Change is Easy and That's Why It Fails

Steering change is an uphill task for a leader, more if you do not support your team through their transition.

- Hamish Knox

Change, corporate or not, is easy. A change is ‘today we don’t have a health benefits plan and tomorrow we do,’or ‘today we calculate our compensation this way and tomorrow we will calculate it that way.’

Change is easy because it is external and impersonal, like turning on a light. You ‘change’ the light from off to on or on to off. Easy. 

‘Transition’, on the other hand, is internal and very personal. like turning off a light when someone is reading, or turning on a light when someone is sleeping, the external change prompts an internal transition.

Change fails because leaders forget that their team will go through transition as part of change. leaders forget this because they ‘already’ went through transition months ago when they first recognised the requirement to change.

Each member of your team will go through the four stages of transition—denial, resistance, exploration, and commitment—but the amount of time they spend in each stage will vary based on their scripting and past experiences with change, professional and personal.

Supporting each person on your team through denial requires you as their leader to: 1) create as much clarity around the change as you are legally allowed to, and 2) ask questions of each individual when they exhibit denial behaviours to understand their real problem (for example, an employee says, “this too shall pass” and instead of saying “no it won’t,” their leader says, “what do you mean?”).

When your team is in the resistance phase of transition, it would be wise to heed the cliché, ‘it’s the quiet ones you have to watch.’ Quiet resistance to your change will foment especially if you punish overt resistance, or if your organisation has a low-trust hierarchical culture that discourages open dialogue.