing incremental change (continuous improvement) and the occasional (or annual) large-scale transformation. But managers today are facing a flood of continuous, overlapping, and accelerating change that has turned their organizations upside down. And managing people through that kind of change requires all the communication and leadership strategies we learned in the past – and then some.
The shift from “a change” to “constant change” is more than just semantics. The increased difficulty lies in the fact that most people and processes are set up for continuity, not chaos. We’re built to defend the status quo, not annihilate it. But the world is throwing change at us with such intensity that there is hardly enough time to regain our equilibrium or catch our breath. Nor is there much hope that the rate of change will ease in the future.
So, what does it take to manage people through continuous change? Here are some suggestions:
Realize that resistance to change is inevitable – and highly emotional. This may not really surprise you, but understand that it is a very real result of our neurological makeup. Change jerks us out of our comfort zone by stimulating the prefrontal cortex, an energy-intensive section of the brain responsible for insight and impulse control. But the prefrontal cortex is also directly linked to the most primitive part of the brain, the amygdala (the brain’s fear circuitry, which in turn controls our “flight or fight” response). And when the prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed with complex and unfamiliar concepts, the amygdala connection gets kicked into high gear. All of us are then subject to the psychological disorientation and pain that can manifest in anxiety, fear, depression, sadness, fatigue or anger.
Didn’t think you were hired to manage emotional turmoil? Think again.
Being aware of and responsive to the emotional component of change is now a prerequisite for effective leadership. This task is complicated by the fact that the emotional cycle of transition (denial, resistance, choice, acceptance, engagement) overlaps – as one change begins while others are in various stages.
Give people a stabilizing foundation. In a constantly changing organization, where instability must be embraced as positive, a sense of stability can still be maintained through corporate identity and collective focus of purpose. The leader’s role here is to create stability through a constant reinterpretation of the company’s history, present activities, and vision for the future. And, by using the term vision, I’m not referring to a corporate statement punctuated by bullet points. I’m talking about a clearly articulated, emotionally charged, and encompassing picture of what the organization is trying to achieve.
Encourage employees to mingle. The new change-management fundamentals include an increasing focus on relationships and collaboration. Social networks – those ties among individuals that are based on mutual trust, shared work experiences, and common physical and virtual spaces are in many senses the true structure of today’s organizations. Anything you as a leader can do to nurture these mutually rewarding, complex and shifting relationships will enhance the creativity and change readiness within your team or throughout your organization.
Give up the illusion of control. The biggest obstacle to the organizational flexibility that executives say they want may be their unwillingness to give up control. Rather than tighten the reins, leaders need to loosen their grip in order to align the energies and talents of their teams and organizations around change initiatives. No one likes change that is mandated – but most of us react favorably to change we are part of creating.
Leaders need to loosen their hold on information, as well. Transparent communication means disclosing market realities and the company’s inner workings to everyone — not just to the upper echelon. It requires an unprecedented openness: a proactive, even aggressive, sharing of financials, strategy, business opportunities, risks, successes and failures. People need pertinent information about demographic, global, economic, technological, consumer and competitive trends. They need to understand the economic reality of the business and why that reality is the driving force behind change. Most of all, people need to understand how their actions impact the success of change initiatives – and how those initiatives impact the overall success of the corporation.
I often tell audiences that “organizations don’t change. People do . . . or they don’t.” The similarities in today’s continuous change may indeed be different from change in the past. But here’s one thing that has hasn’t changed. People are still the key.
Or, as Yogi Berra might have explained it: When it comes to the importance of the human element in change, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
