Resistance to change is often cited as one of the greatest obstacles to change. However, it doesn’t need to be. You can prevent it.
The challenge is that leaders can easily fall into traps that cause them to interpret normal responses to change as resistance. When that happens, they can unintentionally create a toxic cycle that makes change more difficult.
Here are three traps that can lead leaders to believe their employees resist change.
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Preparation Matters More Than the Event
I ran a half marathon in my late twenties. At that time, it was common to invite all the runners to a spaghetti dinner the night before the race. It was thought that carbohydrate loading increased muscle glycogen stores and offered extra energy for the race the following day.
I’m not sure if the dinner helped. Maybe. However, I believe my success in completing the race was more due to my preparation over the eight months leading up to race day.
Now imagine that three weeks before the race, I asked a friend to join me. When she raised concerns about her fitness and knees, I assured her, “Don’t worry, I have been training. We will do some running and have a spaghetti dinner the night before the race.”
Then, when she continued raising concerns and wouldn’t run, I called her resistant to change and told her she must run.
Just so you know, I didn’t do that.
Had I done so, not only would I have been a terrible friend, but I also would have set her up for failure and injury.
Yet this type of scenario unfolds in organizations every day. Employees are surprised and unprepared for changes and face unrealistic timelines. Then they are labelled as resistant when they raise objections. And told they must change to keep their jobs.
This is where leaders can begin falling into three traps that create a toxic cycle of change.
Trap #1: Believing People Resist Change
The first trap is interpreting objections, concerns, or unwillingness to change as evidence that people are resistant to change.
It’s easy to fall into this trap when working with a resistant mindset. This mindset holds that people resist change and that your role as a leader is to manage that resistance.
When you hold this mindset, your brain can misinterpret normal human responses to change as resistance. This misinterpretation can lead to various unhelpful and unproductive actions.
For example, you may dismiss or downplay the concerns and objections of key people who must adopt the new activities.
That’s what happened in one organization. Leaders believed they were making a small, almost insignificant change: moving a small group of people from a suburban office to the downtown office.
When employees complained, and because most, but not all, of the complaints were about working downtown, the leaders dismissed their concerns as resistance. They insisted that the decision had been made and that the employees had no choice but to relocate physically.
It was only when a leader from another department in the suburban office raised concerns about how this group’s work for his department would be completed that the leaders paused to investigate.
It turned out the group being moved was an integral part of the workflow for a much larger department, and most of the work required people to be physically present.
What appeared to be resistance was something else entirely.
Trap #2: Relying on Tell-Sell Communication
The second trap is believing your role is to “sell” the change.
When you use a tell-sell approach to change, you overlook the readiness people need to navigate the journey of adopting new activities and behaviours.
Your role as a leader is not to sell people on the change event.
To create healthy and sustainable change, you must create the conditions and environment that invite, encourage, and enable people to navigate the change journey.
Trap #3: Confusing Buy-In With Commitment
“I don’t know what happened. Everyone bought into the change, but now things are stalling, and people are resisting.”
I often hear frustrated leaders say this or similar statements. Their change initiatives are stalling, and they believe the problem is resistance to change.
The problem isn’t resistance to change. The problem is that the leader misinterpreted their employees’ buy-in for the idea of change for the commitment needed to adopt the new activities and behaviours.
Buy-in is necessary but not sufficient to enable change.
Buy-in represents an agreement about the need or desire to change. For example, I may agree that I need to exercise more, but that doesn’t mean I will.
Commitment is stronger than buy-in. It is the willingness to act, do what’s uncomfortable, and persevere through what’s needed to achieve the intended outcome.
When you misinterpret buy-in as commitment, it’s easy to become frustrated and label people as resistant to change when they fail to act, don’t follow through, or revert to previous behaviours.
As a result, you push harder, making the situation worse instead of better.
Break the Cycle of Resistance by Building Readiness
These three traps make it more difficult to enable change in your organization and in your own life. More importantly, they can create resistance where there is none.
If you’re ready to break the cycle of resistance and build readiness, reach out today.
Let’s have a conversation about how adopting and using The Readiness Mindset® System will help you avoid these traps and work with people’s innate ability to change.
