Overcoming resistance to change

In practice: Engaging with staff impacted by a change to understand concerns and take mitigating actions to lessen or remove the impact.

When do we embrace / resist change?

The truth is that people’s response to change varies widely and depends, amongst other things, on their personality, on the change they are being presented with and how the change impacts on them personally.

Some individuals are more flexible than others, more inquisitive, more resilient and so on. Indeed, our different attitudes to change are an essential aspect of some personality theories.

Our attitudes to change also depend on several factors about the change itself.

Research suggests that people are more likely to support a particular change when any of the following conditions are met:

Build awareness

Especially for those who are currently unaware of the changes, we will want to describe them in a way that allays people’s concerns and emphasises how the changes will resolve existing concerns that they themselves may have.

As mentioned on the communicating page on the website different people like their information in different ways, and it is important to cover a variety of approaches. Some people want to know about the big strategic picture behind the changes, some want to know how it will affect them and their team-mates personally and so on. It may be worth having a website, an individual or a helpdesk that people can link to to find out answers to specific questions they may have.

For those who are happy enough with the status quo it may be important to emphasise what is not going to change to give them the re-assurance of some continuity.

Engage

In trying to move people on from awareness to active engagement with the change, once more it helps to use different formats: workshops and discussion groups work best for some people, one-to-one discussions or emails for others.

It helps to be able to outline what will happen when so that people are re-assured and know what to expect. It is also important at this stage to listen to people’s concerns and respond to them. Reservations people have about your plan may be well-founded, and their resistance may improve your changes. Handling these concerns with fairness and consistency will help people to trust you and buy-in to the process.

Mobilise

To mobilize people more actively you must make the path look do-able and the first steps easy. At this stage you may need to emphasise the top-level backing for the changes and find change champions with enough influence to carry the changes forward locally.

As the team or individual initiating the change your job now becomes one of regularly checking with your change champions and removing roadblocks so that they can actually get on with driving the implementation.

Sustain

Eventually you are able to step back from the detail into the ambassadorial role of publicizing the successes of the change champions.

Emphasise how the improvements have resolved initial unhappiness and built hope for the future. Successful change will become part of the team and organisation’s self-belief and narrative for the future - an important step in creating a can-do culture.