Helping People Through Change

Leaders are supposed to help people through change, Right?

Maybe. I mean I used to think so . . .

This picture comes from an article I wrote for Transformation Magazine (TM), a publication of Gemini Consulting. At the time, I thought the article was my definitive statement on “everything you needed to know about change.” I was fifty then and wouldn’t have said I was young, but sometimes I am shocked at my hubris. The article was long and I went back and forth with TM editors about what to cut. Of course, I didn’t want to cut anything, (hubris).

I wrote the article in 1998, but I left to join Katzenbach Partners at the end of the year, so it was never published. I accidently left the only copy of the article on my Gemini computer when I turned it in. I saved the illustrations, not the text and by the time I contacted TM it was discarded and IT had long since wiped my hard drive. “Instant karma’s gonna get you.”

When I think back on that article, it was all about large scale change that happened all at one time; it had a distinct “here’s how you make change happen” top-down orientation.  Some of my later work in innovation and improvement was more organic and added more bottom-up work with change teams and internal consulting groups.

This drawing originally came from that top-down orientation. I started with Gemini’s Emotional Cycle of Change the curve:

• Uninformed Optimism
• Informed Pessimism
• Informed Openness
• Informed Optimism

Gemini used this change emotion curve to educate its consultants and client teams about what to expect. It is roughly based upon Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s stages of grief, and it fits what some people (not everyone) go through in change.

I combined this with the Scott and Jaffe quadrant model that explained what happened at various stages:

• If you were in denial, you might be looking backwards and at the way the company used to be.
• If you were resisting, you were looking back and at you personal situation, what you had lost.
• In order to move on you’d need to experiment with different personal roles with a future focus.
• Finally committing or recommitting to the company with a future focus.

My thought in combining these two models was that leaders could help someone focus on the future and the company and then move the change along.

Oh, I was nicer than that sounds. I’ve always believed in listening to people, meeting them where they are and helping only when requested to “help.” What I wrote communicated that I wanted people to get through all this messy emotional stuff and change the company. Yikes.

How I look at this drawing today: People’s reactions to change

Mike Myers and Dana Carvey did a skit on Saturday Night Live called “Wayne’s World,” which later became a movie, about two twenty-ish stoners living in their parents basements doing a video show over the Internet. One of the lines they repeated used was, “We fear change.”

That is a commonly repeated myth. I hear this repeated about children “Oh, he’s just having a tantrum, because I changed his normal lunch.” I hear it said about dogs, “Oh she has her routines and if you don’t give her a bully stick when we go out, she’s all confused.”

People don’t fear change. Think about it. Young adults move away from home to go to college or start a job. They get married, start families. People immigrate between countries. Astronauts go to the International Space Station. People are not afraid of those changes and they don’t resist them.

People fear your change, because they didn’t chose it and haven’t had the time to determine whether the benefits outweigh the loss. People don’t much like loss and if they are looking at the unknown they can only see the loss. So they might push back a little – you know, resist.

Saying to a “resister,”  “Hey, you just need to focus on the future and the company instead of the past and yourself.” isn’t likely to be successful.

How I look at this drawing today: The nature of help.

Carl Rogers, the American psychologist who was a founder of the Human Potential movement, once said, “Help is defined by the recipient. . . . Help that isn’t asked for is rarely seen as help. Most often it is seen as interference.”

Therefore, if a leader looks at this drawing and sees it as a roadmap to make people go through change, it won’t be helpful. It might even prove disastrous.

One of the popular sayings at Gemini, at that time was “Let me help you understand something.” This was  usually the preamble to a project leader telling you what you were going to do and how you were going to do it. I always resisted when I heard this introduction.

I hope I knew better than to promote similar behavior from leaders in change.

How I look at this drawing today: Paths of discovery

The drawing isn’t a roadmap for leaders to direct people, but it could be used by individuals facing a change.

• I could write down my individual reactions and place them in quadrants, because it is rare that all my reactions would be in one particular quadrant.
• I could view the past to future as a personal path and a company path
  • What am I/are we leaving behind?
  • What am I/are we carrying forward?
  • What new is created for me/us in the future?
• What are my choices, options, degrees of freedom?

A team might use the drawing in the same way, if they choose to do so.

If asked, a leader, a coach, a consultant might use this as a process with an individual, or a team.

Remember

Expect people to be different.

Some reactions to change might be predictable, not all.

Change must be a choice.

People need to see the compelling case for change individually as well as for the company.

Help must be asked for.

Some people will work their way through change on their own. Some may talk with their friends. If they ask you as the leader, it is a time to ask questions first more than give answers.