Do you find yourself doing research on the best change approaches to manage all the change your people are facing? Are you pulling out your Prosci materials, re-reading “Transitions” by William Bridges, or wishing you had a spare half million in your budget so you could hire McKinsey?
If you are involved in supporting the well-being and development of the people in your organization, figuring out how to help them through change likely has become a top priority in these whirlwind days.
Humans are facing change at an intensity most generations alive today have never seen before. The tectonic shifts in which multiple dimensions of life are being impacted at the same time are shaking people’s sense of stability, orientation, competence, and well-being.
Unfortunately, most change approaches out there are no match for the change we are seeing today. Here is why:
1. They ignore the personal journey. Change has always been a personal journey. However, many CEOs have told me, “I don’t care what they are feeling. Employees will change because they are being paid to do so.” Consequently, the most popular change approaches are those that ignore the personal change journey.
If it wasn’t evident to business leaders before, perhaps the “Great Resignation” we are seeing today finally will bring home the idea that change is, indeed, personal and should be treated as such.
Kurt Lewin, Virginia Satir, and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross all describe the personal journey, but their approaches are designed more for tracking progress than supporting it. McKinsey’s 7 Steps reduces people down to a data point to be analyzed, and John Kotter’s model assumes people will just go along for the ride. Prosci’s ADKAR, the Heath brothers’ Switch Theory, and Nudge Theory all recognize the need to motivate people to change, but none of them consider what it takes to support personal evolution to become a new iteration of self.
2. They underestimate the stronghold of status quo. While I was facilitating the launch of a new performance review policy at a Fortune 500 company, a senior leader was surprised to hear a manager say the policy would never work. His reason was that longstanding traditions, ingrained in the fabric of the company culture were at odds with the proposed changes.
Current change approaches tend to focus on getting a change accepted and often fail to consider what deeply held beliefs within an individual or organization may overrun it.
If you work for an organization that expects perfection, trying something new—especially if it is at odds with existing norms for behavior—would feel risky. However, falling down is a critical stage of the evolution process. If you live in a culture or work for an organization that doesn’t make room for that, then requests to embrace change will be met with nothing but an aggressive set of defenses focused on avoiding falling down, messing up, or losing.
If there is no room for change, status quo will prevail. Room has to be created first by questioning both individual and organizational beliefs in an effort to identify the roots of status quo and disrupt them.
3. They fail to respect human nature. When the change you are asking people to make feels threatening to their perception of self and understanding of how life is supposed to unfold, their human survival instincts flare reactively. Human nature will deploy defenses, throw up barricades, and launch grenades at that change.
Consider someone who has been running a marketing department with success for a decade. They have been the expert for so long they don’t remember not being known for it. The idea of being the expert would be hardwired into their psyche.
Current change frameworks prescribe communicating the why and appealing to the rational side of an individual. However, no matter how compelling the why is, and no matter how much their rational brain agrees the change is needed, just telling one of these experts they need to change the way they operate isn’t going to cut it. They may say they are on board with a change, but sensing a threat to their expert identity would cause their hearts, minds, and souls to fight against it—often without their conscious knowledge.
Failing to consider the power of human nature is the #1 reason I believe billions of dollars are wasted on change efforts every year.
What to Do?
Today’s world demands a new approach. Rather than try to manage change, leaders need to model what it means to embrace change personally, and organizations need to invest in strengthening the traits that are critical to the human ability to adapt and thrive amid change.
To thrive amid today’s change-quakes, people need more than resilience. They need strategies to help them navigate their personal change journeys, break free from status quo thinking, calm their natural defenses, and help them adapt to the changing conditions of their lives.
They need to be reminded of where they came from and what they are capable of and what they were created to do.
Consider this: Humans were made to change. They are born masters of it!
If you want to accelerate the evolution of your organization, you must recognize the shortcomings of current change approaches, and acknowledge the unique nature of the kind of change people are being asked to make today. Then start nurturing the natural evolution of your people. Align your change initiatives with their human nature and help revive their innate capability to evolve.
