The 5 things I learned about change while writing my doctorate

Despite having worked in change for 25 years there were a few things that the deep thinking of writing my thesis enabled, creating lightbulb moments for me. I have shared the top 5 below:

1.     The claim that 70% of changes fail is at best unhelpful and at worst untrue.

I found a lack of evidence generally on the numbers behind these surveys. But simply put…. If a merger doesn’t deliver on the planned financial outcomes but has actually happened - how can we say that’s failed? A new organisation exists!!  Creating a binary perception of success and failure has only served (in my opinion) to make leaders scared about doing or saying the wrong thing.

2.     Focusing on resistance to change is missing the point

I always thought that discussions about resistance to change seemed to be treating the symptom rather than the cause, but it was very helpful to pin the cause down to two specific things.  People care what their day-to-day life is going to be like.

Firstly, job security. People want to know if they can pay their bills. We’re back at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs again.

Then there's what we call “working conditions”. This encompasses a range of things from “where will I sit?”, “where will I be based?”, to “does this mean I have to take on more work?”.

Impacted staff don’t just want to know if they’ll have a job, they want to know if they will want the job. Because they have a choice (believe it or not).

3.     The amount of trust people need from you changes when the stakes are higher.

Irrelevant of the trust you have at the start of the change, the trust need going forward is different. Why? Because the expectations of the leader you need to lead you, when you're worried about how many calls you can take in a day, is different to expectations of the leader who make decisions about your job and your future.

Who do you trust to make a decision about your future?

4.     It’s all about perception

How change is received is all about how it is perceived, and in the absence of communication people will make things up.  People don’t want to hear from the leader above them who doesn’t know anything about their life. They want to hear it from their manager. So if you don’t get your middle managers on board with the change, it’s not going anywhere.

5.     People want to know the truth even if they are going to lose their jobs.

The evidence supports that if you are honest with people they will reward you for it. Research that shows that people who feel like they have been told the truth about what is happening and why (including how decisions are made) will remain engaged – even if the outcome is that they lose their job.