How to Overcome Resistance to Change

ELIMINATE RESISTANCE TO CHANGE BY UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF AND OTHERS FIRST

Why do employees resist change? When asked why employees resist change, all answers lead to their emotional response. Any change naturally shifts a person out of their comfort zone. Whether the change is personal (a house move or a new baby, for example) professional (perhaps a change of job or promotion), or organizational (maybe a new work process or company merger), you can expect an emotional response from your employees. The importance of emotional intelligence in change leadership It’s the emotional response that dictates the level of resistance to change. In the business world, the business case for change, the new systems, and processes are the easy part of change management. The difficulty lies in gaining the buy-in of your employees. You may be asking them to change a routine that they have known for their entire working life. For some, this will cause enormous emotional distress. Effective change leadership hangs on being able to manage emotions – both your own and those of your employees. It’s not what happens during a change process, it’s how you respond and how you manage the responses of others that determines success or failure. If you can’t handle the emotional response, resistance will grow, and change is almost bound to fail. Lack of emotional intelligence is why leaders are poor at overcoming resistance There have been numerous studies into why change management fails. In the

October 2014 McKinsey Quarterly, it was noted that “transformational change initiatives have a dismal track record”. John Kotter’s studies consistently showed that around 70% of organizational change projects fail. The failure of leadership teams to grasp the importance of emotional intelligence as the key to tackling resistance to change is increasingly accepted as the reason behind the poor change management statistics. Yet still, project and change management teams tend to concentrate on the process of change, rather than the psychology of change, when devising strategies to overcome resistance to change. When you embark on any change program, you are not only asking your people to change the way they work, but also the way they think about work. You’re asking them to change their routines, their behaviors, and perhaps even to re-evaluate their values and beliefs. These elements are embedded in a collective culture, as well as individual mindsets. Effective organizational change cannot be made without changing the behavior of individuals. To change behavior, you must understand behavior Old-style carrot-and-stick management simply doesn’t work in the modern workplace. People rebel. They resist change. They may change the way they do things for a while, but soon you’ll find they slip back into the old routines.

18