Your goal in this session is to listen like a detective, not a defense lawyer.
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Between re-orgs and leadership turnover to lay-off rumors, employees in nearly every industry are facing daily uncertainty. Understandably, this can translate into teams that are disengaged, anxious and the opposite of productive. Your remedy starts with talking with your employees about workplace change — and guiding them beyond their resistance to it.
Begin by gathering one or more of your teams and asking what they find challenging about unanticipated change. A common response might be “as soon as we learn a new program or system, it’s replaced by another one.” Other answers may include “no clarity around why changes are being made” or “change is always forced on us from above instead of discussed in advance.”
While it’s tough for most leaders to hear these grievances, bringing issues out in the open is key to resolving them. My standard reply in these situations is “Good, what else?” but feel free to choose your own response — so long as you avoid being defensive or asking for more context. Focus on capturing every response on a virtual or physical whiteboard and keep the session moving.
Once you’ve documented every obstacle, ask the group to make a case for their three biggest challenges to embracing change. Discussing why something is an obstacle will help you discover people’s root causes for resistance. Your goal in this session is to listen like a detective, not a defense lawyer.
For example, if a main obstacle is a “no clarity around why changes are being made,” ask if anyone could expand on this topic? You might pick up clues that all the recent re-orgs have left people feeling unsure of their role in the company. And every time they’re blind-sided by a new change, it reinforces their sense of being out of the loop.
Or in the case of “change being forced on people from above,” you might hear that leadership seems out of touch and doesn’t consider downstream effects every time they make a change. Again, be sure to capture all the feedback because it will serve as your starting point for removing the group’s biggest obstacles to change.
Lead off by asking if anyone has an idea for how to overcome any of the three obstacles? If the room is silent, start whiteboarding solution-focused questions that address people’s root causes. A few examples:
· “If you were invited to co-develop change initiatives with leadership, would that help minimize unanticipated effects downstream?”
· “If you were rewarded for how quickly you become fluent in a new program or system, would that shift your response?”
· “If your concerns were anonymized but addressed in a public town hall by senior leadership, would you feel looped in? If not, what would help you feel included?”
Keep evolving ideas until the majority of the group agrees with potential solutions.
Then, implement at least one of them — on the spot — or commit to getting buy-in from someone who can.
Putting a solution into action immediately proves to your teams that change isn’t always negative or too big to tackle. When employees see that change can have a positive, personal impact on them, they should start defaulting away from fear-based reactions.
Consider deploying this approach ahead of a change initiative to make sure your plan is inclusive and gains the support of influential employees. Through more dialogue sessions like this — and the increased trust that comes from transparency — you’ll be able to introduce some much-needed stability into your org.
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