I drafted most of this post last year, but when I realised it was going stale in the drafts I dusted it down and finished it off. It gave me the opportunity to review my notes and refresh my memory on these ideas.
Change can be hard for people and in our Aurora session on Adaptive Leadership we discussed the idea that people aren’t fearing change itself, they’re fearing what they will lose when the change happens.
Adaptive Leadership challenges, as presented to us at Aurora, are ones where we’re looking to change a “hearts and minds” situation, rather than implementing an established change. It suggests that we assess the features of the situation, deciding what to discard and what to keep,
After the session I was thinking about how breaking down these elements of a change can help “show your workings”. If people are struggling with getting on board with a change, letting them see the bigger picture can help them appreciate what’s going on. For example you might want to share:
What we are leaving behind? – Clarifying how the activities we are leaving behind are not serving us anymore and reassuring colleagues that these are what we want to move away from.
What we are doing instead? – Discussing how we’re keeping the good bits, and what ideas we’re bringing in to replace the discarded activities.
What will the new thing look like? – Breaking down the new solution so that people can see where it differs and where it matches previous approaches. Showing what tools will be used and how they work.
Why we are doing this? – Stressing that this isn’t change for change’s sake – we’re aiming for a better solution – we want to thrive!
What will happen if it doesn’t work? – Clarify how people can feedback and how it’ll be reviewed. Will we be looking to iterate improvements or revert to previous methods?
How we feeling about this? – Emotional responses can reveal things that might not have been addressed already. Acknowledging our own fears, and listening to other peoples worries can shed a light on more hard to define issues.
Having experienced bad change management (where an entire department were sent on a course about accepting change, rather than being asked to meaningfully contribute to, or offered a breakdown of, the changes that were coming) I can see how this sort of information would have helped me. However these only work when the changes are genuinely there to improve things, so building trust with your colleagues is really important. They need to see that you are committed to making your workplace better, and that the changes are well thought out.
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