Problems making changes at work

Of course there are. But not everyone anticipating problems or asking clarifying questions is one of them. Over the years I’ve learned to make it clear that I am not one of them–that my inquires are generally sincere–but there are still people that react to any questioning as being reactionary and not a team player. Most often this happens when the person implementing the program is unclear, themselves, on the details of the program. And in education, at least, this happens a lot. Generally, the process is:

  1. Interesting, exciting new innovation is developed.
  2. People put in charge of implementing it don’t really understand it, only that it’s exciting and innovative and other people who clearly do know what they are talking about are enthusiastic.
  3. Program is poorly presented and implemented. Key details are dropped because they are resource-intensive and the person in charge doesn’t understand that they are key details.
  4. People ask questions because the program as presented doesn’t make sense.
  5. Implementer gets angry because they’ve seen the program implemented properly, they KNOW it works, and therefore people asking questions are just passive-aggressive reactionaries.
  6. Program fails because people don’t support it.
  7. Program is dismissed as inherently flawed and impossible and everyone tacitly agrees never to refer to it again.

Why must you assume that there are only illogical reasons to hate change? I would absolutely react with resistance if you approached me with changes. Whenever someone suggests changes I immediately see angry clients and loss profits. What you call a “natural bias,” I would call “good business intuition.”

Also, for low-level employees, if the new process benefits the business, and not them directly, they are not going to want to use it. And I wouldn’t blame them or call this illogical. The correct solution here would be to order them to do it, because expecting them to willingly use a new system that benefits someone is pretty irrational sounding.

For higher level employees, the fact is that most people are terrible at implementing new systems. Most of the time there is just not enough time spent thinking about the people who will actually use the system for the system to work well.

I’m not saying that you, Syne, are actually like this. You might be the rare BA that creates amazing new systems and all your colleagues are just too irrational to see your greatness. But the fact that you see irrational resistance to change as the major reason people will resist you has left me skeptical.

I would recommend that anyone working in any area even vaguely related to change should read Chip and Dan Heath’s Switch:

*“Change is hard.” “People hate change.” Those were two of the most common quotes we heard when we began to study change.

But it occurred to us that if people hate change, they have a funny way of showing it. Every iPhone sold serves as counter-evidence. So does every text message sent, every corporate merger finalized, every aluminum can recycled. And we haven’t even mentioned the biggest changes: Getting married. Having kids. (If people hate change, then having a kid is an awfully dumb decision.)

It puzzled us–why do some huge changes, like marriage, come joyously, while some trivial changes, like submitting an expense report on time, meet fierce resistance?

We found the answer in the research of some brilliant psychologists who’d discovered that people have two separate “systems” in their brains—a rational system and an emotional system. The rational system is a thoughtful, logical planner. The emotional system is, well, emotional—and impulsive and instinctual.

When these two systems are in alignment, change can come quickly and easily (as when a dreamy-eyed couple gets married). When they’re not, change can be grueling (as anyone who has struggled with a diet can attest).

In those situations where change is hard, is it possible to align the two systems? Is it possible to overcome our internal “schizophrenia” about change? We believe it is.

In our research, we studied people trying to make difficult changes: People fighting to lose weight and keep it off. Managers trying to overhaul an entrenched bureaucracy. Activists combatting seemingly intractable problems such as child malnutrition. They succeeded–and, to our surprise, we found striking similarities in the strategies they used. They seemed to share a similar game plan. We wanted, in Switch, to make that game plan available to everyone, in hopes that we could show people how to make the hard changes in life a little bit easier. --Chip and Dan Heath*

You can read the first chapter on their web site. All three of their books present practical workable models for the steps in conducting process change. And they are fun reads.

A wise co-worker once said to me, “everyone wants change, but no one wants to change.”
mmm

We actually need 33% to 50% of the passive aggressive reactionary blockheads we have? For what?

I mean, I can see keeping one or two, as a sort of a sample…

They serve as an effective brake against the ADHD-addled sociopaths that are routinely in higher management positions, especially in sales and other inherently criminal areas of most businesses.

I quit a job because I had a decade of the same conversations over and over about change.

I’ll state we need to do A, because we have a management directive to accomplish A.
Bob will counter with B
Tammy will counter with C
Fred will counter with D.

I will counter with E and the meeting time will be over. The next week we’d come back, and I’d bring up that we need to do A, it was a management directive, and our job was not to say why we couldn’t do A, but to come up with ways we can get A accomplished.
Bob will counter with B
Tammy will counter with C
Fred will counter with D.
The meeting will end.

For the third meeting, I’d invite Tom, the Director who would tell them stop whining suck it up and do their jobs.

For the fourth meeting I’d start getting cooperation about how we could accomplish A.

It was such a repeatable process that I could put it in the project plan and anticipate B,C, and D from each of the players.

And yes, you’d think the easy thing would be to invite Tom to the first meeting, but somehow, everyone expected this time would be different and these people would do their damn jobs when I told them it was a management directive without having to bring in the manager to tell them to do their damn jobs, its a management directive.

The fear that people have towards change is not always irrational. Especially when your job is on the line.

For instance, just about every new technological advance that the workplace adopts is well-intentioned and no doubt superior to the “old way”. But with progress comes casualties of pride and ego. There’s always that one person who can’t transfer their skills to the new platform and then becomes the “old guy” who gets pushed into the corner like a broken piece of furniture. No one wants to be made obsolete or embarrassed for incompetency. Then there’s the person who can do adopt the new system just fine. But they were a genius with the old system. They were the expert. Hell, they may have even designed the old system. But now the new system has leveled the playing field and made them lose the one thing that made them stand out from the pack. No one wants the subject of their expertise to become a thing of the past.

And also make you feel like your inability to get people on board solo is a reflection of your weak management skills, rather than your lack of management authority.

Actually, I never did feel like that, nor did I think management was setting me up. It was more like they’d continually give these people a chance to do something different. They never did, but it was an organization that valued self organizing teams - and maybe this time the team would organize to meet the objective rather than arguing about what the objective that had been set should have been and why they couldn’t do it.

^ I once had a crummy boss who would try to shame me whenever I couldn’t rally the troops behind her crazy of idea of the month. And when I would point out that her presence was needed to catalyze this effort, she would try to spin this as me being weak.

You think it’s hard as a BA, try being a project manager where you are given all the responsibility but none of the authority or control.

I’ve spent most of my career as a consultant (the management consulting kind who work for firms like Deloitte or McKinsey, not the kind who are basically highly paid temps, although I’ve done that as well).

When I first started my career, I couldn’t figure out why my job even existed. Why would companies pay all this money to bring in an army of 26 year old MBA grads to do the job that their own people should be able to do better (given that they presumably know their company and role better from having done it for years)?

The answer is they can’t. People in big companies are essentially cogs in a giant machine. They are paid to do their jobs and that’s typically all they know how to do.

Not that is necessarily a bad thing. You can’t have a company of a thousand or ten thousand people just doing their own thing.

Plus even if you wanted to implement a change, it’s not just a matter of changing a process or installing new software. There are all sorts of issues of training, setting up a leadership structure, communication with other departments, escalation paths, support for technology so on and so forth. In simplest terms, you might come in and say “why don’t we do it this way?”, but if you leave, who owns that new process?

By the same token, I’ve found that “prestigious” consulting firms and startups can be very resistant to process and procedure. They tend to operate from a perspective of hiring a bunch of really smart, motivated people and then just throwing them at problems. Case in point, I once worked for a Silicon Valley startup where everyone was a bunch of alumni from McKinsey, Accenture and other consulting firms, Stanford, MIT and so on. Management was brilliant at high level strategy, but buying and installing some cheap whiteboards would take 6 months.

Yeah, that’s why they don’t pay women as much.

Excepting a few weirdos, people are resistant to change at work because a very significant proportion of the Changes previously encountered will have been a) theoretically stupid and/or b) badly implemented and/or c) shortlived fads.

To blame the individuals inherent character is an insult.

You’ve got to wonder “why am I enforcing change from above” rather than “coordinating the changes coming up from below”

I spent 26 years working as a civilian employee of the Navy. I worked in 2 different commands during those years under more commanding officers than I can remember. What I do remember is that each and every one of them, within a few months of taking command, would have a revolutionary idea about reorganization. YAAAAAAY!! :rolleyes:

Honest-to-goodness, we would cycle our way thru 2 or 3 approaches, and after you’d been there a while, you’d see something we’d done before being sold to us as new and innovative. Things like:[ul]
[li]Teams by geographical area of interest[/li][li]Teams by technical area of interest[/li][li]Teams headed by one military person and run/managed by civilians[/li][li]Teams with military personnel incorporated at several lower levels[/li][/ul]
The last place where I worked, in the course of 7 years, I sat in (I think) 13 different cubicles because or reorganizations or realignments or whatever the management word du jour was. I have no idea how much time I wasted packing and unpacking, as well as sitting on my thumbs because we mere mortals were absolutely forbidden to touch computer cables or even power cords - we had to wait for IT to get to us.

When you finally get settled into a new team and you figure out how the “new” system works, there’s yet another change of command and the new CO has an innovative idea… One of the things that hastened my retirement was yet another impending change which was actually taking us back to 3 changes before.

I’m not hating on the Navy here, but on the mindset that if you don’t make some sort of innovation, you don’t deserve to advance. Apparently “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” isn’t conducive to getting stars on your collar. Retirement is definitely nicer.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Unfortunately, this view does not work well in business. Neither the horse, the whip nor the buggy were broken but you don’t see many on the road these days. Many a once proud company has been brought down by complacency and/or not adapting to changing times (looking at you Kodak, MCI, Eastern, Pan Am, TWA, Kmart, Lionel Corp, Blockbuster, Reader’s Digest, RCA, Montgomery Ward, JC Penney, American Motors, Burger Chef, etc.)

When I worked at one of the Blue Cross offices, all employees had to attend a seminar called “Only Wet Babies Like Change”.

:rolleyes:
People parroted all the words and ideas for a few weeks, after which the usual suspects went back to being obstructionist jerks, and we returned to the norm.

In all fairness, the people at the lower levels typically only see their job. They don’t see how it integrates with the overall system.

Well yeah. When someone says lets outsource this production line to China.

I’ve been involved in that decision. You want to know how it plays out?

“We need to lower costs or we won’t be able to sell our product at a competitive price. If we can’t sell our product at a competitive price, everyone here will be out of work. We have a choice, we can move our production lines overseas because our biggest factor in cost of good sold that is controllable is labor - or we can wait until we have to lay off the engineers, accountants, marketers, logistics people, and ourselves in three years when we declare bankruptcy. Gentlemen (it is almost always gentlemen), what would you like to do?”

Its more complex than that - they spend months gathering data, reviewing numbers and trying to make sure this is the best decision for long term viability. But when consumers use cost as a major differentiator - and for most things they do - there will always be a drive to lower costs.