Moaning is Habit

Sometimes we just get into the habit of moaning. Low grade, not terribly serious, moaning. In fact, it can become a part of the culture of a workplace, particularly one undergoing change (and let’s face it, most workplaces have been experiencing change over the last few years). Moaning helps us bond with our fellow workers. In fact, we might even feel a bit guilty about being chirpy and moan even when we feel alright with the world. Does that sound familiar?

It’s insidious and it drags you down. Over time it will sap your motivation and you run the danger of becoming a drain (see ‘Drains and Radiators’). It’s not helpful to you at all.

Appreciative Inquiry

Which is why when working with groups at some point I’ll introduce the principles of Appreciative Inquiry, or, as I like to call it, the Pollyanna moment!

In brief, appreciative inquiry means shifting the focus off what isn’t working onto what is! Don’t waste your energy on looking at what you don’t like, what doesn’t work for you, but focus on the positive. Using the principles of appreciative inquiry throughout a change process can really bring out the best in people, tap into creativity and positivity.

You can start the process by simply thinking, ‘what works well in my life’? When work is good what is going well? Challenge your assumptions and the assumptions of your work place or working group. The assumptions are beliefs (unwritten rules) that have grown up over time which become the framework or context for all other decisions. You’re probably not even aware of them on a conscious level.

An example is flexible working. A few years back an assumption in many places was that everyone had to work the same hours and be available to each other at the same time; the assumption was that business couldn’t be done any other way. (Some places still hold this assumption or belief). But once companies rid themselves of this assumption they can begin to look creatively and positively at how work could be and introduce creative working practices which enhance the end result.

Challenging Assumptions Means Change

Once you begin to question in this way more will follow. Other long held assumptions will get questioned. Some will embrace this others will feel threatened and insecure and resist.

Here are 8 assumptions of Appreciative Inquiry:

1. In every group or society, organisation something works
2. What we focus on becomes our reality
3. Reality is created in the moment, there can be multiple realities
4. The act of asking questions in organisations or groups influences the group in some way
5. People have more confidence and comfort in changing their future (unknown) when they can carry with them bits of their past (known things)
6. When carrying forward it should be what’s best of the past
7. It is important to value differences
8. The language we use helps create our reality

In brief, if you view life as a problem to be solved you won’t be comfortable with Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry takes the view that life is a mystery to be embraced. Problem solving means you spend energy on identifying what is wrong and then trying to put it right. Missing the opportunity to look at all that is going really well can mean introducing a solution to fix the wrong bit, which impacts on all the good bits… I hear this regularly when working with organisations and change:

‘It used to work perfectly until…’

‘I could help customers much more until we had this new rule...’

I’m sure you can come up with examples from your own experience – the baby out with the bathwater syndrome!

Appreciative Inquiry Questions to help you cope with organisational change:

1. Think back over your career in the organisation. Try to pin point a real highpoint for you, when you felt really engaged and effective at what you do. How did you feel? What circumstances made that possible?
2. Think about what you value most about yourself, what value you bring into the organisation. Don’t be modest.
3. If you could have 3 do-able, concrete wishes for your company or organisation what would they be?
4. What do you want to take with you into the future?

Photo Credit: Cylonka

Three coaching questions for you:-

• How do you feel at this point in time? Are any feelings of concern or anxiety based on the actual facts of your life, or what you think might happen?

• Is it within your power to do anything about the situation at the moment, at this point in time? If so, start planning to do it. If not, why are you advance worrying?

• What is the worst thing that you think might happen? And the best…?

The book is dedicated to all of those front line managers and small business owners faced with an organisational or business change to implement. Whether it’s of your making or not you will have to take the flak, even when you’re feeling as fed up as everyone else. Read this when you are expected to know all the answers, when you must look in control, even when you’re screaming inside; this is your book!

CHAPTER ONE

‘Cometh the hour cometh the man’…or woman… or anyone, please?

OK, so the powers that be have just told you about their latest initiative and how wonderful the world will be once their new plan/reorganisation/merger/ acquisition is put into place. You front line managers, they tell you, have nothing to worry about because a team of consultants are coming in to manage the change and you will get all the information you need as and when. Just go back and let your team know that change is afoot, oh and by the way, don’t let productivity fall off and keep everyone happy, absence levels down and all the staff on board with the new plan!

Or maybe you are the owner of a small business and have just announced some significant changes to your business like relocation, or a new customer care system. At this stage you may know where you want to get to but not be entirely sure of the route. And your employees are looking at you for answers…

Of course, this being the real world your team or employees probably already knows that something is afoot and will have been discussing it amongst themselves for ages. Already the rumour mill will have been grinding on.

It is really important that you set the right tone right from the beginning even if you may think there is nothing you can usefully say at the moment. But can you just say you don’t know yet?

No Creative Speechifying

Well, yes you can actually. If you start with the ‘creative speechifying’ now you will only tie yourself up in knots later on when it becomes obvious that you don’t know. It is really important at this early stage to establish your credibility so I suggest the following:

Actions
1) Get everyone together as soon as you can. Whenever it is at all possible do difficult communication face to face, or rather your face to their faces. E mail is cowardly and open to misinterpretation, doctoring, and can be sent across the world in the blink of an eye. Don’t do it.

2) It is important now to establish the tone for all future discussions so be as honest as you are can. Tell them that you will meet with them regularly to update them and take questions (because you will, won’t you) and as far as you are able you will tell them everything you can. Tell them that you will invite questions both now and after they have had time to absorb the information.

3) If they are very quiet at this stage don’t be misled. They are probably in shock and have not yet fully absorbed what they have been told. When you leave the room you will probably hear a lot of discussion immediately strike up behind you but don’t take it personally. Never take it personally. You are the immediate face of management and their representative on earth so you will get some flak, but don’t take it personally. This will require some practice….

4) While you still have some energy set up your own support network. You will need it, preferably with some managers or business owners in the same position. Make spaces in your diary now and commit to getting together regularly to share information, coping strategies and handkerchiefs. Go to that next business/management networking event and find someone with experience of this. Or use formal support like a coach.

5) Look up the details of any staff counselling/welfare service or anything offered locally. Even if you don’t need it someone will soon. You might even give them a call to check that someone has remembered to warn them of the likely increase in calls to their service. Maybe even arrange a date to get them in to tell your team what they can offer? If you run a small business try your local support group or Business Link to see if they can offer anything.

6). Go home. You’ve had a tiring day.

Yet a certain amount of natural resistance is entirely natural, possibly inevitable. None of us reacts the same way to change and if we’ve had a lot of personal change, this may just be a step too far.

So my advice is, recognise what loss the change means to you and honour and acknowledge it. If it’s loss of colleagues, make sure you have a proper farewell. Ditto with a change of environment. This may be a communal activity like an office party or it may be something private, like a simple ritual of your own.

Whatever you choose to do, mark the change from one state to another in some way. It helps!

What sorts of things do you do to mark changes in your life?

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Actually, you probably are; we all do it to an extent! But we tend to do it most when change is on the cards, a change or period of uncertainty over which we have no control.

What is Magical Thinking?

I first learned of the term magical thinking when working with young children undergoing trauma in their lives.  At one stage, it was received wisdom that children shouldn’t be told what was happening if it was considered bad or negative.

This proved to be singularly unhelpful to children and their chances in later life, as they then resorted to magical thinking. They filled the gaps in their knowledge with stories of their own.

And invariably these stories (magical thinking) made the children themselves somehow responsible for what was happening. In the absence of information sensitively and appropriately given they imagined the worse and even made themselves culpable.

Adults Use Magic Too…

When I went on to work with adults experiencing change and periods of uncertainty I realised that we all do it. In the absence of concrete, trustworthy information we make sense of the bits we do have by stringing together a story, usually with ourselves being worse off in some way. (see tip 5) And these stories can get passed around an organisation and come to be accepted as a universal truth.

If there is a gap in your knowledge of any impending change, beware of your magical thinking tendencies and try and get some straightforward information. Check out your sources! There’s no point in worrying unnecessarily!

For details of my next change seminar please click here. And if you have some examples of magical thinking in your organisation, please do share with us!

“Oh great, this’ll be good for me!”

or

“Oh no, this will be terrible!”

Most of us tend towards the second response precisely because we have no control. But take a few moments now to think back over actual changes outside of your control, and what the outcomes for you were.

Was it all bad or have you benefited from unplanned changes in the past? Please do share.

Details about my change seminars are available by clicking here!

Before you can do the latter you need to be clear about what you think. Ponder these questions:

Change Questions

• How do you feel about change?

• Do you regularly initiate new things, have new thoughts on old subjects?

• What’s your instinctive reaction when you hear something is changing?

• How do you feel when you visit an old haunt where all has changed?

• How do you feel if the office furniture gets moved?

• What things in your life do you believe to be sacrosanct i.e. must never be tampered with?

• What things can you let go off easily?

• What changes can you see on your horizon over next 6 months?

• How does thinking about future changes that make you feel?

Now write a paragraph to yourself describing how you feel about change- it’s just for your eyes! Did anything surprise you?What changes (if any) would you like to make in your response to change?

This is part of a series on managing change. If you want to be certain of getting every post you can sign up for them simply by putting your email address in box at top of this page. And of course you can unsubscribe at any time.

If you are in an organisation undergoing major change you will know that communication is vital. All organisations know this and every single book on managing change tells managers to communicate, communicate and communicate!

And in my experience, all organisations start off with good intentions but become lapsed communicators somewhere along the way.

The reasons are many. Maybe the person in charge of communications suddenly finds their own job at risk and goes to ground. Maybe the project is floundering and no one wants to say so openly. But more often it’s because for long periods of time there is no real change. And organisations make the huge mistake of saying nothing.

And we know what happens to a vacuum? Someone helpfully fills it.

Managing Change Tip

Always try to distinguish between you know what as fact, actual fact from a reliable source, and what is conjecture, rumour, speculation and gossip. If you hear something about the process try and check it out. Try not to get drawn into discussions of how awful everything will be because actually, that makes you feel awful! It’s fine to let off steam now and again but endless discussion of how bad it all is will really bring you down and limit your ability to cope.

Details of my change seminars can be found here.

I work in a lot of organisations who are undergoing change and the initial response is nearly always the same. Employees feel threatened and anxious, sickness levels go up, productivity suffers. And the toll on individuals can be enormous.

That’s the downside. But don’t forget change can also be hugely positive! It’s hard to remember that when change is being imposed but you will probably have had as many positive experiences of change in your life as negative ones. It’s just that we remember the negative ones so much more clearly!

If you are experiencing a lot of uncertainty in your personal life, a change at work over which you have no control can be the final straw. The Holmes and Rahe stress scale is still a useful guide to thinking about the impact more change might have on you.

Managing Change Tip

My first tip is to take a look at it, see how you rate and then take steps to look after yourself. It might be that you join up with a friend to help and support each other, or make sure you are eating healthily and look after yourself physically. Or find out what is on offer in your organisation to help you – mentoring, counselling, even subsidised gym membership!

Resolve now not to be a victim of the changes but take some control where you can.

This is the first in a series on managing change. If you want to be certain of getting every post you can sign up for them simply by putting your email address in box at top of this page. And you can unsubscribe at any time.

Most of us, when faced with a change outside of our control, insitinctively react by wanting to hold onto things just as they are (even if they aren’t that fabulous – better the devil you know….!).

A few of us will say we’re good at coping with change, but many people I work with tell me how much they hate change, and wish ‘they‘ would just leave things alone for a while.

Lots of us think we’re not good at coping with change but in fact, assuming you are adult, you will already have coped with lots of change in your life and have masses of experience to draw upon. Some of those changes you will have managed better than others and this exercise will help you to realise what some of your coping strategies have been in the past.

A Change Exercise

Take a sheet of A4 paper and turn it sideways (landscape if on your computer). Decide what scale you are going to use. For example, if you are in your early twenties you might have a timeline divided up into two year gaps, e.g. 1-2, 2-4, 4-6, etc but you’ll probably start from when your memories begin, say 5! If you are older, you may use a 5 year span 5-10, 10-15, 15-20. Choose one that’s appropriate. Draw columns down the page for each span of time.

Once you’ve marked off your sheet, put into each of the time frames all the changes you experienced during that period. For example, at 5 you started school (how did THAT feel?), and will have had different schools at different times. You may have moved home, you started working, you maybe left home, siblings may have arrived, parents may have divorced, you went to college, decimalisation was introduced, you had to wear a seat belt, smoking was banned in all public places and so on. This is a great exercise to do in a group as you will spark each other off as you remember more and more changes that you have experienced, some funny, some serious, some sad, some really good.

A Change Survivor

The point of the exercise is to illustrate that you have survived all those changes and not only survived, but also accrued some valuable life skills along the way. Those skills stood you in good stead once and will do so again, if you can just access them in your mind and remove some of the inevitable fear that accompanies change. One of the most helpful things you can do to help cope with change is to stop telling yourself it’s bad and that you’re no good at it!

Coping with Change Article

I have written a much longer article on change which also looks at some of the theory associated with experiencing change. It’s available with many others free of charge on my web site. You can read it by clicking here.

Share Your Tips

If you have your own particular ways of coping with change in your life I’d love to hear them, simply comment on the blog; it’s easy! I look forward to hearing from you!