Tools for Improvement – An E-Newsletter
September 2010
Do You Manage Change, or Does Change Manage You?
Robert Eaton, former Chairman of Chrysler Corporation once said, “Any culture, be definition, exists primarily to prevent change, to set in stone the lessons of the past.”
How willing are we to embrace change? I had a friend that always claimed he was a “change agent,” yet when it actually came down to making changes he was as resistant as any one else. But what is change all about? William Bridges, PhD tells us that it isn’t the changes that do you in, it’s the transitions.
Change is situational, it is an event. Transition is psychological; it is the process that people go through as they comes to terms with the details of the new situation that change brought about.
Claes Janssen is a psychologist and writer. He introduced the four rooms of change. The Four Rooms of Change is a theory that deals with change, with what happens with people and organizations in change and transition and how they can influence their own and others change processes.
In Contentment you are just that — content and without a change need or demand. Your energy is focused on sustaining a good working system. Life is good — you are centered, focused, and in control. Then! A need for change emerges. It might be internal — for example, a need for you or your group to take your work to a new level, perhaps automating a system to free up time for other pursuits. Or it could be external, like an imposed budget cut or new organization-wide program that demands a response.
When we are forced to confront external change, we go through Denial, a state of resistance where we’d just as soon not deal with the new, but stay with the old. We believe that if we deny change, we’ll have less stress. Yet the opposite is true. The more we resist change, the more stress we experience.
The next stage we enter is Confusion. This is where we accept the need for change and begin to grapple for ways to proceed beyond the known into the unknown. The state of Confusion is actually good news because it offers s the glimmering of hope and future possibility.
We need to realize that being confused at this point is not only natural, but to be expected. Once we see confusion as a normal reaction to change, we can quickly move beyond it.
Finally, we enter the stage of Renewal where we embrace change with enthusiasm. We do this either be accepting change that is imposed on us or by conceiving of and implementing new ideas that may be a complete change in the way we’ve thought of and done things in the past.
From Renewal, we cycle right back to the first stage of Contentment. Our new ideas are implemented and before we know it, our fresh concepts have become commonplace and mainstream.
Now that we understand the stages of change, what do we do as leaders to help people deal with it?
During Denial it is important for leaders to clearly explain the consequences of not changing. Describe how the new situation will be better and more comfortable and how resisting the change will be harder than accepting it.
During Confusion, assist people through training and coaching to adapt to the new situation. They have accepted the need to change, but lack the skills to change. Training and coaching is the key at this stage.
During Renewal, invite their participation. People are coming up with their own ideas on how to make things better and want to make improvements of what you have described in your initial plans. Encourage this and provide resources to support the entrepreneurial efforts of your team.
Communication is the key during change and transition. If people don’t know what is going on and you force them to guess, the rumor mill will take over and you will lose the initiative. Get in front of the rumor mill with proactive communication.
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