Change Management Insights

Does it sometimes feel like your best employees - the smart, capable people you depend on - are the ones who raise the biggest objections and create the greatest barriers to change? It’s easy to label this behaviour as resistance. But what if they’re not resisting anything? What if they’re doing exactly what their brains are designed to do, and you’ve been interpreting it completely wrong? Understanding why people appear to push back on change can help you eliminate this apparent resistance and leverage one of your most powerful tools for enabling change.

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 deceive leaders into believing their employees resist change.

What makes communication during change effective? When I ask that question, employees and leaders consistently respond with the same qualities: consistency, accuracy, relevance, clarity, timeliness, and transparency. The foundation for building that level of communication is your change communication strategy. Communicating to create healthy and sustainable change involves much more than simply giving and receiving information. It is the way we interact and engage with people, interpret data, make meaning, develop understanding, and build—or, in the case of poor communication, destroy—relationships. Communication is the thread that weaves through every aspect of your change efforts and your organization. It is reflected in what you say, what you do, and even what you don't say or do. It is an essential element of every change. Although communication serves many purposes throughout the change process, it has one overarching purpose: