Managing Transitions

by William Bridges

  If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

  MARK TWAIN, AMERICAN WRITER

  UNLOAD OLD BAGGAGE

  Managers sometimes find themselves fighting old battles when transition starts. These battles may even precede the manager’s own tenure—the layoff back in 2008 that was handled so badly; the promise about pensions that wasn’t kept when the contract was renegotiated; the repeated statements three years ago that the plant wouldn’t be closed (but it was).

  At times like this you feel like yelling, “You’re not going to bring that up again, are you?” or “You’re not blaming me for that, are you?” The answer, of course, is “Yes.” Transition is like a low-pressure area on the organizational weather map. It attracts all the storms and conflicts in the area, past as well as present. This is because transition “decompresses” an organization. Many of the barriers that held things in check come down. Old grievances resurface. Old scars start to ache. Old skeletons come tumbling out of closets.

  He who mistrusts most should be trusted least.

  THEOGNIS OF MEGARA, GREEK POET

  In the short run, this can complicate an already complicated situation. But in the longer run it can have a positive impact. Every transition is an opportunity to heal the old wounds that have been undermining effectiveness and productivity. If leaders have lied in the past, this is the time to tell the truth and rebuild credibility on the basis of honesty. If people have been terminated callously in the past, this is the time to terminate people with dignity and fairness and start building the values of concern and respect for employees in general. If employee concerns have been disregarded in the past, this is a time to begin listening. It is never too late to become an organization that manages its people well. For that reason, the old scar and the unresolved issue are great gifts. They represent opportunities for organizational enhancement.

  SELL PROBLEMS, NOT SOLUTIONS

  As we said in Chapter 3, people let go of outlived arrangements and bygone values more readily if they are convinced that there is a serious problem that demands a solution. But the idea of selling problems is more than just a practical tactic to encourage people to let go of the way things have been. In an organization in which change is the norm, selling problems is the only way to get beyond having to sell every change piecemeal. Here are some of the ways in which selling problems contributes to your ability to manage nonstop change successfully:

  1.People who understand the organization’s real problems are in the market for solutions and don’t have to be “informed” or “educated” after the fact. When things are changing very fast, often there isn’t time to do that.

  2.If you understand the problem, and the people you work with don’t, a polarity is immediately set up. If, on the other hand, everyone recognizes the importance of the same problem, it’s the manager and people on one side and the problem on the other. Only with such cooperation can organizations respond quickly to the challenges they encounter.

  3.If everyone recognizes the problem, it is likely to be solved much faster. Whatever solution is selected is more likely to meet everyone’s needs because those needs were clear during the problem-solving stage. Any solution that doesn’t take people’s needs into account will never sell.

  4.Finally, selling problems implicates everyone in the solution. It says, in effect, “If you want to be part of the solution, get involved. If you don’t, don’t complain.”

  In light of these points, it is ironic that involving people is sometimes viewed as too time-consuming for a world of rapid change. Actually, it is the authoritarian style and the mentality that goes with it that take too much time—time spent slugging it out to overcome each pocket of self-interest, trying to motivate people who feel that the change was forced on them, arguing with people who don’t even know that there are problems. Selling problems is, in fact, the investment that pays long-term dividends by making people more ready for particular organizational transitions—and for a world of continuous change in general.

  ANOTHER KEY TO MANAGING NONSTOP CHANGE: “CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE”

  We are constantly hearing about competitiveness, game plans, and winning. In a society as sports-minded as ours, those terms strike a ready chord—the more so when we seem to be falling behind in a game in which we were once the dominant player. But the sports metaphor is dangerously misleading. It suggests that there is a coherent game going on and that the winners will come out ahead because they beat their opponents. It suggests that they win because they are a better team, with better talent, training, and strategy.

  In fact, there are no final scores in the world of nonstop change. What we call “victory” is actually just being ahead in the early innings of a game. Besides, real success goes not to the organizations that set out to beat the opposition, but to the organizations that focus on the environment as a whole rather than on the competition. We are in one of those periods of evolutionary shift, and becoming preoccupied with the competition is shortsighted. It is not by competing but by capitalizing on the rapid pace of change that today’s organizations will thrive. And that is as true of a department or a project team as it is of organizations as a whole.

  There are a couple of keys to capitalizing on change. One lies in understanding and utilizing “the cycle of challenge and response.” As historian Arnold J. Toynbee demonstrated in his book A Study of History, the great civilizations have risen to power not because of their advantages, but because they treated their disadvantages as challenges to which they discovered creative responses.

  Toynbee shows, for example, that ancient Athens rose to dominance in the classical world after its soil was depleted. Instead of being destroyed by what was a huge setback for an agricultural country, the Athenians treated their problem as a challenge to find a new way to participate actively in the economy of their day. Their creative response was to turn to the cultivation of olives that draw on a deeper water table than do field crops. The Athenians rebuilt their economy around the export of olive oil—which further challenged them to build a merchant marine to transport the oil, a pottery industry to build the amphoras to contain the oil during shipment, and a mining industry to create the coin to pay for all the peripheral transactions of such trade. New responses thus created new challenges in another part of the society or the economy.4

  Descending from the serious to the comic, one of the first television sitcoms grew out of the original I Love Lucy show, which was itself a response to a challenge that might have doomed a less “responsive” crew. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz didn’t want to live in New York City, where the TV comedies of their day were filmed and from which they were broadcast to relay stations around the country. Instead, they decided to film the show on 35-millimeter film in Los Angeles and distribute the show like a movie through CBS affiliates. Not only did their response work, but it also changed network distribution patterns and (for better or worse) created the possibility of TV reruns, because the movie film kept its quality much longer than did the kinescopes that were then being used to record TV shows.

  The point of these examples is not that you can forget about the competition. It is simply that your competition is the critical factor only when the game is not changing very significantly. When a business or industry is going through a profound transformation—and there aren’t any that we know of today that are not—focusing on competition blinds you to the real challenge, which is capitalizing on change. Competing for market share in today’s markets is too much like fighting for deck chairs on the Titanic.

  For the manager there is another advantage to the challenge and response approach to dealing with change: it can be used at any level of the organization. Start at the top: an organization’s leaders face challenges, and they come up with responses, which might be to launch a new product or go after a new kind of customer. Such responses, in turn, provide upper-level managers with their challenge: How do we redefine the purposes and even the identities of our units
in light of this new organizational direction? Whatever it is, that group’s response provides middle managers with their challenge: How do we reorganize our efforts to serve the new unit purpose? And the middle managers’ creative responses to that question represent a challenge to supervisors to come up with new responses at the team level, which in turn challenge individual workers to respond creatively at the point where the product is made or the service is delivered.

  This cascading of challenge and response breaks the stranglehold of passivity that develops when managers, supervisors, and workers see their jobs as merely carrying out the orders of those above them. In a world characterized by nonstop change, every level of the organization must see its situation as a challenge, calling not for compliance but for creative response. When that happens, people are no longer mere victims who must wait and see what others decide—and then act unquestioningly. Challenge and response restores a sense of control and purpose to people, no matter at what level of the organization they work.

  And, incidentally, it knocks the socks off the competition, just the way it did more than two thousand years ago in Athens.

  THE FINAL KEY: INCREASING THE ORGANIZATION’S TRANSITION-WORTHINESS

  Sometimes when we run transition management workshops for organizations, we ask people to rearrange themselves in a circle by birthday and then use their new configuration to divide up into small working groups. Two things become evident when we do this. First, the people can watch themselves individually and the group as a whole going through transition—letting go of their old locations, milling around in a chaotic neutral zone, and finding a new location for themselves. It also provides them with a firsthand experience of what each phase of the process feels like.

  Second, they can see how the size of the group and the arrangement of the particular room we’re meeting in affects how easy or hard it is to relocate in it. If there are fixed chairs (as in an auditorium) it takes forever for people to make their way from one location to another. If the walls are very close to the seating, the relocation is also slowed down. And because of its more complicated dynamics, a very big group takes much longer to reconfigure itself than a small group.

  Having seen this, people are in a better position to describe the conditions within an organization that may make it more difficult to get people through a transition. People who have held narrowly defined jobs for a long time are sure to have a hard time with reorganizations that involve redefining those jobs. People who have little contact with people working elsewhere in the organization have trouble too. Certain policies and procedures make life difficult for people in transition, while other policies and resources—a relocation program or a practice of periodic reassignments or a wide use of cross-functional teams—can make the experience of transition less confusing and disruptive.

  Boats are termed “seaworthy” if their construction keeps them afloat, even under challenging conditions, or “unseaworthy” if their construction doesn’t do so. By analogy, organizations can be said to be “transition-worthy” or “un-transition-worthy”—their policies, structure, roles, resources, culture, histories, and leadership are either helping or hindering their ability to manage transition.

  Stated so generally, that sounds a little esoteric. But if you ask people who work for your organization which conditions and arrangements within the organization are helping and which are hindering their ability to let go of the old, live with a confusing time in the neutral zone, and make a solid new beginning, they can tell you. Listen to them. And do whatever you can to make the organization more transition-worthy. It’ll pay off, because one thing about nonstop change is . . . it doesn’t stop. It is a problem that won’t go away.

  Am I actively working to rebuild trust in the following ways:

  _____

  Being very careful to do what I say I will do?

  _____

  Listening to people carefully and letting them know what I hear them saying?

  _____

  Understanding what matters to people and working hard to protect whatever is related to that?

  _____

  Sharing myself honestly (without letting honesty be a cover for hostility)?

  _____

  Asking for feedback and acknowledging unasked-for feedback on the subject of my own trustworthiness?

  _____

  Remembering not to push others to trust me further than I trust them?

  _____

  Trying to extend my trust of others a little further?

  _____

  Not confusing being trustworthy with “being a buddy”?

  _____

  Not being surprised if my trust-building project is viewed a bit suspiciously?

  _____

  Constantly reminding myself to tell the truth?

  FINAL QUESTIONS

  What actions could you take to help people deal more successfully with the nonstop change in which your organization currently finds itself and become more able to do so in the future? What could you do today to get started on these tasks? (Write yourself a memo in the space below.)

  1. John Naisbitt, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives (New York: Warner Books, 1983).

  2. Walter Macrae, “The Coming Entrepreneurial Revolution,” The Economist, November 25, 1976.

  3. One warning, though: don’t let honesty become a cover and an excuse for hostility. This kind of honesty will destroy trust just as fast as dishonesty will.

  4. As this example shows, I am talking here about “challenges” in a very serious sense. I work with many organizations that regularly use “challenges” as a verbal way to put a positive spin on—and to keep them from having to say—“problems.” An organization that doesn’t like to talk about its problems is very seriously handicapped when it tries to deal with transition.

  PART FOUR

  The Conclusion

  CHAPTER

  8

  The mistakes are all there waiting to be made.

  —S. A. TARTAKOWER, RUSSIAN CHESS MASTER, SPEAKING OF THE CHESSBOARD AT THE BEGINNING OF A GAME

  A Practice Case

  Six chapters ago you tried your hand at the case of the software company that wanted to form its individual contributors into service teams. Now we’ll present another case to help you see if you can apply what you’ve been reading.

  You work for Apex Manufacturing, a 4,000-employee firm that used to be the world’s foremost company in its field: small, specialized gasoline motors. Together with two domestic competitors, which had been founded by alumni from your company, Apex made most of the world’s supply of such motors.

  Since then two Asian firms and one German company have entered the field, and one of Apex’s American competitors has invested huge amounts of money in new plants and equipment. To make matters more difficult, new governmental noise abatement standards have forced Apex to redesign the motors’ exhaust systems. Somehow, your competitors foresaw these new standards and built them into their new designs. You didn’t, and so Apex has had to make costly modifications. By early last year, Apex had only 43 percent of the world’s market, and that figure was falling.

  There have been rumors for some time of impending plant consolidations and staff layoffs, but only a week ago the CEO was quoted in a Wall Street Journal article as saying that Apex would be able to do its trimming by attrition alone and that he expected sales figures to increase significantly by the end of the year. “We’re just caught in one of those cycles,” he said. “We’ll have 50 percent of the world market again within two years.”

  Yesterday morning you received an e-mail message from the vice president of human resources, asking you to come to a noontime meeting in her office. When you got there, you saw a dozen of the company’s most respected managers—everyone from supervisors to directors. The VP told you briefly that several decisions had just been made by the executive team.

  First, two of the company’s five plants will be closed, affecting 900 nonexempt
workers and 100 exempts, about one-third of the company’s manufacturing group. The situation will be complicated by several factors. The two plants made one of the company’s more modern and successful lines of motors. The locations of the plants raised costs and led to their being pegged for closure. The plants must continue producing motors for at least eight more months while the other plants are readied to take up the slack in the production.

  Second, there is to be a 20 percent reduction in the level of employment at the company—800 jobs. All departments are to make cuts, though specific targets for different groups have not yet been set. Neither have the provisions of a possible early retirement plan. It has not even been decided how many of the terminated employees will be from among the 1,000 extra manufacturing employees. Many of those people were long-term employees whom the VP of manufacturing wanted to reassign to one of the other plants or to some other part of the company.

  “There are still a lot of questions,” the human resources VP said. “But you are being called together as a transition management advisory group. The executive team made the decision as to what will be necessary—downsizing and consolidation. We’re asking you to help us work out how we should do it. Specifically, you are being asked to come up with a scenario for announcing and implementing the closure and for working out a plan for handling the reductions in the workforce.

  “We’re going to meet together all day tomorrow,” she continued, “and I want you to clear your calendars. We have to get a tentative plan back to the executive team by the end of the week. It doesn’t have to be detailed, but it does have to sketch out the issues that we need to be ready to deal with and to give us some ideas for dealing with them. We want it to advise us on communications, training, and any new policies or arrangements we need to have in place to get people through the transition.”