Why do people resist change and how can a leader decrease resistance?
“To
improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”
Winston
Churchill
The ability to change and adapt to internal and external
demands are evitable to a successful organization. Even though change is
evitable it can be very problematic to implement within an organization due to
resistance. Resistance to change can occur on a number of levels but this
article will focus on resistance to change in reference to people. People often
resist change for a number of reasons, in fact, ten of the most common resistances
to change are:- Loss of control over one’s environment.
- Fear of the unknown.
- Negative view of change due to past involvement in change efforts (predisposition to change).
- Lack of knowledge of why change is happening.
- No communication surrounding the change/reason for the change is unclear.
- Mistrust of the organization.
- Timing of change effort.
- Changes in the normal day to day operation.
- No seen benefit or reward from change (ex: increased work load).
- Employee are not consulted or included in the change effort/lack of buy-in from employee.
"Change is
hard because people overestimate the value of what they have—and underestimate
the value of what they may gain by giving that up."
— James
Belasco and Ralph Stayer
The responsibility of a leader is to minimize the resistance
to change by identifying and understanding the source of resistance to predict
when, where, and why resistance is happening. This information should then be
used to build strategies for decreasing resistance to any change management
plans. This can be a hard and very problematic solution to come up with. Can
one predict resistance?
In short, YES but there is no easy way to predict the type of
resistance that a leader may face. In large, people are very unique and
everyone’s reason for resistance to change is different. However, a leader
identify commonalities or trends of resistance within an organization. It all
starts with communication. Communicating the why, when, where, how, and why can
be essential in identifying areas of resistance. Communicating through change increases
buy-in, allows inclusion, and most of all decreases the unknown. People are
more accepting if they know what is coming even though they may not like the
change.
There is no one size fits all way to eliminate resistance to
change but as a leader you can minimize resistance. During change efforts,
leaders need to have an open line of communication about the change to
employees. Remember, change is already scary, so let’s not add to the fear.
Dr. Kay Lackey
Quotes in order, are from: http://www.brainyquote.com/ and http://www.leadershipnow.com/changequotes.html
No comments:
Post a Comment