Embracing Change – From Ask Anya mails

Following series of posts on Change Management – “Why change doesn’t stick?”

Question:

“Change is important, but it involves risk and it is very hard to motivate the team members to embrace the changes and even harder is to get help with identifying the real risks in a constructive way. How can I make the team members to be proactive and get them on board?”

Answer:

There are two components to your question:

1. How to overcome the opposition to change and

2. How to motivate the team to be a part of the change, which is a natural next stage.

To effectively “sell” the change, it is important to understand that there are actually two stages here: the first is addressing the fears and the second is to turn your team members into agents of change. Expecting from someone to jump directly to the second stage will always end up in failure.

The most constructive way to engage others is to talk from their perspective, communicating clearly how the change will affect them. Often the change is smaller than is perceived and isn’t welcomed only due to obscurity and lack of information.

A sure way to get the team members on board and convert them from opponents into eager supporters is by walking through details of the change and what would be its benefits to their work and to the company. Many times we rush into the execution phase, forgetting that people are not machines. Anyone will perform better if he really believes in what he does and it’s the manager’s role to properly engage and inspire them.

Change could be a tough undertaking, but what everyone has to understand is that the change will come anyway.