On your path to becoming an effective change manager, recognise that the natural human response to change is resistance. People become attached to familiar ways of doing things, even ways they initially regarded as cumbersome, costly, or ineffective.

Individuals resist change; teams and groups resist change; whole organisations resist change. Going further, entire societies, continents, world religions, even the broad swath of humanity reflexively resists change. Remember, change as used throughout this article means significant, challenging and disruptive change.

Fear of the unknown

The resistance people exhibit when they confront change is derived in part from fear of the unknown. My sister worked for years in a battered women’s shelter. Time after time, she would see victims who would share their tales of misery, being beaten and abused by an out-of-control spouse. These partners then relented hours or days later professing sorrow for their actions. Then, the cycle would continue until one day the battered woman showed up at the shelter.

My sister wondered why such women didn’t leave these relationships. After endless rounds of battering, hearing apologies, and then being battered again, surely these victims knew the situation was not going to change. Yet, most of them had difficulties doing what observers thought to be an obviously needed change—leaving the relationship.

A minor percentage of battered spouses were afraid that the abusive partner would track them down. For the rest, the fear of the unknown was greater than the fear of the next beating or potential repercussions of leaving the relationship.

Hardships of making a better life

Just as these victims were afraid of starting over in a new community, finding new homes, seeking new work, and  living on their own, the same situation occurs in companies.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Ph.D., a noted economist from Harvard University in Massachusetts, wrote The Nature of Mass Poverty. While researching his book, he visited four continents to determine why some civilisations remain poor for centuries.

Galbraith found that poor societies accommodate their poverty. As hard as it is to live in poor conditions, unfortunately people find it more difficult to accept the hardship—the challenge—involved in making a better living.  Hence, they accommodate their poverty, and it lingers from year to year, decade to decade, and even century to century.

Resistance despite awareness

You most likely don’t face anything like those situations mentioned above, yet the demons keeping you or your team from embracing change may be just as onerous.

Even when an individual knows and understands that a change will be for the better, he or she is still likely to resist for reasons such as these:

• Embracing the change will take time and effort that the participants may not be willing to invest in
• Taking on something new largely means giving up something else, and that something else is familiar, comfortable, and predictable
• Annoyance or fear of disruption may prohibit people from taking the first step even when it is widely acknowledged that the net result will be to their extreme benefit
• If the change is imposed externally [as opposed to being internally derived] resistance may endure as a result of ego-related issues.

A tale of resistance

Years ago, I worked for a management consulting firm as a project manager. At the conclusion of each consulting engagement, we had to write a report for the client. This was the most cumbersome, labour-intensive aspect of the job. This was the time before computers, so reports had to be handwritten. I had been in consulting for five years and had written my share of reports. I was looking for easier ways to do my work faster. One of the staff consultants had a pocket dictator he used occasionally to dictate letters and I asked him if I could momentarily borrow it, to which he agreed. I became proficient within about two minutes and I asked him if I could borrow it for the day if he wasn’t going to be using it and he said, “Go ahead.”

Armed and potent

Our office was equipped with transcription equipment but hardly anyone knew about it. I loathed writing longhand; my handwriting wasn’t very good, and it took me forever. So I decided to dictate my very next report. When I started using the dictation equipment, miraculous things happened. Soon, I was able to do my job in 30 per cent of the time that it used to take and my 40-hour work week now only required 12 hours.

Something seemed askew. Here was a device that worked so well and so easily and no one knew about it. I told my co-workers of this miraculous equipment and suggested that everybody adopt it. I sang the virtues of dictation equipment to my boss as well. And will you guess how many people started using it? Not a single one.

Let resistant dogs lie

Everyone was attached to writing reports long hand and then submitting them for word processing. So, I became silent and decided that I would refrain from functioning as an advocate of dictation equipment within my office. If others didn’t want to accept a new way of doing things that could vastly improve their productivity and their lives, so be it.  I wouldn’t be stopped from excelling.

For the next three years, I used dictation equipment extensively. I dictated every single thing that I needed to write and saved it on the computer. Then one of our administrative staff transcribed the mini-cassettes.

With a weekly average of 28 hours freed, I used the time to read, research, or help others in the office. I got large raises and promotions several times during this three-year period, and, within three years, I was the third-ranking professional in the company.

It is your option

I could have ordered my staff to use the dictation equipment, but I refrained. Instead, I conducted sessions where I demonstrated how to use the equipment. I let everyone get familiar with it and then let them decide whether they would use it to do their reports or continue with longhand.

To this day, I am amazed at the diffidence people show in embracing change even when given instruction, follow up, encouragement, time to make the transition, and every other opportunity to embrace the new way of doing things.

Adopt and win

Looking at the larger question, how many of us, throughout the day, week, or month, shun alternative means of accomplishment when the advantages yield such productivity that there is no comparison to the old way? How many of us don’t want to hear about new ways of proceeding in our careers and our lives?

Predictable resistance to change

As a change manager, you may have observed that the moment people are required to make a change in their behaviour, predictable phenomena are likely to occur.

Some or all of your staff members will bemoan what they have to forsake. This occurs even when they didn’t like what they were doing before! We form irrational attachments to the way we have been doing things.

Your job is to acknowledge your team for the ‘sacrifice’ that they will have to make and to commiserate with them for enduring the ‘hardship’ of changing over. Even if you do not intellectually and emotionally agree with your team’s viewpoint, give validation to their feelings. That will prove to be the most helpful gesture in inducing them to move on to what is next.

This is so awkward

Some of your staff members will feel out of place if they try to embrace the new measure.

To give you the experience of what it might be like for your troops, if you’re wearing a belt, take it off and put it on in the opposite direction, securing it at the same loop as before. You feel different, don’t you?

Even the most minor of changes have the potential to throw one off-kilter.

How long would it take you to feel comfortable about reversing the direction of your belt? It could be days, weeks, or even months. Or you could probably adjust in a few minutes. So it is with asking your staff to incorporate various changes. Nearly all changes are likely to cause some feeling of awkwardness, even if for a few moments. Some changes will have a lingering effect. Some will make your people feel self-conscious for days on end.

Anticipating and welcoming resistance

An effective change manager anticipates resistance at the outset of a change campaign. He or she almost welcomes resistance because it’s a sign that the change-process is unfolding.

Consider the situation in which change is perceived to be burdensome, demanding, difficult and meets with little resistance on the part of those charged with executing it. If anything, such a situation would be a cause for alarm, because people would be masking their true reactions.

Eat what they eat

When you understand what your troops are enduring, you have the potential to be a far better manager of them. In the war, a commander was served a lavish meal one evening.  The meal came during a time when rations for his men had to be cut back. He waved away the server, in effect saying “bring me the same level of rations that my men are receiving.”

This commander understood the importance of sharing the experience that his targets of change were experiencing. He could have easily eaten the lavish meal and justified having such a feast. After all, as the commander of the troops, he would need to be mentally sharp. He would need to have the full benefits of a highly-nutritious meal.  However, that would not give him the insights that would naturally accrue as a result of him having the same meal as them.

What about you? How will you act in this scenario? Will you act differently and rationalise the situation? Claim that you instead have the intellectual and emotional capacity to empathise with their experience? Or are you prepared to have the same meal as your targets of change?

This was first published in the April 2014 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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Unquestionably, we are afforded today the ability to extract timely and relevant information that supports our lives and careers in ways our predecessors could not conceive. At the same time, the vast majority of information to which we’re exposed is of little or no value to us, and even if it was, we would have to live multiple lifetimes to take advantage of it.

Against this backdrop, how do we recognise and organise the information that is appropriate and useful to us? Here is a plan for taking charge of the over-communication streams you and your organisation face.

Pre-identify the type of information you need

All organisations, as well as individuals, have a fair idea as to the kind of information they need to gather. This includes information about their own profession or industry; significant products, services and developments; relevant as well as pending legislation; customers, client, or consumer information; competitor information; special applications, breakthroughs, and prospects for the future.

Pre-identify the key information carriers

In every industry there are a handful of key publications, news sources, websites, blogs, and other purveyors that represent the cream of the crop in terms of accuracy, completeness of coverage, timeliness, and reliability. If there are scores of information purveyors in your field, rest assured that the top 3 – 5 often account for and will provide coverage of 80 – 90 per cent of what all the others could collectively provide.

How is this so? There is considerable overlap, redundancy, meta-reporting, and outright lifting of news between sources. Thus, there is the need to focus on the highest sources of information in your profession or industry.

Streamline your systems

Having identified the type of information you need and the best sources for providing it, everything is for naught unless you have a way to receive, synthesise, disseminate, and apply that information so that it benefits you or your organisation. Too many individuals and groups over-file, over-collect, and over-download. Your goal is to keep information flows as simple as possible.

Stay focussed on your strategic objectives. What do you seek to achieve, and what information supports that quest? This is not to say you cannot devote attention to ancillary issues, but more often than not, keeping your eyes on the prize and staying focussed will help you to achieve goals more effectively than any other way of proceeding.

Be kind to one another

Much of the information glut that we all experience comes as a result of not having guidelines in place within our own organisation that could spare us from unnecessary exposure to data, reports, and verbiage that does not support the challenges at hand. Each of us needs to be kinder and more thoughtful in disseminating information to one another.

At the level of individual e-mail correspondence, eliminate buzz words, acronyms, and abbreviations that could be misunderstood or misleading. Limit the length of the correspondence to those phrases, sentences, or paragraphs that are vital to ensuring that the proper message is received, but have the intellectual tenacity to spare the recipient of any excess. Encourage one another to avoid cc-ing and bcc-ing individuals who do not need to be in the loop.

Avoid sending FYI types of information altogether. Keep attachments to a minimum. Include executive reports, briefings and summaries that enable the recipient to understand the essence of what larger documents contain. In short, it is possible within your own organisation and your own team members to aid each other in combating information overload.

Forsake information crutches

Much of the information we encounter and retain in some manner supports what we already know, believe, and don’t need to retain yet again. And much of the information you may need to assemble in support of a report or a presentation you will be making, the data will be available online.

What’s more, anything you’ve been retaining that is older than 18 – 24 months, more than likely, can be deleted without reservation.

Establish an effective information and distribution channel

The higher up you are in your organisation or further along in your career, the less often you should be burdened with information collection duties that could otherwise be ably handled by more junior staff. Whether you realise it or not, even your most junior staff person in short order can be taught to effectively collect much of the information you previously assembled.

Your staff can serve as pre-readers, clipping service, and information scouts all rolled into one. Freed up from mundane, serial tasks of assembling information, you are then able to engage in conceptual thinking that helps to lead your team, department or division, especially when it comes to novel endeavours such as launching a new product or service.

Systemise your responses

In the course of any career professionals life, a variety of routine responses will emerge that should be saved as part of your e-mail signature capability. Most popular e-mail software programs support 20 or more different signatures.

Thus, you can compose and retain signatures in particular categories so as to be able to respond quickly and effectively to inquirers. Pre-identified signatures could include standard letters, rosters, price lists, descriptions, credentials, background, and history. The more you automate your system, the faster and more effectively you can respond to a correspondent. Any signature on file obviously can be adapted to address specific inquiries as they arrive.

Establish a paper reduction plan

While the specific types of hard copy documents required for retention vary from industry to industry, in the aggregate, we can each make a concerted effort to pare down the amount of paper that we retain in our desks, filing cabinets, and offices. For each document you receive that merits retention, evaluate its potential as a scanned document. If the scanned version of the document will serve just as well as the hard copy, then scan it and recycle the hard copy.

While the act of scanning in itself requires a few extra minutes and is labour intensive, the long-term payoff is more than worth the initial investment. Based on the way you label the documents you’ve scanned, your ability to find them on your hard drive or online, often vastly exceeds your ability to find the same document in a hard copy file.

Effective computer backup systems take on an advanced role in an age in which it makes sense to reduce the physical holdings of reports, documents, and sheets of paper. Fortunately a variety of effective backup systems are available.

Continually review, evaluate, update, and apply

All of the information that you retain, on a periodic basis needs to be reassessed for its applicability. Such reviews, especially for a date that has been retained in electronic files, can be done relatively quickly and easily. Here, the rule is divide and conquer.

Pick one section of your date collection for review per week. What can safely be dropped? What needs to be merged? What can be synthesised so that the few pearls of wisdom crucial to operations can be easily extracted and disseminated, while the bulk of the information or raw data can stay safely parked as an electronic file or, if the situation merits, be deleted?

The most effective information managers are in the habit of constantly updating and eliminating, merging, purging, and applying the vital information that they chose to collect in the first place.

Recognise the value of staying organised

Keeping your information organised is not a glamorous task and for many provokes a sense of anxiety. Yet, as we march forward in this brave new over-communicated world, becoming and remaining the master of your files takes on a higher level of importance than ever before. The future will belong to those career professionals who are adept at identifying, collecting, storing, retrieving, and disseminating the right information at the right time.

Devoting a few minutes per day, perhaps no more than 1 – 2 hours per week to keeping track of all that you deem necessary to retain, is becoming the differentiating factor between those individuals who receive raises, promotion, and recognition by leadership versus those who dwell in a semi-permanent state of overwhelm.

This was first published in the March 2013 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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