As a leader, manager or supervisor, you and your peers often wrestle with team members who “don’t like change”. To you, this makes no sense. Change after all, is the creative part of work! Seeing yourselves as first and foremost, agents of change, you shake your collective leaders’ heads and commiserate on how difficult it is to get your employees to joyfully accept your new ideas. What’s their deal?
You need a corporate perspective check!
Do you remember when you lived at home as a teen and you had a beautiful Saturday laid out before you? By some miracle you were not scheduled to work, your homework wasn’t due until the end of the next week and your best friend was out of town. You had the day to yourself and planned on getting some of your own projects done.
Your dad however, had other ideas. He had been thinking all week about these ideas and had come up with some beautiful ways to streamline his systems and his processes, with the help of his well equipped young teen and some new lawn implement tools. The pool needed to be shut down for the oncoming fall season, the lawn needed one more good mow, the sprinkler system needed to be blown out and the rain gutters had to be dealt with before the impending rain and snow flurries. Your dad was pumped! He would get to hang out with you, try out his new leaf blower, teach you how to use it AND he wouldn’t have to climb up on the roof this year as it was so much safer and more efficient to have his capable and willing teen clean out those gutters. Yes, this would be a mandatory father/teen bonding time. What a great idea! Are you getting the picture? The beauty of change is in the eye of the beholder because it depends on which side of the change equation you are on.
Organizational development training around change should acknowledge this perspective issue and spend more time helping leaders to include their team members, as much as possible, in the design and development side of the equation. Likewise, change seminars offered to team members should focus on working through frustration, delaying self-gratification, giving the benefit of the doubt to managers and re-framing the changes coming at them as opportunities to self-regulate and become self-disciplined. This approach would focus on realistic skill building concepts rather than attempts to convince employees that foisted change is wonderful and fun.