“I Didn’t Sleep At All Last Night!”

6 Questions That Should Keep Change Leaders Up At Night

Can We Agree On This?

Change is a highly emotional endeavor. That is not an opinion; it is a scientific fact. If you don’t believe me, do a quick search of the emotions of change or the science of change, and you will be inundated with images that depict a change curve overlaid on top of Dr. Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief work similar to the image at the right.

There are two reasons why this is true. The first is that any “loss” an individual experiences causes them to grieve. The second, is that all change leads to loss on some level. Whether we are talking about personal change or organizational change, change triggers loss, and loss triggers grief. To implement change effectively, the “grief” must be dealt with.

The issue becomes, that in most organizations, the change management processes focus on project management at the expense of the emotional and leadership components of change.  At the left are two images that contrast the typical change management implementation model with the emotional science of change model.

What felt like a curse but turned out to be a blessing; I faced this reality throughout my career.  At first, as a new director of human resources, I was tasked with implementing change initiatives decided by those above me.  Later in my career, as a senior leader, I was the one making the decisions that impacted thousands of folks in our workforce.  In both instances, I found myself losing sleep at night.  Not because I was concerned about whether the change initiative was right strategically or the best technical solution but because of the human and cultural issues the changes would create.  It wasn’t until the writing of our book, The Dying Art of Leadership, that I learned my feelings were justified.  Looking back on my career I found that the change and transformation initiatives were far more successful when our team focused on answering six questions that kept me awake at night.

Question 1: Do We Care About Our Emotional and Leadership Health?

The consulting group McKinsey published a study indicating that the number one cause of all change failures is “Human and Cultural” issues. Specifically, they found when a change initiative fails at any level, 70% of the time, human and cultural issues are to blame. Stated another way, the drivers of most change failures are EMOTIONAL (human) and LEADERSHIP (cultural) reasons. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/leadership/changing-change-management

In a second article, The Perils of Grief in the Workplace, McKinsey sheds light on why. Their article discusses the 7 Losses people experience during times of personal or organizational change. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-hidden-perils-of-unresolved-grief    From an acquisition to a plant closing to an office change or returning to the office post-COVID, people immediately seek the answer to how the change will impact them through the lens of the following losses and questions.

Loss of Attachment – who am I, or will I be, connected to?

Loss of Territory – where do I belong?

Loss of Structure – what is, or will be, my role?

Loss of Identity – who am I / how do my values align with the organizations or the change?

Loss of Future – where am I going?

Loss of Meaning – what’s the point?

Loss of Control – Why do I feel overwhelmed?

If your organization has not asked itself the question, “Do we care about our Emotional and Leadership health?” it should. If you ask and the answer is “NO,” you need to ask yourself the loss of identity question and seriously ponder whether your organization’s values align with your own.

Question 2: Do We Understand Our Emotional and Leadership Health

Caring is one thing. Understanding is another. How well does your organization understand its emotional and leadership health, and how is it measured? In our experience, engagement surveys do not address the issues surrounding the seven losses that need to be unpacked when implementing change. While that may be a good starting point, most engagement surveys are of little help.

Think about your business’s emotional and leadership aspects from the perspective of three circles; a genuine Respect For People culture, an Emotionally/Psychologically Safe environment, and leaders skilled at Adaptive Leadership™.

The greater the overlap of the three circles, the greater the results. From a change perspective, the greater the overlap, the more resilience and capacity for change, and the more likely the success of implementing change.

At this point, most who attend our training ask, “So, how do you create that alignment?”  There are three critical elements that must be approached with purpose and great intentionality. The first is what we call the Respect For People staircase. The second and most important is the Leadership Golden Circle. The third is making all leaders fluent in the Adaptive Leadership™ model and its practice.  We will look at the first two elements together.

The Respect For People staircase, depicted below, begins with treating people with “dignity and respect” as the lowest step in the journey (respect for people through governance activities) and continues through connecting your people to a Purpose and Values driven business model.  You will notice the staircase is not linear.  The break in the slope occurs in the steps we call the Leadership Golden Circle represented by Leadership Competence, Leadership Courage, Leadership Compassion, and Leadership Vulnerability.   Without these four steps, the entire staircase collapses, the circles drift further apart, personal and organizational resilience decline, capacity for change is reduced, and results are impacted.

Whether you realize it or not, every person at every level of the organization needs to visibly answer the questions associated with the Leadership Golden Circle.  Those questions are:

1. Am I competent in my role, or am I working hard to learn and develop my skills?
2. Do I have the courage to make the tough decisions and to do what is right even it brings negative consequences on myself or the organization?
3. Do I care as much about you as I do myself?
4. Do I exhibit the same vulnerability as I expect of others?

It is within this circle that cultures are built or destroyed and where personal and organizational resilience and capacity for change are increased.  It is also within this circle that ethical fading begins to take hold.  Name a corporate scandal from Wells Fargo to Volkswagen to Boeing, and you can point to a failure in the golden circle at its core.  By the way.  Your spouse, significant other, children, and friends are also looking for you to answer these questions on a personal level.  But I digress.

Adaptive Leadership™ is the third circle in the cultural alignment model.  Ironically, Adaptive Leadership™ is best depicted with a three-by-three matrix, a square (LOL).  For an in-depth explanation of this concept, reference chapters seven and eight of our book, The Dying Art of Leadership.  https://griefleaders.com/who-we-are/about-the-book/

However, I will attempt to summarize the concepts here.

1. Employees demonstrate performance characteristics depicted vertically on the matrix.
2. Employees also demonstrate their future potential depicted horizontally on the matrix.
3. This matrix can be superimposed over whatever tool you use to assess the talent in your organization.
4. Each block of the matrix requires a different leadership approach to provide the appropriate levels of support and guidance people need at various points in their career and personal life.
5. People constantly move within the matrix based on their experience level, assignments, and personal factors.
6. The model requires a shift from managing uniformly to leading individually.

The problem arises when leaders fail to recognize these points or latch on to a preferred leadership approach, they are most comfortable with.  When this occurs, the employee and the leader become out of sync, and frustrations build in both parties.  As the frustration builds, people no longer feel supported by the leader/organization, and morale and engagement decline.  As the decline worsens, burnout sets in, and retention issues arise.

Change of any kind in a person’s life leads to an emotional response.  This is true of workplace changes.  As such, the introduction of change initiatives further exacerbates the dynamics at play.  Generally speaking, the emotional component of change will cause people to move down and to the left.  Leaders who are not skilled in Adaptive Leadership™ fail to adjust their approach and compound the issue. What appears to be “resistance to change” is really the emotional component of change (grief) playing out in the workplace and leaders failing to lead appropriately on an individual basis.

Successful change implementation requires this level of understanding of your organization’s Emotional and Leadership health. Anything less than this and you run the risk of failure at some level, as the McKinsey study indicates.  If you recall, the McKinsey study found that 70% of all change failures are driven by “human and cultural issues.” The human issues are the emotional component of change.  The cultural issues are the leadership issues that arise when the Golden Circle and Adaptive Leadership™ practices are not practiced.

Question 3: Do We Have A Change Management Process That Addresses The Emotional Component Of Change

Once your level of emotional and leadership health understanding is reached, you can now turn your attention to your change management process and the gaps that may exist. While every organization’s gaps will be different, here are the areas where many organizations find opportunities for improvement.

1. Inserting stages to engage in the emotional discussions that need to take place. When this process step is missing there is a huge elephant in the room that no one recognizes, acknowledges, or addresses. People are perceived as resistant or as barriers to change and untrained leaders begin a performance management process. Ironically, this only serves to deepen the emotional struggles people are having.
2. Training leaders to deal with the emotional component of change. To say leaders lack this training is an understatement and represents a huge opportunity for companies to increase personal resilience and capacity for change.
3. Recognizing that frontline leaders are grappling with the same emotions. This is issue leads to our fifth question to be asked, so we will answer this then.
4. Effectively communicating with your people. Most change implementation plans contain a communication plan. However, if all you are doing is communicating key messages repeatedly in response to any objection or questions your people raise, then you are not communicating WITH your people. You are merely TALKING AT THEM. You are likely listening to respond not to understand, and you are fueling the emotional flames each time. Phrases like, developing the narrative and creating a positive spin should be red flags to change leaders.
5. A change process that has devolved to managing a project plan. Organizations that fall into this category are MANAGING change not LEADING change. You likely care only about the numbers and people are an afterthought. Guess what? Disengagement, lack of morale, turnover, burnout, and retention issues are signs that your people have figured this out.
6. Leaders who MANAGE UNIFORMLY rather than LEADING INDIVIDUALLY. This topic was covered in the Adaptive Leadership™ commentary above. This point is so vital that we have partnered with an industrial psychology group to develop a proprietary Adaptive Leadership™ assessment to provide a basis for individual coaching and development.

The answers these first three questions lead you to questions four, five and six.

Question 4: Is our culture ready to support change?

This question is self-explanatory, but you would be shocked at how often it is overlooked. If you find the answers to the first three questions to be mixed or negative, then the answer to question four is a resounding NO. End of story.

Question 5: Are our frontline leaders prepared to support change?

Ninety-nine percent of organizations will say their leaders are prepared. However, none of them have ever trained their frontline leaders in the leadership and communication skills they need to help employees navigate the emotional component of change. Be it personal or organizational in nature. Yes, I said personal. If an organization is going to claim they have a Respect For People culture and that they care about their people’s emotional and mental wellbeing, then frontline leaders have to be a part of the statement. Additionally, 100% of organizations fail to recognize that their frontline leaders are grappling with the very same emotions as their people are while being tasked with leading the change. The only way to correct this situation is to arm those leaders with the skills to support their people AND to adapt your change process to support the frontline leaders as well.

Question 6: Is our change management process robust enough to support change?

At this point, you have read the entire article, so I will ask you, is it?

Anthony Casablanca

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