People Don’t Resist Change
…they resist the feeling of loss.*
In my first experiences as a change manager, I relied on my trusted Kotter framework. It wasn’t enough. That’s because I was missing a piece of the puzzle.
There is a big difference between change management and transition management. Organizational changes require people to change their behavior and beliefs. One of the main reasons organizational changes flounder or fizzle out is because leaders fail to support people with the behavioral and psychological effects of change. The Kotter framework alone doesn’t adequately support people with the human side of change.
Anyone who has attended one of my training sessions knows that I believe that there is no change without changing.
THERE IS NO (organizational) CHANGE WITHOUT (individuals) CHANGING!
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THERE IS NO (organizational) CHANGE WITHOUT (individuals) CHANGING! 〰️
Transition requires people to let go of the way they have done things in the past, which means that change managers need to support change participants with managing endings and repatterning.
Because this is a huge topic, I’ll focus this post on Phase 1 — Managing Endings. Analyzing loss a crucial step when planning a transition, but that can’t be done without first selling the problem and comparing the current reality to the future.
Sell the problem: Change initiators have been immersed in the challenge and underestimate how much change participants fully understand the problem. I’ll never forget the moment I realized that I had skipped this step as a new, 20-something year-old, manager. “There was nothing wrong with the way we were doing it before,” was the feedback I got 3 months into rolling out a program change. I had spent so much time hyping the solution, that I didn’t even realize that some change participants felt we never had a problem in the first place.
William and Susan Bridges, authors of Managing Transitions, caution change managers to not pass go unless change participants can answer these questions:
What is the problem?
What’s the evidence?
What would occur if no one acted to solve this problem?
Next, imagine your organization in a future state and write down all of the ways life will be different. Barb Grant, author of Change Management That Sticks, calls this finding “the truth of the change.”
When I turned 21, I told my hair stylist to cut off all of my hair so I could look like Halle Berry. She forgot to tell me the truth of the change.
I woke up looking like Bob Ross. My hairstylist didn’t prepare me for how my habits were going to have to change; I would either need a different sleep routine or would need to redo my hair every morning for 30-40 minutes. Gone were the days of throwing my hair up into a messy bun and heading to class. I instantly regretted my big change.
Explain Current Reality vs. Future State: Change participants need a picture of the desired outcome and need to imagine how it will feel to change their behaviors after the change has been initiated.
What will be different? Who is affected? How?
What are the layers of change (primary, secondary, tertiary, etc.)?
What behaviors need to change?
Lay it all out on the table so people can envision what it’s going to look and feel like to adopt the change. This is crucial for the next step. If people don’t understand how their habits, time, goals, responsibilities, etc. are going to have to change in the future, it leads to resentment when they find out later.
The last element of managing endings is a step that change managers often skip. Maybe because it feels like opening Pandora’s box.
It forces everyone to confront and voice how they are feeling and it requires vulnerability and psychological safety to have an honest conversation.
Analyze Loss: Surface what people stand to lose when making the change by asking what people are thinking and feeling about the change. Barb Grant suggests doing a “Behavioral Change Diagnostic” by asking these types of questions:
What will be hardest about this change for you? Why?
What would you need to make this change possible?
What do you think leaders haven’t considered that they need to know?
People don’t resist change, they resist the feeling of losing their sense of competence. If they have to learn how to do something new, they may suddenly feel incompetent.
People don’t resist change, they resist losing their independence. If there is a new, streamlined and codified way of doing something, they have to confront the fact that they can’t do things in their own quirky and creative way anymore.
People don’t resist change, they resist losing control. If roles and responsibilities are changing in a way that asks change participants to focus on a new initiative or priority, they may have to trust other people to take on the work that they care deeply about.
When you listen deeply while managing the ending of the old way, you will uncover what people stand to lose once the change has been initiated so that you can plan the repatterning phase of the transition (more to come on this in the next post).
Organizational changes initiate a transition period and transitions need a plan. Drop me a line if you’re starting this planning and want a planning template or a thought-partner!
*Many authors have written about this… Ronald Heifetz, William and Susan Bridges, Lisa Lahey and Robert Kegan, and Barb Grant to name a few.
