Stressful Organizational Changes

Can someone lead a team or organization successfully by hitting the technical milestones, but miss signs of employee stress during changes that may cause them to check out emotionally, or put up resistance? Sure, and I was a perfect example of it.

During a memorable meeting to discuss major changes one of my staff started flipping through a travel magazine while I was talking, completely ignoring everything going on around them. Everyone noticed, and it felt like a slap in the face. I asked them to close it, then after the meeting spoke to the employee in private. I mistook their lack of expression to mean they didn’t care what I was saying, but as an older, and much wiser, leader, I’ve come to understand that they'd shut down emotionally in response to the new threat of frightening organizational changes.

If only I’d known about the science and psychology of change management then! I’d been given leadership roles at a very young age, which upon reflection was good, but also not so good in many ways.

It was very exciting, and surely helped my career, to work on billion-dollar projects, but it also hurt my development as a leader. 30 years ago change management wasn’t brought up; managers were directed to get things done as soon as possible, and that was that. We were concerned with deadlines and budgets, which will always be high priority, of course, but weren't very aware of the way employees would deal emotionally with individual, team, and organizational changes.

It’s refreshing to see how today's thought leaders have evolved in this area. Timely, too, because it’s critical for employees to get on board with the cybersecurity revolution that’s changing the way we do business, and the growing awareness corporate security is the responsibility of everyone in the organization, and not just IT.

In the past we were very focused on change control, but that’s completely different from change management. Change control deals with assets, and the changes made to them, while change management revolves around the culture of an organization, and the emotions of its employees. A good differentiator to note is you can control an asset, but you manage an employee, not control them.

As a manager, not all organizational changes were good for my own feelings about the job. I’m thinking especially about layoffs and re-orgs, which I personally found very troubling, as do most managers who like and appreciate their teams.

Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote about the five stages of grieving, and acceptance, which has been adapted to include the way employees feel about changes. If I’d known about Bridges Transition Model during my early days as a manager, that would have been very helpful.

Other references that might help managers and employees during stressful times of organizational change:

“Making Sense of Change Management” by Cameron & Green

“Power, Politics, and Organizational Change” by Buchanan & Badham