Addressing your Team’s Concerns about Change
Something I have noticed about change in the workplace is that the only people who consistently like change are those who suggested and pushed to implement it in the first place—the default position for most employees is to hate change.
There is a significant gap between an organisation’s strategic needs and the concerns of its employees. This largely comes from how leadership approaches change – treating adaptive challenges like technical problems. As much as someone might be technically minded, the journey from “input to processing to output” is simple enough where computers are concerned, but it is drastically different when the computer is substituted with the human mind.
For example, consider an elderly person who has just had their driver’s license revoked. When people reach a certain age, between reduced reaction times, poor eyesight, or even mental degradation, allowing them to drive often becomes more dangerous than not. In this instance, it makes sense for them to lose their license, but even in old age people still need to be able to get around.
An obvious solution would be to install a ridesharing app on the elder’s phone or to organise lifts and carpooling when necessary. This is pragmatic, a ‘technical solution’. The issue here is that the problem isn’t technical, it’s adaptive. To the individual, their ability to drive was likely tied to their sense of independence and autonomy – imagine having to plan and rely on the availability of others just to get to the grocery store.
Adaptive problems are ‘human’ problems, they relate to a person’s identity, values, and self-worth. When an employee reaches out to management and says “A new system is being implemented and I don’t understand it”, the common solutions are:
- To ask them whether all of their requirements are ‘within spec’.
- To let them know that there will be user-acceptance testing.
- To offer them a position on the steering committee to implement the change, often as a “change agent”.
These are technical solutions to an adaptive problem. The employee was not asking for more say in the process, they were informing management that they felt scared, uncertain, confused, vulnerable, and out of control. Recall my previous piece on the roles people play in change – when someone on the team is scared, confused, and vulnerable, they become a Victim to the process, or worse, a Critic, an active detractor in the change process.
As a manager, your job isn’t just about managing processes, it is about managing people. Sitting down with individual employees to walk them through each change may be time consuming, but it is an important part of change. Making changes to workflows and processes in the workplace, most concerns come down to small things that can easily be amended or explained as needed.
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