How to Overcome Resistance to Change

 How will the project be initiated, carried through, and sustained?  What tools and support will there be for affected stakeholders?  Where can more information be found (websites/managers/team meetings)? Of course, your change project document should not be the beginning and end of the communication process. You’ll need to continue to engage your people, employing their strengths when and where needed, and keep all stakeholders informed of project progress. Do this with clarity, and your transformational change should benefit from inspired leadership, a strong focus of purpose that eliminates resistance, and preparedness for change at every stage of the process. In the next two chapters, we’ll look at the insight that change leaders need to establish effective communication techniques in an environment where emotional responses are mixed.

In an article published by Project Smart (Why does change fail?) the top reason quoted is “Not clear about the reasons for the change and the overall objectives”. In the article Why Change Fails published by Change Designs, among the top five reasons put forward are “ineffective communication” and “mixed messages and confusion”. How do you give your change projects the clarity they need? When change projects are initiated, there is often a lack of clarity in the communication of scope and purpose of the proposed change. This is typically because the change management team, who are completely at ease with all the whys and wherefores, fail to answer the questions that employees and other stakeholders need answered. Or, they do so with change documentation that is pages and pages long, and shrouded in numbers, accounting terms, and technical descriptions that even astrophysicists would find complex. The result is confusion, resistance, and poor execution of the transformation program. The project is a failure before it starts. To encourage engagement and to jumpstart change, it’s necessary to publish a change document to all stakeholders which is written concisely and with clarity, while answering the questions to which the stakeholders want answered. These six questions need to be addressed early in the process, before any resistance is allowed to develop and mature:  Why is this change needed?  What’s in it for me (the stakeholder)?  How will this change the organization?

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