Resistance to Change

I've come to the conclusion that people aren't really resistant to change. They are very resistant, however, to being changed. When people are a part of the process and when they're hearts and minds are in the game, they not only aren't resisistant they become champions.

Change, whether it's in your personal life or in business can be either good or bad, depending on what you make of it. When we see change as potentially threatening by nature we dig our heels in and fight it. When we look at it as an opportunity to achieve our goals, we want to move foward.

I've found that one of the best ways to be an agent of positive change is to take a collaborative approach with the team, making sure that we all know that the goals we are trying to acheive benefit us all. The beneift may be direct or indirect, depending on the role each person on the team plays, but the objective and the outcome potentials are key.

Other than outright resistance, there are a lot of reasons why people may not jump on the band wagon. The most common one I've seen isn't so much a fear of the outcome but more inertia. An object in motion tends to stay in motion, and an object at rest tends to stay at rest. "I'm happy where I am". They don't recognize a need. Some of the other subtle resistors are procrastinators ("if I keep everyone occupied with something else, maybe the boss will forget"), and nesters (I've worked hard to get where I'm at, and this might be threatening in the long run").

The most dangerous are the active resisitors (assholes). They are usually either in a position where the potential implications of defiance aren't substantial to them, or they are in a high enough position to be an obstruction. It may be a long time legacy employee that no one would ever think will leave (he thinks he's irreplaceable) or the VP who will sing the praises of change to the top and silently undermine from the background. In either case the issue needs to be dealt with quickly. If not, the poison seeps through the rest of the team and the change is doomed to fail. I'm not usually an advocate of the ax, but people who actively work against the best interest of the company should be out the door quick.

A while back I wrote about solution selling. Driving change within an organization isn't all that different. The company has a whole and each person in it has defined needs. Rather than sell the change as change itself, sell it as a solution to the problems at hand. Without the individuals recognition of the need, the change will be an uphill battle. Needs are drivers of action, and action is a driver of change.