Resistance is becoming a bad word in change management circles lately. Some thought leaders are recommending that we stop focusing on reducing resistance, and focus on developing Readiness instead.
I get it. To focus on resistance is to focus on the negative. On its surface, it seems to place blame on the people who are not changing as readily as we expect them to. It’s easy to interpret resistance as a character flaw or ingrained human nature that must be overcome.
The alternative that’s been proposed is to focus on getting people ready for change: providing information, equipping them with skills and resources, enlisting leadership support, etc. All the pieces of good change management.
In this sense, I see resistance and readiness as two sides of the same coin. All the things you do to build readiness necessarily reduce resistance. Perhaps it’s just a matter of semantics? Using the word “resistance” conjures feelings of frustration, while “readiness” is a more positive approach.
And yet, we still can’t ignore resistance completely. If we could anticipate the resistance a change may cause, and thus design the change to mitigate that resistance, shouldn’t we do that? When we encounter people who are reacting to change negatively, shouldn’t we engage them to better understand their experience, so we can change our approach?
In a recent interview with Jen Frahm about this topic, I said, “Resistance is the gateway to empathy.” When we encounter resistance to change, it is a signal to look deeper and understand people’s experience of the change. Then, instead of blaming them for not changing, we can find ways to either help them change or modify our own approach to reduce their resistance.
In that sense, anticipating, designing for, and dealing with resistance are not opposites of readiness, but key components of readiness. Ignore resistance, and people won’t be ready. You’ll create more resistance instead.
What are your thoughts on the Resistance vs. Readiness debate? Please share in the comments.
Leaders need to have that want to be open and look within themselves and within their sphere of influence. As you say, the gateway to empathy must be observed and open. Without that openness then the leader just follows their own thought patterns and sees resistance as something that is to be confronted rather than to listen and engage with those involved.
Great post. Categorizing things into bad or good, is not a helpful approach. It’s like when people stop using the word “problem” and replaced it by “challenge” instead. Things are not good or bad, it’s what we do with them that counts. In my case, I help leaders and teams understand that resistance, constraints and frustrations are not negative things. If you can actually turn them fuel or motivation by rewiring personal mindsets and behaviors. Empathy definitely is a much-needed skill to achieve that.
Looking forward to your webinar.
To me this debate seems to miss the point. It’s not ‘change’ that people resist (after all, aren’t we all craving to change to a better world?), but rather it’s the particular approach of imposing change to a system not invented by them that people resist. Instead, invite all affected people to co-create the change themselves, make it a co-iterative process, making it their own, then resistance is not an issue. It’s “change ‘management'” that people resist. It’s ‘change management’ that needs to change!
I think that the difference between lack of readiness and resistance collapses when everyone is committed to the same goals and aware of all relevant information; readiness can mean staff having information about the changes you plan and the ability to digest them, but it can also mean having equivalents of the resources that staff currently require ready within your plan.
The important thing to recognise is that when you start off a process of change, your plan will inevitably be misaligned from that ideal of unified goals, either because your goals are not aligned to those of your staff, or because you are not aware of ways in which your stated plans do not precisely match your goals. In that context, talking about your plans is the first stage of implementing them, and by the resistance it produces, will inform you about ways that the system is not yet ready, or that the plan is not fully aligned to that system.
When it comes to aligning goals, sometimes a fully consensual approach will be impossible, because you find that elements of your proposed change are things that reasonable people would find uncomfortable, such as job losses, having to retrain rather than retaining skills etc. in that context, dealing with resistance is irreducibly essential, as if you don’t believe it exists, you will find yourself in difficulty in resolving it in a positive and human fashion. Most people have probably experienced the trainee school teacher who comes in wanting to be the friend of all the children, only to swerve uncomfortably to authoritarianism when they first meet disagreement. Sometimes staff need not readiness for something they will be otherwise happy to accept, but compensation and respect for the sacrifices they make in accepting it despite preferring not to.
In that context, presenting people with difficult choices, and then later offering them gifts, thanks, or even bonuses or profit sharing, can actually be more satisfying than exclusively trying to ease the blow by giving them up front compensation built into the new plan. Recognising resistance as a problem on the “political” level of the relationships between management and those they manage can help to treat it in a more adult manner. They take the hit, and then they reap the rewards, such as they exist, when the change has been implemented. This is the lesson of the uk conservative party’s victory in the 2015 elections; people will be willing to face suffering and difficulty if they believe it is necessary and done for a sensible purpose, and that they will be able to share in the rewards that come from it when it is resolved, and often they find that easier to accept than someone offering to soften the blow.
Alternatively, you can bring this more within the readiness framework, even for situations representing the most difficult divergences of goals, like redundancies, by making compromise work both ways by bringing in some of the staff’s goals.
For example, the computer game company Irrational faced the most extreme change management process by seeking to transform from a medium to large game studio to a smaller flatter structure, resulting in large numbers of staff being asked to leave the company. But in order to do this, they used the assets they had from their original operation, and allowed soon to be ex-staff to start working on their own projects to start their own small game studios, or building their CV to be hired by competitors. Essentially, the company was strengthening the future career of people with whom it had no business relationship, but in terms of dealing with the emotional stresses of downsizing, it was enormously effective, not to mention the value of trying to help respected ex-staff with their future lives. They managed change by preparing readiness for a state of divergent goals, seeking an amicable breakup. Another games company example is Valve, who provided people leaving the company with intellectual property that they had worked on, as they wound up their “augmented reality department” in order to help them continue it as a separate business, seen as it was found to be a poor fit for Valve’s working processes. This is inevitably more generous than the first approach, but both are similar in that they treat people as intelligent adults, in either case the misalignment of your goals with theirs is recognised, and in the first case is handled by respecting and recognising their sacrifices, and in the second case is handed by expanding your activities to include things that are obviously unnecessary as far as your priorities are concerned in order to try to bring them on side, even if not contributing to your goals.
But this second approach required that the information condition to be fulfilled, that in each of the examples they had a relatively good idea of what their ex-staff would need in order to be hired by other companies, or to be able to start their future projects. There was significant uncertainty to be dealt with, but to some extent, the situation was defined.
Even if a plan has been proposed that either gets everyone on the same page, or handles the divergence of interests gracefully, it can still meet resistance if there is hidden information that renders that coherent set of goals impossible to achieve in practice without alteration. Sometimes resistance means that someone has misunderstood your plan, sometimes it means that you have misunderstood it, or the situation in which it will be applied. In that sense resistance can an opportunity for increased understanding, depending on how fundamentally grounded it is.
It is important for leaders to engage every person to be affected by the change right from the beginning in order for them to appreciate the need for change and embrace it. If properly done, with no hidden agendas, the issue of readiness will follow automatically and resistance would be reduced as everyone in the organisation will be moving at the same pase.