Many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request.
PHILIP STANHOPE, EARL OF CHESTERFIELD
As for the rest of the emotions grieving people feel, treat them seriously, but don’t consider them as something you personally caused. Don’t get defensive or argumentative. Here are some of those emotions and what you can do to deal with them successfully.
Anger—everything from grumbling to rage, often misdirected or undirected. Anger can lead to foot-dragging, “mistakes,” and even sabotage. Listen . . . acknowledge that the anger is understandable. Don’t take on the blame if it is being misdirected toward you. Distinguish between the acceptable feelings and unacceptable acting-out behavior: “I understand how you feel, but I’m not going to let you mess up the project.”
Bargaining—unrealistic attempts to get out of the situation or to make it go away. People may try to strike a special deal or make big promises that they’ll “save you a bundle of money” or “double the output” if you’ll only undo the change. Distinguish these efforts from real problem-solving, keep a realistic outlook, and don’t be swayed by desperate arguments and impossible promises.
Anxiety—silent or expressed, a realistic fear of an unknown and probably difficult future or simply catastrophic fantasies. Anxiety is natural, so don’t make people feel stupid for feeling it. Just keep feeding them the information as it comes and empathize with them when it doesn’t.
Sadness—expressed with everything from silence to tears—the heart of the grieving process. Encourage people to say what they are feeling, and share your feelings too. Don’t try to reassure people with unrealistic suggestions of hope, and don’t feel that you have to make the feelings go away. Sympathize.
Disorientation—confusion and forgetfulness, even among well-organized people; feelings of being lost and insecure. Give people extra support and opportunity to get things off their chests; reassure them that disorientation is natural and that other people feel it too. Give them extra encouragement.
Depression—feelings of being down, flat, dead; feelings of hopelessness; being tired all the time. Like sadness and anger, depression is hard to be around. You can’t make it go away, however. People need to go through it, not around it. Make it clear that you understand and even share the feeling yourself, but also let them know work still needs to be done. Do whatever you can to restore people’s sense of having some control over their situation.
Not everyone feels all of these feelings intensely, and people don’t go through them by the numbers. But within any group you can expect to encounter all of them, and you need to get people to recognize that they can accept the situation and move forward if they work through these emotions. The danger is not from these emotions themselves, but rather from the way they make people afraid of what is happening to them.
If you suppress the feelings and push people to get over them, you’ll be handicapped with people who never “mended.” In my work I have seen teams, departments, and sometimes entire companies fall apart because they never found a way to grieve over a significant loss.
COMPENSATE FOR THE LOSSES
“No pain, no gain,” they say. But many change efforts fail because the people affected experience only the pain. The company may gain, but for employees it seems to be all loss. Trying to talk them out of their feelings will get you nowhere. Find a way to act. Here are some examples:
1.A large financial services company reorganized its operations group and retrained the specialists to do what the supervisors had formerly done. These supervisors were essentially demoted, and they did everything they could to badmouth and undermine the new plans. Then the manager had an idea. She brought them together as a “training task force” to create a program—not only to bring their former employees up to speed but also to train new hires. Although these supervisors lost hierarchical status, they were given new status as technical experts and trainers, and they kept the new roles, even after the change was accomplished. Their opposition turned slowly into cooperation and support.
2.The U.S. Forest Service went through funding cutbacks. As the logging industry declined, so did the need for timber specialists. At the same time, recreation gained more prominence, as did forest ecosystems sustainability and wildfire management. Foresters lost promotions, power, even jobs. So, following the principle of giving back in one area what has been lost in another, the Forest Service instituted career renewal programs to help people focus on areas where opportunity was increasing. People still felt their losses, but they moved through the grieving process and quickly became productive again.
3.A large university reassigned one of its vice presidents to a far less important area than the one he had previously headed, and although no one called it a demotion, it was hard to see it as anything else. Everyone knew that he had been ineffective in his previous job, and his new job actually fit his talents far better, but he was deeply hurt by the move. Discussing the situation, we discovered that the man was less troubled by the fact of the move than by how he thought it would be perceived by his colleagues. Understanding the VP’s real interests in the matter, the president was able to negotiate how the announcement was made and the decision explained. A crippling loss was turned into a temporary hurt, and a solid (if over- promoted) employee was saved.
The question to ask yourself is this: What can I give back to balance what’s been taken away? Status, turf, team membership, recognition, roles? If people feel that the change has robbed them of control over their futures, can you find some way to give them back a feeling of control? If their feeling of competence is gone because their job disappeared, can you help them see how timely training in other functions will help develop new feelings of competence?
This principle of compensating for losses is basic to all kinds of change, and even the most important or beneficial changes often fail because this principle is overlooked. As the journalist Walter Lippmann once said, “Unless the reformer can invent something that substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.” Remember Lippmann’s advice when you try to get people to accept programs in quality improvement or customer service, when you try to set up self-managed teams or introduce unfamiliar equipment, or when you flatten the organization or cut overhead.
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
TOM STOPPARD, BRITISH DRAMATIST
GIVE PEOPLE INFORMATION, AND DO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN
There are lots of rationalizations for not communicating. Here are some common ones:
“They don’t need to know yet. We’ll tell them when the time comes. It’ll just upset them now.” For every week of upset that you avoid by hiding the truth, you gain a month of bitterness and mistrust. Besides, the grapevine already has the news, so don’t imagine that your information is a secret.
“They already know. We announced it.” Okay, you told them, but it didn’t sink in. Threatening information is absorbed remarkably slowly. Say it again. And find different ways to say it and different media (large meetings, one-on-ones, email, a story on the company website, Tweets) in which to say it.
“I told the supervisors. It’s their job to tell their teams.” The supervisors are likely to be in transition themselves, and they may not even sufficiently understand the information to convey it accurately. Maybe they’re still in denial. Information is power, so they may not want to share it yet. Don’t assume that accurate information trickles down reliably.
“We don’t know all the details yet ourselves, so there’s no point in saying anything until everything has been decided.” In the meantime, people can get more and more frightened and resentful. It’s much better to say what you do know, say that you don’t know more, and provide a timetable for additional information. If information isn’t available later when it’s promised, don’t forget to say something to show that you haven’t forgotten your promise.
Those who honestly mean to be true contradict themselves more rarely than those who try to be co
nsistent.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JR., AMERICAN JURIST
Of course, there may be times when information must be withheld temporarily. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may require it, for example, or you may not be able to talk about a strategic move because competitors will learn of it. But most of the time information is withheld because leaders or managers are uncomfortable giving it. That discomfort often arises not from the anticipated long-term effects but simply from the short-term impact—the setting off of the “grieving” emotions discussed earlier.
So instead of telling the truth, managers substitute a fabrication of half-truths and untruths. Not only do these later turn out to be outright lies, but managers often trip themselves up with inconsistencies and new stories to cover the old inconsistencies.
DEFINE WHAT’S OVER AND WHAT ISN’T
One of the biggest problems that endings cause in an organization is confusion. Things change, and obviously the organization won’t do some of the things it used to do. But which things? The boss says, “From here on, we’re lean and mean!” Does that mean that we order 30 percent fewer supplies, or that we have to work longer hours? What do we stop doing? The boss says, “We’re really going to be customer-focused.” Does that mean that from now on we do everything the customer says? Do we respond to every single complaint? What about company policy and existing procedures—are they out the window? The boss says, “We’re increasing spans of control by 50 percent.” Does this mean doing more with fewer people or looking at how to influence most effectively?
One of the most important leadership roles during times of change is that of putting into words what it is time to leave behind. Because talking about making a break with the past can upset its defenders, some leaders shy away from articulating just what it is time to say good-bye to. But in their unwillingness to say what it is time to let go of, they are jeopardizing the very change that they believe they are leading.
Managers risk three equally serious and difficult reactions when they do not specify what is over and what isn’t:
1.People don’t dare to stop doing anything. They try to do all the old things and the new things. Soon they burn out with the overload.
2.People make their own decisions about what to discard and what to keep, and the result is inconsistency and chaos.
3.People toss out everything that was done in the past, and the baby disappears with the bathwater.
So think through each aspect of the changes you are making, and be specific about what goes and what stays. It takes time to do that, but undoing the damage wrought by any of these three reactions will take much longer.
MARK THE ENDINGS
Don’t just talk about the endings—create actions or activities that dramatize them. When a new executive took over the leadership of Dana Corporation, he found operations choked by a culture in which everything was covered by rules; though incredibly detailed, these rules nonetheless failed to cover all cases. Besides, no one could remember them all or even be sure in which of the company manuals a given rule could be found. The executive wanted to change to a culture in which there were a few universally understood principles and in which the employees’ intelligence and commitment were counted on to apply the principles wisely.
He explained all this, but when it came time to make the change, he chose action rather than words to convey his point. In a management meeting he piled all the company manuals on a table. They formed a stack almost two feet tall. Then he swept them onto the floor and held up a single sheet of paper on which the corporate principles were typed. “These are our new rules,” he said.
If you want an even more dramatic action, think of the story that is told about the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortés. When he came ashore with his men at Veracruz, he knew they were extremely ambivalent about the task ahead of them. Some called it hopeless. Faced with a continent full of adversaries, everyone must have wished that he had never come. Cortés burned the ships. A bit heavy-handed perhaps.
Think back to the software company service unit I described in Chapter 2. In changing from individual contributors to teams, they tore down the walls of the service technicians’ cubicles and created work team spaces in which people could see and talk to their new collaborators. On a functional level the new space worked better. But just as important, the act of creating the new space sent a message: “The old way of separation is gone. We’re doing things a new collaborative way now.”
Albertsons, a national supermarket chain, wanted to help employees mark an ending during a significant reorganization. They staged a New Orleans–style funeral, complete with a jazz band and a casket.
The intention was to bury the old, let go, and to have some fun doing it. The president gave a eulogy, and people threw old policies, procedures, paperwork, and anything else they were no longer using into the casket. The funeral gave employees an effective way to cope and move forward.2
TREAT THE PAST WITH RESPECT
Never denigrate the past. Many managers, in their enthusiasm for a future that is going to be better than the past, ridicule or demean the old way of doing things. In doing so they consolidate the resistance against the transition because people identify with the way things used to be and thus feel that their self-worth is at stake whenever the past is attacked.
But managers who are tempted to denounce the past are not all wrong: they are right in wanting to distinguish what they are proposing from what has been tried in the past or what is being done in the present. The trick is to make the distinction nonjudgmentally. Here are some examples:
An executive is brought in to reorganize a division into business units. Rather than attacking the old functional organization as inefficient and outmoded (“Nobody in his right mind would run a business that way!”), he credits it for bringing the organization to the point where it now stands: on the brink of an important development. He emphasizes the continuities he feels with his predecessor and talks about the new challenges that call for new responses.
The new director of a human resources department realizes that the compartmentalism of her group in the past led to conflicting policies and turf battles that made cooperation impossible. She avoids the devastating critique that she could deliver and instead sends key personnel out to visit customers—who deliver her critique for her. She then exposes key members of the previous group to a couple of organizations where teamwork has greatly improved service and helps them formulate and spearhead plans for the change.
Be careful that in urging people to turn away from the past you don’t drive them away from you or from the new direction that the organization needs to take. Present innovations as developments that build on the past and help to realize its potential. Honor the past for what it has accomplished.
LET PEOPLE TAKE A PIECE OF THE OLD WAY WITH THEM
Endings occur more easily if people can take a bit of the past with them. You are trying to disengage people from it, not stamp it out like an infection. And in particular, you don’t want to make people feel blamed for having been part of it.
The past is to be respected and acknowledged but not worshipped; it is our future in which we will find our greatness.
PIERRE TRUDEAU, FORMER CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER
When two airlines merged, the employee store at Los Angeles International Airport sold out of all items with the big red company logo in a few hours. When the land occupied by Almaden Winery was sold to developers, employees lost one of the loveliest workplaces imaginable. They grieved especially for the winery rose garden, where people had strolled during breaks and spent lunch hours. Management discovered that the employees were going into the garden after work and taking rose cuttings to take home. Recognizing the significance of what was happening, management decided to help by providing the cuttings themselves.
Organizations can take even more initiative in tapping this longing for a piece of the past. A Procter & Gamble paper plant in northern Michigan put together a yearbook
during the last year of the plant’s operation. People brought in pictures and wrote little essays about the past. The “graduating class” of current workers was featured, along with such information as was available about where everyone was going.
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
EDMUND BURKE, BRITISH STATESMAN
A large telecommunications company announced a merger date for taking on the name of the new company. Employees experienced anxiety and confusion about their roles. They felt a loss of their pride in how they were known and their achievements.
Their two main buildings were connected by a glass walkway where most employees passed through daily. To honor the past, they created a “Wall of Fame” and built displays that included media articles, awards, and photos taken over the years. They contributed items such as caps, mugs, and T-shirts. As employees walked through the hallway they stopped, remembered, and appreciated their history. The day before they started as the new company, tangible items were donated to charity and everything else was compiled for the company library. Finally, they held a farewell barbecue.
Only the provisional endures.
FRENCH PROVERB
SHOW HOW ENDINGS ENSURE THE CONTINUITY OF WHAT REALLY MATTERS
Most endings are not so terminal as a business closure or the acquisition of a company. In fact, many endings represent the only way to protect the continuity of something bigger. An out-of-date product line is discontinued and replaced so that a company can keep its customers. Two hospitals merge (and lose their individual identities) because neither will be able to survive alone. The start-up company’s seat-of-the-pants operating style, though exciting, is not adequate to manage the midsized company it has grown into. The old ways have to be relinquished before new systems will work. Again, people have to let go of a piece of their identity to protect the integrity of the whole.
Managing Transitions Page 5