Okay this was recently published in Advisor Perspectives
http://advisorperspectives.com/newsletters11/Change_Isnt_So_Hard.php
but for my readers here I wanted to make the link to toyota lean SO . . . here we go:
People Skills 101: Reducing Resistance to Change
by Justin Locke
I was recently reading a book about Toyota “lean” management techniques, and an ongoing complaint in this and other management books in general is how much time it takes to overcome resistance to change in large organizations. So for the benefit of anyone seeking to effect change in their organization, I thought it might be worthwhile to examine the nature of resistance itself. Maybe one could reduce waste in the process by lessening the original resistance, rather than increasing the energy used in overcoming it.
The phrase “in my humble opinion” applies to everything you see here.
The key to reducing both individual and organizational resistance is to first understand its emotional underpinnings. There are five basic elements of resistance, and four of them are positives: membership, rank, loyalty, ritual, and fear of embarrassment. Here we go:
First of all, with all due respect to Mr. Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, the most important needs of human beings are not physiological. Important though those needs are, the highest need of human beings is for membership, i.e., basic connection and belonging. People will give up food, sex, even their very lives, to achieve and maintain it.
So bear in mind, when you want to institute a change, you have to calculate how the change will impact everyone’s sense of connection and belonging to their family, their coworkers, the organization itself, and to you. And more importantly, you want to plan ahead on how they will perceive the extent and impact of the change.
No matter what you say about the changes you want to make, and no matter how carefully you present them, and no matter how logical your argument, because of the extreme flammability of the average person’s fear of loss of control/connection/status, most people will immediately interpret your proposals in terms of the worst-case scenario it could possibly represent to them. Human imagination is limitless, and not always all that logical, so one should be careful not to set it off. The resistance is not always resistance to the actual change; the resistance might be to a spectacular horror movie
loosely based on the change you are proposing. People who might otherwise seem quite unimaginative will surprise you with what they can imagine when they feel threatened.
There are two primary ways of reducing this kind of resistance reflex:
The first one is to make the change as small as you possibly can. The smaller the change, the smaller the threat to current status quo. There is always the temptation to present changes as being wonderfully new, sweeping, and grand, since doing so looks so good in the fund-raising brochure, but when push comes to shove, the bigger the (perceived) change, the bigger the (perceived) potential threat. So keep it as small as you can. If you say it is small, it makes any overblown reaction to it seem inappropriate.
The second method of reducing resistance is to do a preemptive strike by eliminating the most common imagined threats / worst case scenarios before people can imagine them on their own. Do a little thinking and homework, and at the time of the announcement of the change, point out what will NOT change. This could be a very long list. If you don’t do this, the lack of information will always be interpreted, again, in terms of the absolute worst case scenario, and worst case scenarios are the lifeblood of resistance thinking. Reinforce the status quo as much as you can, and emphasize the continuation the status quo whenever possible.
Another trick to overcoming resistance is to define the problem, but instead of a solution, just give the parameters of an acceptable solution and then step back and let other people come up with the “change.” For example, you can define a problem and say, “okay, I don’t have a solution, but the solution must do x, must cost no more than y, and take no longer than z.” Now when the change comes, the people who designed it have “ownership,” and they will defend it for you. Besides, they may have come up with a fabulous solution.
Note, when dealing with objections, it’s best to do this one on one, not in a huge group meeting. The reason is, when people are afraid of losing connection, they won’t say that openly. They will express their fear by attacking the plan itself, and when other people hear this, it will snowball into a festival of can-you-top-this worst case scenarios. So always remember, you may be dealing with fear of disconnection, not a logical argument, and attacking brittle logic head on will only make the underlying fear that much worse.
The next element of resistance is “rank.”
A big part of membership in any group, be that a wolf pack or a chicken coop or a baboon troupe– is a sense of rank. Those who are highest in the pecking order have the most power, and also have the most to lose from any changes. Therefore they are the most likely to be resistant to it.
For these high ranking individuals, being asked to adopt and learn something entirely new has a tendency to feel like a demotion. In a sense it is, because they are going from a state of comfort, i.e., great expertise in the known, to the scary discomfort of being the new kid on the block. Part of the reason why these people put in the effort to be in a high position in the first place is because they cannot bear being in a state of “freshman vulnerability.” This
feeling may not be avoidable if the change is large enough.
The best approach is to keep the pecking order as intact as possible, or even better, somehow imply that this new system is a reward, or is somehow a sign of their higher status that “they get to do it first.” And if at all possible, go on the “ride” with them . . . accept the sense of demotion that comes with the new system. Again, high status is a huge part of group membership, and if someone feels like the change is a clear demotion to their hard-won social status, they will fight it tooth and nail, or quit.
There is, however, one last ditch technique you can try with such folks, and that is to take advantage of the “hero reflex.” In this case, you couch the need for change as a threat to the entire group. You tell them that an unpleasant frightening task– i.e., facing a wholly new problem and trying a wholly new solution– is required, and we need a hero to do this terrible job. Of course, you expect your highest ranking people to be heroes, and the chance to be a hero is hard to pass up when it offers such an opportunity for even higher
status. No guarantees that they’ll go for it, but it’s worth a shot.
The next item on the resistance agenda is the issue of loyalty– in this case, loyalty to the past.
No matter where you go on this planet, and wherever you find people, you will consistently find loyalty. Just exactly what people will be loyal to is another subject. Some people are loyal to their country, some people are loyal to their school, some people are loyal to their family, and some people are loyal to all the above. And many people are loyal to traditions in the workplace.
When you want to institute a new way of doing things, it is very important to realize that you are rattling the cage of loyalty to the old system. In order for people to be loyal to your new system, you are asking them to commit a form of treason, i.e., to be disloyal to the past system. No matter how good your new system is, and no matter how lousy the old one is, on a gut level the change just feels WRONG.
Criminal. Immoral.
Loyalty does this. It’s everywhere. Being loyal just feels good, and one can rationalize it ad finitum.
It is a common mistake to think that you can overcome loyalty to an obsolete system with a purely logical argument. This rarely works; loyalty is emotional, not logical, so be aware of that and deal with it as such. People have a need to be loyal, and they can’t change on a dime. Their need to be loyal to something is always there, so make sure you are managing the loyalty energy to your advantage.
One method of loyalty management is to say you are not asking them to be disloyal to the old system; on the contrary, you say your new system is merely enhancing their loyalty to the old system. This might be a good time to remind everyone of their higher ideals, which, for example, might be “best patient outcome” or “best customer service.” The loyalty energy is there, and if it is not working for you it is working against you, so be aware of it and use it.
Next, when you make a change, bear in mind that no matter how successful you are, there will always be a little bit of nostalgia for the old system. Any kind of change in one’s environment, no matter how many benefits it has, carries with it a sense of loss of connection to the past, and therefore requires a little bit of grieving time. The NFL occasionally has games where teams play in their old-fashioned uniforms. This lets everyone settle into a
collective sense of connecting to “the good old days.” You can occasionally let people do things the old way just “for old times sake.” This will take advantage of the old system as being something you own, rather than letting it be a distraction and competition for loyalty. Constantly honoring what was and is good about the old system (and if there’s nothing good about it, make something up) will make you and your changes seem like less of an enemy.
The fourth element of resistance is the power of ritual.
We have so many rituals in our lives we tend to take them for granted, but they are there, and they are there for a reason. They are a big part of reinforcing our fragile sense of connection and belonging. Every baseball game begins with the national anthem, every rotary club meeting in the USA begins with the Pledge of Allegiance and “God Bless America.” It’s a ritual. It’s a habit. Seems pointless to an outsider, but it isn’t. Collective habits are part of belonging to a culture.
When you are initiating change, no matter how logical your argument for it, you are coping with the inertia of habit. The best way to change a habit is not to fight it, but to replace it with yet another habit. For this, we employ. . . Persistence. Achieving change via persistence is not a new idea, but let’s try to add a new twist:
Persistence always sounds like it’s really hard and arduous, but persistence is actually one of the easiest things you can do. The trick is to be mindlessly repetitive, and to do it with the least amount of effort possible. You don’t need to explain your new system in a different way each day, you don’t have to come at things from a different angle, you don’t need to make a cogent argument, and you don’t even have to listen to all the arguments you hear. Instead, just boil the highest priority down to one simple phrase or two, and
you just keep saying the same thing over and over again day after day.
People will eventually get tired of arguing with you, or they may adopt the new system just to get some peace and quiet. Your new system will become the new habit. Pick your goal carefully though, because once it becomes a habit, changing it will be just as hard!
Again, the key to effective persistence is not to expend a lot of energy on it. Do a very small thing, but do it every single day. The idea is not to fight the resistance, but to wear it down without tiring yourself out. It takes far more energy to come up with lots of objections than it does to repeat the same idea every day.
And finally, we get to the negative that needs to be addressed, i.e. fear of embarrassment.
One thing that is useful when reducing resistance is to make sure that you are willing to be the “fall guy” for the changeover anxiety. People will be hesitant to do things for fear of “looking stupid”and being the butt of coworker ridicule, but if they can easily point to you and say “I think it’s dumb too, I am just doing it because (you) said to do it,” they are in a state of emotional safety during the changeover period. Let them laugh. As long they are doing the new system, you win.
And finally, a most important element of bringing about change is the element of forgiveness.
Just to illustrate, I am an active social dancer, and every once in a while I will take a private lesson with some national superstar teacher. Invariably, this teacher will point out to me some basic technical flaw that needs to be fixed– after all, that’s what I’m paying them to do. The problem is, in accepting the fact that I need to fix this thing, I also have to deal with the shocking realization that I have been doing this particular thing wrong for 20 years, with every single woman that I have danced with, and they have all politely
tolerated it. That’s a lot of “oops” to swallow in one gulp.
(Many people cannot cope with this kind of awareness, so they prefer to stay where they are, in blissful denial. If you seek to establish change in such people, you must first improve their base sense of safety and connection. Lotta work, but do-able if you have the desire, time, and energy.).
If you have managed to effectively manifest change in someone, both they and you have to remember to add in some forgiveness for past imperfections. Once it’s been fixed it’s best not to bring it up the past ever again, even in jest. Focus on celebrating the new and continuously improving you. See my article on “the power of praise” (http://www.cpa2biz.com/Content/media/PRODUCER_CONTENT/Newsletters/Articles_2011/CPA/Mar/PeopleSkills101.jspfor more info.
These are just some general guidelines that may or may not apply to your situation. I hope this at least provided some food for thought and maybe a different perspective. Good luck.
© Justin Locke
Justin Locke is an entertaining speaker. Call him at 781 330-8143 to discuss having him appear at your next event.
