Podcast: Navigating Change in Your Organization in a Truly Human Way

Is change a dirty word in your organization? Do scenes like this often play out:

You schedule a town hall meeting. You talk about major new initiatives. You’re met with blank stares and crossed arms.

This may happen time and again and your leadership keeps saying the same thing: They just don’t like change. They don’t deal well with change. They don’t want to change.

But maybe, it’s not a change resistance problem in your organization. Maybe your people are trying to tell you something.

This is another podcast installment of the People and Performance Playbook where the experts at Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute share their knowledge on leadership development. You can subscribe to the People and Performance Playbook Newsletter when you follow Chapman and Co. on Linkedin.

Talking in this episode about change in organizations is Chapman & Co.’s Barry Kirk and Emily Gauvain. You can listen through your favorite podcast provider or through the link in the header above. 

Transcript

Barry Kirk: Change is something we experience in our lives sort of constantly now. I think we would acknowledge the speed of change seems to be increasing every day. Whether it's technology, whether it's what's happening out in the world, whether it's things happening within society, just at a cultural level, it's really hard to keep up. We're all navigating change more than ever, personally and professionally. I think we would agree.  

Emily Gauvain: We walk into work, and there's just a whole new stack of change. It feels like every week, every day, there’s something different.    

Barry: Yeah. There used to be this phrase people use that I think got old after a while, but it does fit here, which is the new normal. Not just change itself, but I think the rapid pace of it, and that it doesn't conclude. Whatever change you're dealing with, as soon as you get it figured out, there is more change sitting right behind it.  

I did a little research, and I looked back to 2016, so not too long ago. The average employee dealt with basically two big organizational changes a year. Today, that's ten. It went from 2 to ten—the number of large organizational shifts that an employee had to somehow figure out how to navigate within their organization.  

That's a huge amount of change for people to get behind to try to understand how to navigate. There are also some pretty good statistics now that saying because of that, employees are way less receptive to leaning into change, which I guess isn't surprising. If you've got way more change, your patience with dealing with it starts to diminish over time.  

Emily: The amount of change is going straight up, and our appetite for it is falling straight off the cliff. Those two lines are heading in the opposite direction. Sounds like a real challenge for both organizations and the people working in them.  

Barry: The most interesting thing, certainly we've seen in the work we do, is that oftentimes when we look at what's happening in the organization, change is working its way through. We're informing teams; we're giving them information; and we're trying to let them know what we think is going to happen.  

At some point, we run into a wall. That wall is what is commonly referred to as change resistance. Why aren’t those employees just happy to do whatever it is that we're moving the organization toward? You eventually just run into a whole lot of people who say, I'm not on board with this or I don't get what we're doing or no, I didn't read the last email, and I don't know what you're even talking about, which is probably more avoidance than anything. They really don't want to lean into the change. The change is overwhelming. And so, we look at it as change resistance. I think that sounds familiar to a lot of the companies that we work with.  

Emily: Yeah, certainly. That's something I hear in my work with the companies in our span of care, or in our influence, is that our people are not leaning into the change. We have these big things we need to get this done to grow into the organization we want to become. Why are the people slowing us down?  

Barry: What do you think that's about? Before we kind of dig into it, why do you think change resistance just seems so common when we put these organizational shifts in front of large populations of human beings and say, follow us, we're going in that direction now.  

Emily: I think sometimes the easy answer to that is we get a lot of people in a room together, probably more people than we were ten years ago, to decide on the change instead of it being one or two people. We have 10 or 15 people. We might bring in different stakeholders. Sometimes we think, hey, that's enough. That’s enough people in the room that this change will take hold. I'm still wondering if maybe we're not bringing people along on the journey or seeing where they are in order to help move this change forward.  

Barry: I would say almost certainly, in a lot of organizations, that's the issue. We think we're bringing people along because we're making all these wonderful decisions and then telling them about them, but that is actually not the same as bringing them along. It's simply telling them, hey, we're about to smack you in the face with a whole bunch of new stuff that you have to figure out and navigate — and you weren't involved at all in how we arrived at the decisions for that. I think what's interesting about that, in our experience, is that we label this change resistance. That's the most common phrase for this, and it literally is saying the people in our span of care are pushing back against these really amazing decisions that we have made, and how could that be happening?  

The most common thing that I think companies do then is they say, OK, how do we get less resistance? That's where they go. I've always thought this is like going to the doctor. Before you come in, the nurse practitioner puts a thermometer in your mouth and takes your temperature. The doctor comes in a few minutes later and looks at that temperature reading and says, oh, you have a fever. Your temperature's high. That's why you're in here today. Then, the doctor prescribes less fever in response to that. Now, you would probably change doctors if that's what your doctor did.  

Emily: Absolutely.  

Barry: Right. You want to say no, doctor, I know I have a fever or I'm glad you can tell I have a fever, but what is actually happening that causes the fever? Well, that's silly. It sounds like a silly example, but that is literally what organizations are doing when they come in and look at a change management process and say, oh, we have change resistance. Now, we need less resistance when, in fact, what they need to be doing is identifying what is underneath that.  

The change is being resisted, yes. But it is almost always, I'd say maybe go so far as to say is always just a symptom of something else going on culturally that says, because of that thing, because of that friction, I am not ready to move forward with this new thing you're asking me to do.  

Emily: Barry, the world is full of smart leaders. Why do you think they might be missing that? Why are they just approaching change with more change management?  

Barry: Yeah. I will say, I don't think this is about leaders not wanting to diagnose this correctly or to solve it in an effective way. I think fundamentally it's a lack of understanding of — it's going to sound crazy — not of change or organization or culture. It's a lack of understanding of humans.  

We talk a lot about Truly Human Leadership, and a lot of that is about sort of the skills that a leader needs to have, or the way you should work through the people in your span of care. Another, I think, fundamental part of Truly Human Leadership is: Do you understand human beings? Do you understand human behavior?  

Because if the answer were yes, you would actually never be surprised that when you bring large change in front of a group, intense change, their immediate reaction is to push back. It is merely human psychology at play. This is the way the brain works to say, oh, change, that's a threat, so I'm not going to move forward with it.  

I think that's part of it: Do leaders fundamentally understand human psychology?  

Emily: Yeah. I think even the ones that do, maybe sometimes the world asks them to ignore what they know about human psychology. Sometimes, I think, especially in traditional organizations, leaders don't have the opportunity to stop and pay attention to that. It is just like, oh, you know what? We know we need to communicate this seven times in seven different ways for it to land.  

Just doing that, just smacking them in the face with the change seven different ways doesn't necessarily make it land or give the leaders the space to stop back and think about what is the human experience behind this change?  

Barry: I found that really interesting. What do you think that is about? Why, as a leader, if my inclination is to try to look at this as a human problem, not a systems problem or a communication problem, why would I feel I'm not allowed to? Should I be hesitant about looking at it as a human issue, a human need?  

Emily: The first thing that comes to mind is the world talks a lot about the sandwich generation of people in their midlife that are taking care of both their aging parents and their children. I think a lot of leaders in organizations are also, in their own way, kind of in a sandwich generation.  

They are caring for the people in their span of care. They have to help them navigate through the change. The majority of leaders aren't actually the ones making the decision either. That change, that thing that needs to be implemented, is coming from above them, the same way they are sandwiched in between. If they are not getting the space or taking care of themselves to be like, hey, how is this change impacting me? How do I process it? That can make it hard to stop and be like, how do I process and help the people in my span of care?  

Barry: Yeah, I think one thing you're hitting on that's really important there is oftentimes the focus, in a topic around change resistance, is the front line. How do we bring the front line along? But the reality is that more often than not, it's actually your mid-tier leaders who are probably your biggest change resisters. We can talk about that in a minute.  

What are those things that might feel threatening to them that are different than the front line? One of the things I think about with the human part of this is whenever you're bringing change into an organization, you've got a group of people sort of artificially brought together to get a task done, to run a company. You're treating change as if that is the change in their life, as if that's what's sitting in front of them.  

If you can help them navigate that change, they’re fine, and the world is great. The reality is they are navigating change that sits outside of your organization as well. One of the exercises that I like to do with companies we work with is to put two concentric circles on the wall. On the outside circle, people identify and write down the changes in the organization that they’re really challenged with right now.  

It could be moving into a matrix structure or leadership changes at the top or new processes. Maybe you've acquired a company, and you're trying to figure out how to integrate them together, all that. There are so many things. IT. Whatever it is that's making you frustrated and creating friction. That's the outside circle.   

The inside circle is: What change are you encountering in your personal life that you're willing to share? That is change you're also navigating. When you think about particularly people who are at the age right now that they're leading in organizations, what does that look like? You've probably seen this, too. It's aging parents, for some people in the workforce. It could be new kids, or it could be kids leaving the house. They're an empty nester. What are the kinds of changes are we seeing that they're dealing with at a personal level that we need to be thinking about?  

Emily: Yeah, I think all of the context of the world is changing. It can even be silly things, like the way we're driving our cars is different. Are we driving electric vehicles? Are we driving gas vehicles? The cost of things, all of this change that people are navigating in the world. I could easily fill that inner circle with personal changes.  

Barry: Yeah, I think it could be big things. It could be: Do you have team members that are going through divorces? One of our team members has made me very much aware of a topic that is not generally on my radar, but it is now: menopause can be an issue. For women in leadership going through menopause, there are things happening that are getting in the way of them being able to focus on change at work. I don't think that's a thing we talk about a lot when we're talking about business and leadership. That inner circle, all that stuff that's going on in our personal lives, is the first circle that we're actually going to try to navigate through, not the second one.  

Work is the second circle. That's why I think it's really important that we look at this at a human level, because human beings have a lot of stuff happening. I will say, I'm of the generation that when I grew up in corporate America, you were told early on, whatever is happening in your personal life, you leave that at the door. You walk inside of Corporation Inc. and all that sits outside.  

Of course, that was nonsense. That wasn't actually happening, but we pretended it was. I know from you with your experience with HR and working with teams, you definitely know today that nobody's leaving that at the door.  

Emily: No, they definitely aren't leaving that at the door. That difference in what it's like makes me think, OK, maybe we were pretending to leave it at the door decades ago, a little bit ago, but we were also experiencing less change in the workforce. I think maybe that things have been happening in people's personal lives forever.  

There has been divorce. There have been aging parents. There have been children for as long as there have been people. But the amount of change that's happening in that outer circle, things at work, is also increasing. If we don't do anything different, if we don't act any differently, we're going to get slowed down there.   

I’m wondering, Barry, when you do that exercise with organizations, what's aha moment? What do leaders or participants leave that room feeling when they see all of those sticky notes in the concentric circles?  

Barry: First of all, it's definitely a relief to a group of leaders to say, OK, we're all just stating reality. Instead of trying to be the good soldiers and leaning into the change, we're acknowledging there are reasons that we're struggling with the change. It has nothing to do with obstinate resistance. It has to do with our navigating a lot in our personal lives and then work adds a different concentric circle of friction that we're navigating.  

It sort of becomes obvious at that point, oh, we should have always anticipated resistance because it is a natural state, and everybody's got a lot going on. I think that's the one thing I would certainly advise organizations going through a change process to do. Just anticipate change resistance will occur because people have a lot going on in their lives, and it is a normal human reaction to change to feel threatened by it.  

One of the things I think is really interesting in human psychology is, I can't remember the exact number, but it's like 10,000 or more decisions that we make on any given day. Most we're not thinking much about. Do I turn right or left in traffic this morning? Some of them are about do I hire a new person? Do we change the focus of our client base? Things like that.  

You've got big decisions, little decisions, but your ability to navigate those decisions is really helped by a pattern-seeking part of the brain. The brain is looking for patterns all the time, so it can make predictions so that you don't have to think that hard about things. You can move through your day without every single one of those decisions needing concentration and focus.  

The minute that we bring change into the environment, what do we do? We break the pattern. When we break the pattern, now people have to stop and they have to say, is right the way to go or left the way to go? I thought I knew, and now I don't know anymore. In fact, maybe I'm supposed to go forward.  

I'm not sure anymore. Now, they begin to say, well, not only do I not know the answer, but does this threaten my position in the organization? Does it threaten my ability to go to my team and say, I know what's happening? Or do I now have to say, well, even I don't understand where we're heading right now? You start to think about what that does for the way your team looks at you.  

That starts to build up with leaders. Then, of course, the front line is the same way. In fact, you know that one of the models that we really like that helps us think through these threat states is a model called SCARF, which is based on neuroscience work, by a neuroscientist named David Rock. It's been around for decades, but it's a really effective way for us to think about what those threat triggers are that happen when change is put in front of an organization.  

Emily: Yeah, I was thinking exactly the same thing. David Rock's SCARF model. That really talks about, for anyone that's unfamiliar, status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. All of those things can be triggered in a change and make someone more or less motivated to move in the direction the organization is trying to get them to move, to say, hey, I want to lean in or not.  

I look at things like status. If we're changing the structure of an organization, status, certainty, autonomy, all of those things can be things where people are like, hey, I wonder what's going on? What does this change mean for me?  

Barry: Yeah. If you go back to my analogy about the doctor and the thermometer, change resistance is the fever, but the threat states are the illness that you're trying to address. If somebody is saying what I really am feeling is a lack of certainty, and therefore I cannot move because I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I'm also afraid of the repercussions if I now make the wrong decisions because the patterns broken. I don't have the level of trust in my own decision-making that I had before.  

That's the flu; that's the pneumonia; that's the COVID; that's whatever it is you need to address, not the change resistance. That's just the external symptom. If all we're doing is saying, oh, we have change resistance, so let's give them more communication. Let's find a team of evangelists that will tell everybody this is a great idea. What you're still not doing is saying the core illness, which is lack of certainty or a threat to status; those are the things you've got to address or you're just looking at the symptom. You're not looking at the thing that actually needs to be cured.   

I'm wondering if in our work we've seen any of these threat states that maybe you get triggered more often than others? Do we have some sense of any of that?  

Emily: With change, the one that I think naturally pops up is certainty. I think any time something is changing, we could communicate all of the things we could do. A million messages in a million ways. It's hard to answer every question for every person. I see certainty, the ability to predict what comes next.  

Like you said, our brain is operating in patterns. Change breaks the pattern. Now, I no longer have certainty. It feels like one of those states that would pop up. I think that can lead to fear. The other thing we haven't talked about much in this conversation yet, another almost buzzword, is change fatigue. People are fatigued by change.  

The organizations I work with say that a lot. To your point, a lot of them are like, hey, we need to find evangelists. I feel like champion is another buzzword. We'll find someone to champion this change, and we'll just assume if we find eight champions, they'll go out and the change fatigue will disappear because we'll have eight really energetic, excited champions.  

Then, organizations do that. Sometimes, these things still fail. I wonder a little bit about that fatigue. We've talked a lot about the number of changes, the increase of change. What do you think about change fatigue, Barry? Is that real? What do we do about change fatigue?  

Barry: One thing I'd say, Emily, I like change fatigue a lot more than change resistance. Because change resistance sounds like I'm deciding to push back. That's what resistance is. Fatigue simply says this is washing over me every day, and it's wearing me down. I think that's really, really different because one of the reasons I think organizations need to really hesitate in talking about change resistance is it says you were the problem.  

You, the team member who can't get on board, versus we didn't execute this well as leaders or there are systemic things in our culture that we should have taken care of first before putting significant change in front of the organization. I like fatigue better because I can't really say, oh, I can't believe your change fatigue. It's a thing that's happening to you.  

I think that is more likely what is going on inside of an organization. Then, it gets back to that question. What is the source of the fatigue and what do I need to do about it? The other interesting thing that I really love about the SCARF framework is it says these are not, by the way, isolated threat states.  

If certainty is threatened and I'm a leader who feels like I'm outside the decision-making and I'm supposed to implement, but I'm not even completely sure myself, the next threat you might go to is status. People came to me two or three times and asked me what's going on, and I don't have information. Now, they stop looking to me as someone with authority and inside knowledge.  

It's not just certainty that's feeling like it's not where it needs to be, but my sense of who I am in the organization starts to break down. It is important for organizations to understand that this is complex. This is why it is never solved by one more communication or one more energetic champion saying, please do what the organization is asking you to do. These are complex human needs states. We have to recognize what's going on and address them.   

The other one that I think is really important to note here is social connectedness and the SCARF model. It's called relatedness. If I start to feel like the change is breaking social bonds and social connections or throwing me in with people I don't know, and all of a sudden now I've got to trust new people, that begins to create that change fatigue as well. This is so complex, and it's important to say it's complex.   

However, I will note one thing about the SCARF model that is hopeful. The same states that cause these threat triggers — fairness or relatedness or autonomy — can also be reward triggers. If I can fix the issue with certainty, if I can give you the information that makes you feel like you now understand what's going on, if I can find ways to give a new team an accelerated path to connecting and becoming a full-fledged team, then I have actually made relatedness a reward state.  

Even in an organization where I can't make fairness or certainty a reward state right now. This is where you have to get smart about applying a framework like this. You've got threat states, and you've got reward states, but they're all triggered by the same thing. You have to figure out which ones to apply into that environment.   

I'm wondering if you look at the framework, Emily, and within our experiences, if you're experiencing change fatigue in an organization and you want to start solving it culturally, where would you go first? Which one of those would you flip into a reward state the most quickly?  

Emily: If you're experiencing fatigue, I might look at certainty first. What can you tell people is going to be the same? I think that mental energy, the fatigue of navigating another thing, that's different. That is a challenge.   

You can't always fix that piece with listening or with more opportunities to give input. Sometimes people do just need to know here is what is certain. Here are the things. Here is how you should navigate this. I think if someone is really feeling fatigued by change, if we have change fatigue, we need to name some of the things that are certain for people. We need to help them understand that piece. That might be where I go first. What about you? Would you go someplace different?  

Barry: No. I agree with you: certainty. Here's an interesting thing that I've learned from working with the SCARF model and looking at the neuroscience. It seems counterintuitive, but it's fascinating that a negative certainty, a thing I don't like, but which I can tell you is going to happen, is actually perceived better and feels better to me to hear than an uncertain positive.  

If you're telling me, I think when we get down the road, this is going to be better for everybody, that doesn't feel great. What do I do with that? If you can at least tell me, yes, we are splitting your team into two parts, and you're going with a new leader. At least now I know what's actually happening.  

I think that maybe another mistake we sometimes see organizations make is that they are trying to solve this by putting the positives out there, which sometimes changes and morphs and can't actually be fully committed to. It's like, well, there's a bright and sunny future down the road. What I want to know is what's going to happen tomorrow. I think that certainty part is hard sometime.   

You say, well, I can't give them a certainty, or I can't give them a positive one. What is counterintuitive is sometimes even giving them a negative certainty is the right path to do in the immediate moment.  

Emily: Yeah. That's really interesting because I do think a lot of times in change management efforts, we focus on here's the hopeful possible thing down the road, or here's the hopeful possible three things down the road. That doesn't answer the lack of certainty today. It doesn't make any of that better. Really helpful, I think, for me to, in my own work even, to continue thinking that a negative certainty can be OK.  

They might not like every part of this, but we can provide them with some clarity. Here are the rules; here are the processes; here's the game we're playing. Instead of saying the game is changing, and you'll probably like it at the end.  

Barry: Yeah. I'm not sure what we expect team members to do with that. They're navigating today. They're navigating this week and this month. I agree with you. I think the first place you go is certainty. If I had to pick a second one, I'd probably say relatedness.   

How do you help people come together in a time of change and understand that they have each other to lean on? That you as the Truly Human Leader, hold them in your span of care and you have empathy.  

You said a few minutes ago that you want to treat this as a human situation, but we feel pressure in the corporate world not to do that. Don't bend to that pressure because you're actually not helping the organization by treating this as a mechanical question. It's not a mechanical question; it's a human question. And you need to treat it in a human way.   

I think we're getting something really exciting here, which is we're saying that when you roll out change in your organization, the first thing we want to be doing is looking to see how people react to it. The resistance that we're seeing, the fever there, is probably telling us something, one, about where friction sits in the organization, but two, how people are trying to manage their own fever.  

How they're trying to deal with it is actually really great information to tell us either there's a weakness that we need to design for better to keep people on track of what we need them to be on, or they might have a better idea than — this is going to sound crazy — we, as a bunch of leaders, had sitting in a conference room making decisions on our own about this. The other thing that I think is really cool about what you just pointed out is almost always when these cheats are occurring; it's at what we'd call the local level.  

It's at the subculture level. We talk to us all the time. All culture is local, and the way I might react to change is probably very local as well. That is a subculture within the company oftentimes finding their own way to deal with change in a way that makes things more effective. That's great data. If we're trying to be a data-driven organization, a lot of times the data we miss is the data that our own team members can give us about how to run more effectively.  

I think the question, for anybody who likes what they're hearing us talk about and wants to embrace change differently in their organization, is how do I know?  

How do I know what's actually going on? I can see the high fever. I can see the resistance, the fatigue or whatever it looks like. How do I figure out which of those threat states are being triggered? How would I get to that, Emily? I think that's the important question we need to answer as we come to the end of this discussion.  

Emily: Yeah, I think it is one of the most powerful tools in your leadership toolbelt, and it can be used in most situations is listening. There is a need. I think we think change management is communicating. Tell them; tell them; tell them. Maybe what we should be doing is listening. Because the reality is, if you have ten people on your team and you're implementing a change, they're not seeing it the way you see it. They are seeing it from their perspective, from their lens. You need to understand where they are. The best way to do that, I think, is to listen.  

Barry: Yeah, I love that because I know certainly Bob Chapman; that was always his core message. The most basic level of Truly Human Leadership is the ability to listen, to listen deeply and to listen empathetically. I so agree with what you said. I do want to note, maybe, that it's not just listening to a few people.  

We're actually talking about a pretty systems-wide listening that you need to do, because I think you could listen to one group and say, oh, I've heard them. I really thought about what I heard there. I've identified the core threat state, and it's autonomy. They feel like their autonomy is threatened, and therefore I will now put into place in this change management process something to address this autonomy, which is great for that team, for that subculture, for that local group.  

What you might have missed is another group is being threatened by relatedness or loss of social connection or a sense of who am I, and who do I work with and what do I know about them? Your autonomy solution doesn't address that. Where the complexity gets in here is different groups might need different solutions for you to help them bring themselves along to lessen the fatigue and make them part of it.  

We're really talking about a significant listening effort within your organization, which, by the way, is a good idea even if you're not dealing with major change. I think you and I would both agree.  

Emily: Yeah. Barry, any ideas or tips for people? If I'm putting myself back in that sandwiched mid-level leader role where the change is also happening to me, and I'm helping people in my span of care through the change, listening can be a lot. It can take a lot of time. Do you have any tips or ideas? How can people make that feel really manageable?  

Barry: Yeah. I guess the obvious one certainly is to do some kind of survey. I'm sure you have tools within your organization to do surveys and make the survey really specific to what is happening within the change process. I will say surveys are great. I love data; you love data. It's really important to gather that and to have that to react to.  

I also think you need to spend some time in listening sessions, what we might call focus groups. What it gives you that you don't get from surveys is the color. What are the stories that they would share to help you understand that? Really, the reality is you don't need to do that many listening sessions before you start to hear the same stories over and over again.  

I want to say it's not as daunting of an initiative as you might think. You need to do enough of it that you start to hear the stories repeated. When that happens, you know you've listened enough. They are sharing an experience together. It's not everybody having an individual experience; it's a group experience and how they're navigating it. Those feel to me like the two most obvious approaches that we would take to do that.   

Emily: Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. As a reminder or a thought for leaders, you can listen every day. There is an opportunity and sometimes I think even space to process. Even if nothing can be immediately done or rectified about the concerns, allowing people to feel heard and validated as they are navigating a change can help them move through that, too.  

It doesn't always have to necessarily be through a big listening effort. I think if I'm just one leader sandwiched in the middle, what is the one thing I could do tomorrow? Maybe I can't do a whole focus group, but I can just check in with each person in my span of care and say, hey, how is this going?  

How are you feeling about this? What's one thing I could do to make it better? Maybe I can do that. Maybe I can't, but I have at least listened, given them some space and help them move through the box of the transition. They can get to the other side and be ready to go.  

Barry: The beautiful thing about that is that is a skill that you should be using every day anyway as a Truly Human Leader. You don't need to wait until there is a major change initiative or there is a disruption or a leadership shift. The real, I think, skill that is the cornerstone of being a Truly Human Leader, and frankly, the gift that you bring to the people in your span of care is your ability to stop talking and let them talk and listen and ask questions and really understand that. If you're doing that today and tomorrow, when that change initiative hits your organization, you've already got the most important skill, the most important tool in your toolbelt to do that, because they'll tell you what's really happening. Then, you can take that information and use it to be a better leadership team in your organization.