Change always means endings and new beginnings. One piece of critical groundwork is planning endings and their impact on people. The goal in planning and managing the impact of endings is facilitating transition, “the psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation.”
The task of managing endings and their impact is complex because individual employees, divisions, and groups are likely to be at different stages with regard to their own personal transition and their understanding, knowledge, and acceptance of the organization's need to change. Many will see the proposed change as a denigration of the company's past and their role in creating that past. Others will see and actually experience change as loss – loss of status, value, compensation, and even jobs. Those who keep their jobs and status through the change may feel a loss of consistency, predictability, job mastery, and control. Even those who have accepted the need for change are often confused and ambivalent about what needs to change and what their role and responsibility is in a yet-to-be-defined future. Still others will be discouraged by the fact that it took the organization so long to realize that change was needed and will be impatient to begin the implementation process.
How does an organization effectively facilitate transition when its leaders, managers, and employees are bringing such diverse perspectives and experiences to the process of change?
Looking back is one of the most effective tools for facilitating transition. Leaders can begin by utilizing the change workshop to focus the Change Leadership Team on the past, not the future or the present. On Day One of the workshop, Ki ThoughtBridge utilizes the Trustee Leadership Development History Timeline Exercise to help participants look back at the history of the organization and their role in that history. By the end of the exercise, participants will have created a common understanding of the organization's history to date and the role each person has played in that history. They will also have honored and celebrated what was good about the history of that organization. In addition, the team will have learned the history of change in that organization, i.e., how change has been initiated, managed, and implemented in the past.
The Change Leadership Team will use this information to have an explicit discussion about the values and culture that have shaped and guided the organization's history. Participants end the day by asking what values and cultural norms the organization will want to carry into its future and which they may need to let go of.
On Day Two of the change workshop, participants are ready to create History Timeline II which, by laying out the current environment and circumstances the organization is facing, makes the case for change. This is the point where data, research, and information can best be heard and received. The data shared must not only be hard data provided by internal experts as well as external, nonpartisan experts, but soft data (anecdotal stories and experiences) provided by change team leaders in response to the question: “Is there a need to change?”
After creating a common discussion of the implications of this data with respect to the organization's future and the future of the employees of the organization. They will explore, for example, the implications the data has for changes to the vision, mission, and strategy of the organization, and what, if any, implications there are for the skills and competencies of the organization's staff, the structure, systems, and policies of the future, etc. These discussions are likely to uncover a level of tension and conflict the first day and a half of the workshop did not.Next - Paradox 3