2.5: Change Resistance Transition - Moving People Past Resistance

Managing Change Resistance Section 2: Deeper Dive - Good-to-know Beyond the Essentials
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Four models of how people move through Organizational Change Acceptance, which are key behaviors to understand for Change Management.

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Change resistance transition, how people move through the change process, from initial surprise, through compliance into commitment. This is going to be the focus here. There are different change models. And the topic of change models oftentimes becomes very confusing, because authors and many speakers do not differentiate the different purposes of the different models. And I'm going to take a little time now here to explain where the models of resistance transition takes place within the broader framework, so that you can see where this fits within your other aspects of organizational change. The focus then is going to be on the resistance transitions itself, and we're going to be talking About four specific transition models.

But these models really are subordinate to how individuals change. The stages of change that people go through individually creates instances of resistance, so that you have a broader perspective of individual change with a subordinate or embedded resistance models. But the individual model of change also fits within a higher category still, of the project methodology, how the project is initiated, and managed through the implementation. And there's a fourth area of diagnostic models, those that are used to analyze and prescribe change itself. So within the broader perspective, then there's four different types of change models and In this lecture, we're going to focus just on those that relate to resistance transition. Think of them as being link models, each with a different purpose.

The purpose in this case is understanding resistance to change. First, the loss cycle. This comes from the grief or the death, in that there's the death of what is familiar and known. This thing gets into a series of steps. The shock, it's all of a sudden a surprise, the denial is not happening to me, it'll go away. The anger Why me?

Bargaining, I promised to do this, if this will be changed in some way, the depression in that what the use, it's too much for me. These are all different stages of grief that people go through, not only in dealing with death of somebody They know but death of the familiar within the organization. Finally, there is a tipping point there's acceptance, it has happened well, okay. And then finally, taking ownership or the adaptation of your behaviors and your thought processes, so that you go through a cycle of transitions, that is normal and to be expected, this is the stages of loss or grief model. A second model is the psychological transition, and that performance changes over time. In which case when you initiate the change, there will be a performance dip and then improvement, the performance dip is doing something different, something you may not be prepared to do.

And then once you become competent It becomes a upward slope to higher levels of performance. You have transitions then through the process of over time becoming more competent, while first becoming what may appear to be less competent, because you're doing something different. So there's resistance initially, followed by letting go with the tipping point and then building competency going forward to higher levels of performance, the psychological transition model. The third model is a stage of transition model. Similar to the grief cycle, where you lose focus, you minimize the impact and then you go into the pit of despair. Eventually, you let go as a tipping point you let go of the past and you're moving forward once again.

But you're testing limits, you're searching for meaning. And eventually, you integrate the new ways of doing things with your old and you become more competent. So either stages here, similar to grief, but a little bit different in that you're focusing on what you're doing versus how you're reacting to the change. The fourth model is a phase of acceptance. If you ignore it, it won't happen. Eventually, though, you feel the pain and it's worse than you thought.

You isolate yourself, you'll wind you'll try to manipulate the system. You may become angry and aggressive toward others, you become territorial. We talked about some of these demonstrated symptoms in an earlier video. So first of all, you'll ignore it then you'll feel the pain and it is bad. Eventually though, you get to a tipping point and Healing starts to occur, you start to look once again to the future, you'll focus on the me and the plan and how it starts to fit together, even though it is still evolving, and you'll start to look for opportunities, eventually turning the corner fully committed on board. But sometimes compliance is enough.

And we're talking here about compliance of doing it, not necessarily wanting to do it, but agreeing to do it. So we've talked about a loss cycle, a performance cycle, a acceptance cycle. The key then is which model should you use? What is your model of choice? It depends. All models have some validity because they come at it from different points of view.

My recommendation is just choose one. Choose One based upon your comfort with understanding how people react and does it fit, it's really not critical that you use one model or another. But what is critical is that you understand that people go through phases. And you may pick one model dependent upon the situation to help them move through the phases. This is different than the models of how people progress through organizational change itself. Because there there are five very specific steps that you go through, and you go from one to the next to third to fourth to the fifth, and they're sequential.

In their approach, in this case, the rationale behind the model is a little bit different. And you may want to review the models later. When you're in a chain situation to see which one fits. We're playing People are because that then will give you some understanding of what you may need to do different to move them forward to the next step. So what's important then, is to move past the resistance toward compliance, ideally toward commitment, using the model that makes sense to move people forward. Keep the people moving forward through the resistance so requires some understanding of how the resistance is demonstrated.

We talked about that previously. But we also need to now address the reasons the underlying core reasons that once addressed will give a better focus on how to mitigate. We're moving now from the understanding into the mitigation of change resistance, dealing with the pain as it arises or not. mitigating the reasons in advance that requires some understanding, moving into action. The deeper understanding though, is why people are resisting beyond the symptoms that we see to their core needs. Understanding the core needs then is the foundation for the actions in dealing with resistance.

When should resistance be resistant? What do we need to be doing different

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