Appoint a “change manager” to be responsible for seeing that the changes go smoothly. This is a good idea if you have a well-planned undertaking, complete with communication, training, and support. But if you merely appoint someone and say, “Make it happen,” you are unlikely to accomplish anything. If the person isn’t very skilled, he or she may become simply an enforcer and weaken the change effort.
Give everyone a T-shirt with a new “teamwork” logo on it. Symbols are great, and you should use them. They have to be part of a larger, comprehensive effort. (A lot of issues come back to that point, and so will we.)
Give everyone a training seminar on how to work as a team. Seminars are important because people have to learn the new way. But much training is wasted because it’s not part of a larger, comprehensive effort.
Change the spatial arrangements so that the cubicles are separated only by glass or low partitions. You’re on the right track—individual cubicles do reinforce the old behavior—but this solution doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t use space creatively to reinforce the new identity as “part of a team.” See Category 2 for a better solution.
Give bonuses to the first team to process one hundred client calls in the new way. Rewards and competition can both serve your effort, but be sure not to set simplistic quantitative goals. Those one hundred clients can be “processed” in ways that send them right out the door and into the competition’s arms. In addition, speed can be achieved by a few team members doing all the work. You want to reward teamwork, so plan your competition carefully.
Category 4: Not very important. May even be a waste of effort.
Explain the changes again in a carefully written memo. When you put things in writing, people can’t claim later that they weren’t told. Memos are actually better ways of protecting the sender, however, than they are of informing the receiver. And they are especially poor as ways to convey complex information—like how a reorganization is going to be undertaken.
Give everyone a copy of the new organization chart. An organization chart can help to clarify complex groupings and reporting relationships, but this solution is pretty straightforward. It’s the new attitudes and behavior we’re concerned with here, not which VP people report to.
Category 5: No! Don’t do this.
Turn the whole thing over to the individual contributors as a group and ask them to come up with a plan to change over to teams. Involvement is fine, but it has to be carefully prepared and framed within realistic constraints. Simply to turn the power over to people who don’t want a change to happen is to invite catastrophe.
Break the change into smaller stages. Combine the firsts and seconds, then add the thirds later. Change the managers into coordinators last. This one is tempting because small changes are easier to assimilate than big ones. But one change after another is trouble. It’s better to introduce change in one coherent package.
Pull the best people in the unit together as a model team to show everyone else how to do it. This is even more appealing, but it strips the best people out of the other units and hamstrings the other groups’ ability to duplicate the model team’s accomplishments.
Scrap the plan and find one that is less disruptive. If that one doesn’t work, try another. Even if it takes a dozen plans, don’t give up. If there is one thing that is harder than a difficult transition, it is a whole string of them occurring because somebody is pushing one change after another and forgetting about transition.
Tell them to stop dragging their feet or they’ll face disciplinary action. Don’t make threats. They build ill will faster than they generate positive results. But do make expectations clear. People who don’t live up to them will have to face the music.
As you look back over my comments and compare them to your own thinking, reflect on the change-transition difference again. When people come up with very different answers than I have offered, it is usually because they forgot that it was transition and not change that they were supposed to be watching out for. Change needs to be managed too, of course. But it won’t do much good to get everyone into the new teams and the new seating arrangements if all of the old behavior and thinking continue. As you read the rest of the book, keep reminding yourself that it isn’t enough to change the situation. You also have to help people make the psychological reorientation that they must make if the change is to work. The following chapters provide dozens of tactics that have proved helpful in doing that.
In Chapter 8 you’ll find another case and another chance to try your hand at a transition management plan. But first let’s look at some well-tested transition management tactics. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 deal with how to manage, respectively, endings, neutral zones, and new beginnings. Chapter 6 talks about the stages of organizational life, and managing nonstop change is the subject of Chapter 7. When you reach the next case study, you’ll be full of ideas.
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Social Aims,” 1875.
PART TWO
The Solution
CHAPTER
3
Every beginning is a consequence. Every beginning ends something.
—PAUL VALÉRY, FRENCH POET
Almost anything is easier to get into than out of.
—AGNES ALLEN, AMERICAN WRITER
How to Get People to Let Go
Before you can begin something new, you have to end what used to be. Before you can learn a new way of doing things, you have to unlearn the old way. Before you can become a different kind of person, you must let go of your old identity. Beginnings depend on endings. The problem is, people don’t like endings.
Yet change and endings go hand in hand: change causes transition, and transition starts with an ending. If things change within an organization, at least some of the employees and managers are going to have to let go of something. Here are some examples:
1.A hospital administrator decides to consolidate maternal and pediatric services. The reorganization makes terrific sense from the patient’s point of view—and customer service is the name of the game these days! It will also save overhead costs, and cost-cutting is just as important today. So the idea is a real winner. But right now there are two completely different organizations, two different patterns of loyalty, two different career paths, two different sets of procedures. There are even two organizational cultures—one developed from working with adults and one developed from working with children. Each of these differences is a part of the unit members’ separate identities. People in both units talk about “us” and “them.” People will have to let go of a whole world of doing and thinking to make the new arrangement work.
2.The newly appointed controller of a large corporation decides to reorganize the inefficient way in which financial transactions are handled. The old workflow has been cumbersome, resulting in errors and downtime, and customer dissatisfaction. So she redesigns the workflow, and to make the new process work she restructures the department. Some teams are combined and some are separated. People have new bosses who, in turn, have new responsibilities. Managers depend on the cooperation of people they don’t know well, and they miss their friends who used to help them get the job done in the old way. But the new system will work like a charm—she keeps saying.
3.A new general manager arrives at a manufacturing plant and finds that there are multiple layers of supervision and management between him and the hourly workers. Real-time updates take too long to move up or down the line and are often inaccurate. Decisions are delayed until, finally, someone acts. Then implementation slows as it filters down level by level. “Too many managers,” he announces. “We’re going to trim the workforce and flatten the pyramid.” Of the 30 managers and supervisors, 8 are close to retirement, so they are offered enhanced benefits to retire. Three others are poor performers and are laid off, and five more are “reassigned”—which means “demoted,” although no one will admit that. “There,” says the GM. “Now we’re trim and efficient.” But as months go by the results get worse
and worse. People are dragging their feet. Rumors abound. The GM keeps talking about how much better the new structure is than the old, hoping that somehow he can convince people to make it work. In logical terms it is better, but he doesn’t realize that his words sound hollow to people who have lost their familiar turf, their sense of self-worth, and many of their good friends.
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another.
ANATOLE FRANCE, FRENCH WRITER
It isn’t the changes themselves that the people in these cases resist. It’s the losses and endings that they have experienced and the transition that they are resisting. That’s why it does little good for you to talk about how healthy the outcome of a change will be. Instead, you have to deal directly with the losses and endings.
But how do you do that? Here’s how.
I’m not afraid of death. It’s just that I don’t want to be there when it happens.
WOODY ALLEN, AMERICAN FILMMAKER
IDENTIFY WHO’S LOSING WHAT
What is actually ending, and who is losing what? If you’re in the planning stage, these questions can be answered in the following sequence:
1.Describe the change in as much detail as you can. What is actually going to change? Be specific. Terms like “improved quality,” “centralized decision-making,” and “lower costs” don’t tell people what is going to be different when the dust clears.
2.Imagine that the change is a cue ball rolling across the surface of a pool table. There are lots of other balls on the table, and it’s going to hit a few of them—some because you planned it that way and some unintentionally. Try to foresee as many of those hits as you can. What are the secondary changes that your change will probably cause? And what are the further changes that those secondary changes will cause? As in the first step, describe exactly what will be different when each of those changes is completed.
3.You have now started a chain of cause-and-effect collisions. Think of the people whose familiar way of being and doing will be affected. In each case, who is going to have to let go of something? What exactly must they let go of? Is it their peer group? Is it the roles that gave them a sense of competence? Is it their chances for promotion? Is it the strategies that fit with their values? Is it their old expectations?
4.Notice that many of these losses aren’t concrete. They are part of the inner complex of attitudes and assumptions and expectations that we all carry around in our heads. These inner elements of “the way things are” are what make us feel at home in our world. When they disappear, we’ve lost something very important, although to someone else it may seem as though nothing has changed.
5.Beyond these specific losses, is there something that is over for everyone? Is it a chapter in the organization’s history? Is it an unspoken assumption about what the employees can expect from their employer? Is it something that the organization stands for? Whatever has ended might be described with a phrase like one of these:
“We take care of our people.”
“We are a cutting-edge, high-tech company.”
“We won’t settle for finishing second.”
“We won’t be undersold.”
“We will always act ethically.”
“We promote from within.”
If, on the other hand, the change is already under way, you can find out about losses much more quickly. Simply ask people. “What’s different, now that we have a new X?” “When we did X, what did you have to give up?” “What do you miss since we changed X?”
ACCEPT THE REALITY AND IMPORTANCE OF THE SUBJECTIVE LOSSES
Don’t argue with what you hear. In the first place, it will stop the conversation, and you won’t learn any more. In the second place, loss is a subjective experience, and your “objective” view (which is really just another subjective view) is irrelevant. Finally, you’ll just make your task more difficult by convincing people that you don’t understand them—or, worse yet, that you don’t care what they feel and think.
We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage, and resolution were most important, into that more difficult time when it is a person’s duty to understand the world rather than simply fight for it.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY, AMERICAN WRITER
Maybe you don’t care. Maybe when you first started managing people, you learned to give orders and to issue ultimatums if they weren’t carried out. But today it’s different. You need everyone’s commitment because only with commitment will people give 100 percent. And you won’t get people’s commitment unless you understand them and make decisions based on that understanding. So however you do it, learn who is experiencing a loss of some kind and what it is they are losing.
DON’T BE SURPRISED AT OVERREACTION
People seem to “overreact” to a change when they are reacting more than we are. But when we think that way, we overlook two things: first, that changes cause transitions, which cause losses, and it is the losses, not the changes, that they’re reacting to; and second, that it’s a piece of their world that is being lost, not a piece of ours, and we often react that way ourselves when it’s part of our own world that is being lost. Being reasonable is much easier if you have little or nothing at stake.
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest, even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
LEO TOLSTOY, RUSSIAN WRITER
“Overreaction” also comes from the experience that people have had with loss in the past. When old losses haven’t been adequately dealt with, a sort of transition deficit is created—a readiness to grieve that needs only a new ending to set it off. We see this when people overreact to the dismissal of an obviously ineffective manager or leader or to some apparently insignificant change in policy or procedure. What they are actually reacting to is one or more losses in the past that have occurred without any acknowledgment or chance to grieve.
This same kind of overreaction occurs when an ending is viewed as symbolic of some larger loss. The minor layoff in a company that has never had layoffs before is an example. It isn’t the loss of the particular individuals—it’s the loss of the safety people felt from the no-layoff policy.
Overreactions also take place when a small loss is perceived as the first step in a process that might end with removing the grievers themselves. Someone whose job seemed secure is dismissed, and one hundred coworkers begin to wonder, Am I next?
In all of these cases, overreaction is normal and not really overreaction at all. Learn to look for the loss behind the loss and deal with that underlying issue. You’ll get much further if you can show people that Loss A is really unrelated to the dreaded, larger Loss B than if you simply try to talk them out of their reaction to Loss A.
ACKNOWLEDGE THE LOSSES OPENLY AND EMPATHICALLY
You need to bring losses out into the open—acknowledge them and express your concern for the affected people. Do it simply and directly:
“I’m sorry that we’re having to make these transfers. I know that we’re losing good people.”
“I know that switching to the new platform is going to leave a lot of you feeling like beginners again. I feel that way myself, and I hate it!”
“Hey, Mike, I heard that you got the pink slip. That’s really tough! I wish they could have figured some way around that.”
Managers are sometimes worried about talking so openly, some even arguing that it will “stir up trouble” to acknowledge people’s feelings. What such an argument misses is that it is not talking about a loss but rather pretending that it doesn’t exist that stirs up trouble.
An electronics company had to lay off several dozen employe
es, and fairly attractive severance packages were put together to reward them for their loyal service. It happened that these workers had to stay at their jobs for two months after the announcement was made, and their manager explained that he wasn’t going to talk to them explicitly about their loss “because calling attention to it will just make them feel worse.” His silence made them feel so angry that several of them began plotting ways to sabotage his unit’s key project.
What that manager was really saying was that he didn’t know how to handle the pain his employees felt. Many people find it difficult to deal openly with others’ pain. But the research on what helps people recover from loss agrees that they recover more quickly if the losses can be openly discussed.
I saw this point demonstrated some time ago in a factory that had been targeted for closure. I watched a crowd of upset employees, who were listening to the executive who’d been sent out to explain the decision, relax and drop their belligerent manner when the executive interrupted his explanation to express his personal distress at having to close the plant. The man later apologized to several of us for the “display of emotion,” not realizing that his honest feeling won the employees over more than his logical explanation.
EXPECT AND ACCEPT THE SIGNS OF GRIEVING
When endings take place, people get angry, sad, frightened, depressed, and confused. These emotional states can be mistaken for bad morale, but they aren’t. They are the signs of grieving, the natural sequence of emotions people go through when they lose something that matters to them. You find these emotions in families that have lost a member, and you find them in an organization where an ending has taken place.1
Yet those emotions may not be evident, especially at first. People may deny that the loss will take place. Denial is a natural first stage in the grieving process, a way in which hurt people protect themselves from the first impact of loss. It is healthy and doesn’t demand action on your part if it doesn’t last very long. But if your people stay in denial for more than a few days after the handwriting is legible on the wall, you’re going to need to address the issue. You may want to say something like this: “A lot of you are acting as though X isn’t for real. Well, it is. Your actions concern me because I want all of us to get through this change with as little distress and disruption as possible. We’ll never do that if we pretend it isn’t happening.”
Managing Transitions Page 4
