George Kohlrieser, Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD, explained during an event some years ago, how to to manage change effectively.
People do not naturally resist change. Please don't build that into your culture when you start the change process. Because you've now two problems. You got to change and you got the negative mindset. People resist the pain of change, the fear of the unknown. Watch in your own life, in other people's lives. Who has sought to change not because they were afraid of something but because they saw a benefit?
The brain system is hard wired to the day you die to create
new neurons. Isn't that a good news? It's called brain
plasticity - how we create new neurons. And it requires
curiosity, exploration, new learning and change.
You are
doing something good for your brain, when you are curious, when
you're going through changes doing something new. Even
driving on a different route to go to work. Or eating
a different food or whatever it might be.
People are no longer looking for the pain and danger.
Then they're looking for opportunities. This is fundamental to entrepreneurs,
the people who wanna be creative and innovative. You have
to look for opportunities, but if you're constantly focused on
the fear around you or not inspiring, how you ever gonna
see those opportunities? It's neuroscience.
People hate
being changed, they'd like to have choice. It's called
reactance. And when they understand and see the benefit of
change, most will go with it.
The biggest problem in
communicating change is that the leader is not able to
clearly articulate what the benefit of the change would be.
And how many of you have seen people be fired or lose their
job and never get over it? They have
to go through that grief. And how many of you have seen people
who got fired or lost their job and because of the way it was
done they came back and said: "Thank you", in 3 months or 6
months. They will describe it as a positive experience. Yeah.
It's all in the mindset and the behavior of the leader,
delivering that.
There's always a benefit in
every change.