The Change Cycle: How People Can Survive and Thrive in Organizational Change - Softcover

Salerno, Ann; Brock, Lillie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1576754987 ISBN 13: 9781576754986

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008

Synopsis

Dealing with organizational change is about getting through the emotion and commotion with minimal damage to your blood pressure, career, relationships, and confidence. In The Change Cycle, Ann Salerno and Lillie Brock help readers cope by explaining the six predictable and sequential stages of change—loss, doubt, discomfort, discovery, understanding, and integration—and offer examples, tools, and success strategies so you can move resourcefully through each stage.

Each chapter focuses on a single stage of the Change Cycle, described in a lively, informal style peppered with frequent humor. Utilizing stories and essays about the ways people, departments, and teams have successfully dealt with challenges, Salerno and Brock offer examples, tools, and success strategies so individuals at all levels will know what to expect from themselves and others and will be able to resourcefully move through each stage.

Based on the authors’ fifteen years of experience in hundreds of companies and government agencies worldwide and firmly grounded in recent discoveries in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, The Change Cycle will help readers at all levels take responsibility for how they react and respond in a changing work environment.

About this title

About the Author:

A frequent guest of airports, Ann Salerno is an internationally known trainer and consultant who has guided people and their organizations through change in places as varied as New Delhi, Warsaw, London, Cape Town, and Ottawa, as well as in dozens of American cities. Following graduate work in public administration, she began her business career in management at General Mills, gaining recognition early on for her managing and leadership skills. Named a Master Speaker and Trainer by Citizens Against Crime, she went on to build her successful career in corporate training and organizational change, working with organizations and Fortune 500 companies ranging from the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Canadian government to General Motors, Amgen, the GAP, the NCAA, and American Express. Heralded for her ability to communicate successful change strategies in an entertaining, practical, and accessible way, Ann has attended the Josephson Institute’s Organizational Ethics Program, is a member of the WinStar Foundation’s development team, and serves on the board of directors for Operation of Hope.org. She has coauthored four books, including The Divorce Solution: How to Go from Bitter to Better, and, with Lillie Brock, The Secret to Getting Through Life’s Difficult Changes. Ann makes her home in Louisville, Kentucky.
Born in L.A.—lower Alabama, that is—Lillie Brock took the country road to the city, studying psychology and education as an undergraduate and graduate student before devoting herself full time to corporate training, work that has brought her to cities all over America and through- out the world. A sought-after keynote speaker and gifted facilitator, Lillie has years of experience assisting organizations in the business and nonprofit sectors to develop and integrate productive change. Former national president of Citizens Against Crime, on behalf of which she taught personal protection to members of hundreds of organizations nationwide, Lillie is coauthor of The Secret to Getting Through Life’s Difficult Changes. Her professional background also includes work as an educational therapist for emotionally disturbed children. Lillie’s passion for helping others led to a significant life and professional change of her own: a decision to enter ministry full time. An elder in her denomination, she is currently pursuing a graduate divinity degree at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lillie lives in Dallas, Texas, with her family.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Change@Work
Note from Ann
“Conversations at 37,000 Feet”

I travel a lot. Often my seat neighbors will ask me what I do. “I’m a corporate trainer,” I say. “I help organizations trying to change. Because no matter what their business, how well they manage change will determine their success. They need to be ready.”

Change in the same sentence as success often gets their attention, and then they ask, “How do you train a company to change?”

My answer is always the same: “Well, once I teach a company’s people the stages of change and how to navigate them, workplace changes are much easier to take.”

Marketplace shifts, new industry standards, a current event with company impact—businesses are hit with myriad changes. I make the point that when speaking of change, the emphasis must go to the company’s people. Change only becomes a reality within a business or organization when its individual members commit and carry out the new initiative, accommodate the new structure, follow the new system, or turn out the new product.

This sometimes causes a moment of skepticism in my seatmates. “Yeah,” they say, “that’s all we ever hear— change this, change that.” They comment on how fast change happens, how it happens all the time—how 2important change is—but no one ever seems to know how to do it well, whether personally or professionally.

At this point in my airplane conversation, I usually admit that despite fifteen years as a “change agent,” I, too, struggle with life’s changes at times—at home and at work. Some changes are great—a new love, a promotion, a financial bonus—but many changes in life (maybe most) are simply hard, really hard: a company layoff, a divorce, the death of a loved one, a business failure. They hurt. They make us feel out of control.

Knowing that even a change professional can have trouble coping with change seems to somehow comfort my seatmates. The next question they typically ask is, “Can you help regular people deal with change?” By this time I know a conversation about some difficulty of theirs is coming. So I make it easy for them by explaining that managing change is more about understanding and accepting a set of common human reactions than it is about some kind of “attitude adjustment.”

Change is life, life is change. It just happens, like the weather. Changes result from chance, choice, or crisis, and are generally unpredictable. But the process of “how” we move through life’s changes is predictable, I explain. This usually brings a measure of both curiosity and relief.

In my work I have seen many employees struggling to adjust and regain their productivity following some new initiative or shift in leadership and direction. Both professionally and in my personal life, I have seen people grasping at straws trying to make sense of circumstances that leave them at a loss as to what to think or do next.

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I’ve seen people in “change pain”—sad, mad, angry, blaming, afraid—their sense of loss and confusion often driving their lives into uncharted emotional waters. These are places they wouldn’t have to go (or at least enter so deeply) if they understood more about the universal process of change: what to do, and what not to do, as they progress through the regular and sequential pattern of experiences that is The Change Cycle.

By this point in the conversation I’m drawing on a napkin, explaining how we as humans are wired to react and respond to change in six stages, how these stages are defined by characteristic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and how (best yet) they occur in an order that can be anticipated, so much of the mystery of What’s happening? or What will happen next? is eased.

Then I ask my seat neighbor if there is a change in their life that is causing some angst. Sensing I won’t judge them and seeming appreciative to have a chance to talk, they tell me things like, “My husband just got laid off,” or, “My mother recently passed away.” “My oldest just dropped out of college,” they might say, or, “My best friend has breast cancer.” Sometimes it’s just, “I have a new boss.” I listen as they tell their stories. The way they talk—the words they choose, the thoughts and emotions they describe—are clues I need to determine which stage they are in now. I show them where they are, explain what it means, and suggest what they might consider or explore or do next. Sooner or later, I assure them, they’ll feel back in control, though they may not ever actually like or appreciate the change.

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I love this moment. It’s the one when they get it—”it” being the reminder that whatever they are going through, it’s only temporary. After all, I tell them, just because you have a flat tire doesn’t mean you have forgotten how to drive.

And then we share a laugh.

Knowing what’s likely to happen next is the part that gives people the most comfort. Yes, when brought to their attention, they see the pattern—the natural sequence of change, just like there is a cycle of the seasons or phases of the moon.

Through the years, I’ve heard hundreds of change stories. At 37,000 feet I have listened to tales of life’s battles lost, and life’s wars won, of changes that brought some people to their knees and propelled others to new emotional heights. For all the good and bad that can be said about life, the fact is we will all face challenging transitions—personally and professionally—that will continue at varying intensities throughout our lives.

Learning to manage change is a skill we all need to acquire, improve, and master—in all aspects of our lives. I hope this book will assist you in improving your change resiliency and help you find your footing during times when the going gets tough.
The Focus of Our Book Change@Work

When we speak of work or professional changes, we mean both the “big ones” and the mundane ones, the ones that took weeks or even months to complete and the ones that kicked in overnight, the ones that seemed ridiculous but

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turned out pretty good, and the ones that appeared to be no-brainers but crashed and burned. This book provides a framework to assist you in gaining perspective on the change and its impact, insight that will guide you through the transition.

Our central goal is to help you take responsibility for how you react and respond to a changing work environment by giving you tools of self-awareness and assessment—instruments to light the curves and bumps on your change road. It’s all about getting through the change emotion and commotion with minimal damage to your blood pressure, career, relationships, productivity, and confidence—whatever your role in the company or organization.

It is our belief that there is no magic way to achieve a pain-free experience of a significant work change—or a significant life change, for that matter. But understanding the regular, cyclical nature of the process helps you navigate the change in a conscious, anticipatory way, minimizing the fear, loss, resentment, and anxiety which to one degree or another accompany so many changes in work and life.

For all we know about the science and predictability of change, there is still the mystery of intensity when it comes to individual reactions. A change that might rock one person’s world can be a speed bump to another. Each of us experiences change with our own scoreboard correlating to where we are on our path through life. And this variability extends to companies—collections of individuals— as well. It is amazing to be in one workplace where productivity might decline simply due to the distraction of a new food-service vendor, while at another company such

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a decline would only result from layoffs or similar major change.

In the pages ahead, you will encounter many different examples of workplace change. Some we might call “change bombs”—devastating losses to companies and individuals: a plant closing, a product recall, workplace violence, executive corruption. Other changes might seem trivial in comparison, but as we suggest above, almost any company change can have real impact, and depending on certain factors (management style, workplace culture, change track-record), it can seriously affect morale—to the point where what would appear to be a “small” change can give rise to employee anger, blame, resistance, and lethargy.

In a way, organizational change brings a set of dynamics akin to family or relationship dynamics: little things can become big things over time; employees have “long memories.” If management is cavalier in making changes that impact employee convenience (parking, food, dress code), when it comes time for a company to initiate a major change, reaction will be partly predicated on employees’ prickly memories of what has come before. The bottom line? The price of frequent, chaotic, or mismanaged change can be high. Change management requires care; no change is too small for skilled handling.

We wrote this book for anyone charged with communicating, carrying out, integrating, or simply dealing with a challenging work transition. We focus on the human perspective. We take as seriously as we can everything that comes into play during a change at work, not only company rollout strategies and management-employee 7relations but also the effects on people’s work performance, schedules, interactions with colleagues, energy levels, morale, and life at home.

A change at work is like throwing a rock into a lake— there will be ripples, and often they extend into your non-work life too. We try to never lose sight of the fact that the separation between work and home can be narrow, often very narrow. Happily, in helping you better deal with workplace change, these pages teach lessons that carry over into your nonwork life—a positive not only for you and those close to you, but also for your company or organization. Fewer ripples at home mean fewer at work—and of course the reverse is also true.
The Challenge of Change

Why is organizational change so difficult?

Because teams, departments, sites, mom-and-pop entrepreneurial businesses, companies small and large, school systems, governments, and global organizations cannot effectively transform unless their workers and members are committed to the change. This holds true whatever the impetus, crisis, challenge, or well-constructed strategic plan, whatever the rewards of success or consequences of failure. People must buy in.

No matter the value or process employed to make the change, there will be unforeseen implementation issues and underlying dynamics created by the workplace environment and the organization’s communication style. If change is initiated in a decree from the top brass and the news then makes its way down through the ranks, 8what we call the “they factor”—How did they decide?, “How do they know?, They have no idea—can arise among employees and lodge a stick in the spokes of the transition.

Another challenge stems from the gap in change-assimilating between those company leaders who conceived of the change and those who one day learn about it. Execs and upper management can be significantly further along in The Change Cycle than those at the employee and lower-management levels who are suddenly mandated with “making it happen.”

When change is initiated within the workforce itself, it has a different set of implementation issues. By and large, these issues work themselves out more quickly, and the change impacts service and product quality standards for the good. Communication is more relevant and timely. There’s more ownership of the need to change, which leads to superior identifying of problems and solution-creating, a circumstance less prone to the-old-way versus the-new-way struggle some top-down decisions create.

Supervisors and managers are the most important link to the potential success of any change, because it is up to them to carry the ball for the ongoing communication after the initial announcement. Successful strategic initiatives and organizational change require above-average attention and commitment to communication, above-average leadership and management skills. Executives, managers, and supervisors must be willing to go beyond job and industry know-how to valuing learning and excelling at people skills—aka communication skills—in order to successfully facilitate and manage the ongoing 9changes at all levels within any organization. This includes being willing and able to look forward with fervor to what might be.

The first and most significant issue is this: managers and leaders must be willing and able to manage themselves. Individually, they must take responsibility for how they tend to react in changing environments. In dealing with change, managers and leaders must address their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors before they can address anyone else’s.

Often workplace higher-ups say things like, “We have to beat this thing.” Or, “Change or die.” Or, “We gotta swim with the sharks.” These types of comments are indicative of the survival mentality common in the early stages of change. “Can you swim with the sharks?” should not be the focus or concern. “Can you swim at all?” is the issue. If yes, teach others. If no, grab your floatie and jump into the water—we can change that.
The Pull of the Past

One of the reasons people find change so hard is they have never been taught to understand the emotional and cognitive challenges that change creates. The latest brain science and cognitive psychology studies continue to point to memory as a key indicator of how we will react during an unfolding change situation. Whether you are reading this book as a worker, manager, or leader, you probably don’t need research to persuade you that unresolved thoughts and feelings about “how some things were handled” in previous company changes are a significant reason employees can

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have a hard time believing or trusting their employer when a new change is introduced. Our recollections of unfortunate or difficult past changes can insinuate themselves into our general outlook and cause skepticism, cynicism, bitterness, and other states not conducive to workplace concentration and performance.

Memories have a dramatic impact on how we interpret what is or might be happening to us and why. And even if the memories aren’t actually resourceful—meaning there is no close connection between the past change and the one you are experiencing now—the brain has a way of editing, reshaping, and generalizing the “historical” information, calling it useful and sending it to you anyway. You then try to superimpose it on the current situation as if this could be the key to solving your issues or problems. The good news is, it could be valid and helpful information that gives you direction. The bad news is, it could turn out to be a distortion or generalization that takes you down the wrong dark alley.
The Role of “Schema”

Human beings have always had a complicated relationship with change. Is it good? Is it bad? The combination of our memories and the power of our personalities (whether we motivate ourselves with new challenges or a need for security) is what pushes or pulls the change to the good or bad side of the line. Just why is our memory so powerful a driver of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? Because as humans, we first view change— whether we categorize it as good or bad—as something

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that can cause loss of control. This provokes primal fears, even turning it into a survival issue: fight or flight. And if that sounds a little dramatic for everyday workplace change, it remains true that the brain runs all new experiences through its self-protection cir...

About this edition

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1576754987
• ISBN 13: 9781576754986
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216