At a recent Navigating Change® workshop, a regional manager shared that every time she introduces something new to her team, their first reaction is negative. It doesn’t matter if the change was beneficial (say, a new technology or tool that makes it easier to perform certain tasks) or not; her team members tended to react negatively and resist the change. Most participants in the workshop echoed this pattern of reaction to change with their team members.
This type of negative response to change is not unusual. In fact, the well-researched condition known as Negativity Bias is a psychological phenomenon where humans give more weight to negative perceptions, experiences, information, or stimuli than to equally intense positive ones. Negativity Bias can contribute to strong emotional responses and impact judgment and decision-making, particularly in situations involving risk or uncertainty. The origins of this bias may be a variation of the fight-or-flight human wiring that helped prioritize threats to survival millions of years ago. What was beneficial in the era of wooly mammals contributes to organizational hurdles to navigating change today.
While Negativity Bias is prevalent, it is not the only point of resistance to change. Change resistance refers to the reluctance or opposition of individuals or teams within a firm to embrace and adapt to changes in processes, technologies, strategies or organizational structure. Collective habits, routines, fears and cultural characteristics can play into change resistance. Lack of trust in leadership, poor communications and lack of training and support make resistance to organizational change more challenging.
In the business world, the track record for successful change management is mixed at best. When it comes to navigating change, we know a great deal about what doesn’t work:
- Failing to develop a clear picture of the organization’s future state.
- Failing to engage people across the organization in co-owning a future-state vision.
- Failing to develop a deliberate road map between the current environment and future state.
- Failing to communicate frequently about progress and challenges in the journey.
- Failing to regularly re-engage the organization in the future state vision.
- Failing to adjust the road map as conditions evolve.
Even with a well-documented body of knowledge about what doesn’t work, there is a dearth of success stories when it comes to change management victories. Still, every organization is faced with navigating a continually changing operating environment.
Five fundamental factors are needed to overcome the inertia that stifles change programs — a clear future state vision, engagement, communication, actualization and reinforcement. Every venture, be it a start-up or an ongoing enterprise, begins with a vision of what success looks like — what an organization wants to demonstrate. From there, engagement with key stakeholders — employees, partners and owners — gives the change endeavor traction and sustainability. Frequent, regular communication with stakeholders about where the organization is going and about progress and accomplishments toward the vision creates transparency. Actualization brings specific results to life and highlights progress for the organization to observe. Reinforcement means frequent re-articulation of the vision, the road map to fulfill it and progress.
Here are specific steps leaders can take to help your team navigate change:
- Recognize the business world is in perpetual motion. Help your team reframe their view of change as an ongoing process, not an event. Recognizing that operating conditions are in perpetual motion helps align expectations and shift away from the false belief that the status quo means a static environment.
- Unify the team around your company’s definition of what success looks like (aka your vision). The vision is like an organization’s GPS – while conditions may change, the destination remains constant, and constancy empowers people in navigating change.
- Declare progress, milestones, successes and setbacks. Declaration provides comfort through transparency. When these declarations are part of regular, ongoing communications, team members have an opportunity to embrace the message, even if it is related to a setback. There is a tendency for leaders to disregard setbacks, but that can contribute to distrust of leadership.
- Repeat. Repetition of these steps is essential in overriding the natural proclivity toward Negativity Bias and resistance to change. It’s been said that more than 90% of our daily thoughts are repetitive, and 80% of repeated thoughts are negative. If this view is even directionally correct, it means we need to invest heavily in highlighting the benefits of advancing our business in the direction of our vision. Until we develop mental and emotional engagement in the vision, navigating change among our team members is likely to remain stuck at the starting line.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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