Change Acceptance Part 2

 

In my last post, we looked at the early stages of a workforce's change acceptance process. The upshot is that special care is needed to get workers through the early rough patch so that they can regain the performance required in your project and required in the organization generally.

Venting is acceptable at first. Allow workers to safely make statements of frustration, surprise, anger, fear, even rejection of the recently-announced change. All leaders and change managers must be seen as empathetic listeners during this early period. Keep telling yourself that these are not personal attacks on you (even if they sound a lot like it), but a natural reaction of the workforce as a whole when major changes are initially communicated. Oh, and your good-hearted attempts to respond with rational, logical counterarguments will be wasted.

Of course, leaders will have - and should have - a limit to what they will accept, such as anything close to Greek austerity measure protests.
 

You Can Allow Performance to Slip. You will see a reduction in worker performance early in major change efforts. Leaders of change efforts in years past overreacted in the face of this as they feared failure of multi-project initiatives. Overreaction means tightening the thumbscrews with tough talk and strict discipline. While there are times when this reaction is necessary, early in organizational changes is not one of those times. Patience and understanding are the tools of the most effective leaders during this time. Performance will recover. And it will recover faster if you respond correctly in the early stages.

With all this discussion, venting and underperformance it's a wonder you will be able to roll up a project successfully. This is one of the reasons why so many major change-related projects do fail or are challenged. The wise project manager will add extra time to the work plan early to handle the workforce emotional and performance "slump."

Does your organization tend to apply the thumbscrews too early in change efforts? Have you experienced a performance slump in organizational/business process change efforts? What was that like? Have you ever tried to respond to worker frustration with rationale counterarguments? How did that work?