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Managing change
This edition of “Organization Matters” was written for HMI World by Miles F. Shore, MD, Bullard Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Senior Consultant and Director at Harvard Medical International. .
If you type “managing change” into Google, you will get nearly 50 million hits, confirming what we all know, that in the modern environment change is a way of life, and managing it is a major activity. The result is a deluge of books and articles on how to manage change, and a sizable industry of consultants helping their clients do it.
All of this activity must be viewed against the finding that a great many organizational changes fail. Either they stop in mid-course, or more commonly, the change does not get embedded long term, and the old ways come back. The common explanation of these failures is a clash of cultures or a clash of egos. The clash of cultures happens when the changes are too large to be tolerated; egos clash when strong-minded individuals are glued to the status quo and cannot let go. In either case, an issue is that people don’t want to abandon what they are used to or get over their customary way of doing things. Psychologically this can be thought of as a failure to grieve what has been lost.
People get emotionally attached to a great many things besides their loved ones. Without realizing it we get attached to our automobiles, our houses or apartments, and even our offices and our associates at work. Giving up these attachments takes place by an entirely normal process of grieving that has been described as “grief work.” The process proceeds by stages (denial, anger, depression, tears, acceptance) that are most starkly apparent in the loss of loved ones, or when we must accept our own terminal illness. What is not recognized is that a similar but milder process takes place in the case of losses that are not so catastrophic. Their mere triviality makes it hard for us to identify the loss, or the mourning process that follows without our recognizing it.
Most of the literature on change management stresses the bright future that will be the result of changing. John Kotter, for instance, in his book Leading Change, advises stimulating change by playing up the urgency of crisis, developing a coalition of trusted staff to plan and promulgate change, offering people short term gains, and sticking with the process long enough to make sure that it will last. These are classic, tested methods that are essential for success. The missing element is acknowledgement of the painful nature of giving up what must be lost, even if change is ultimately for the better.
A familiar example is what happens after final examinations in school. Students work hard for weeks to prepare, looking forward to the relief that will follow when the examinations are over. They are always surprised at the letdown they feel when they no longer have to study day and night. Of course the letdown is transient and easily treated by ordinary means. Students talk over the exam with their classmates, checking its reality against what they expected. They quickly shake off the deflated mood, enjoy the party that follows, and soon are ready for the next challenge.
Organizational change involves a similar process of loss that is typically unrecognized because the emphasis is usually on the bright future to come. Being preoccupied with the past is not part of the game plan. And few leaders or their consultants are prepared to acknowledge the loss or deal with it constructively because awareness of the psychological consequences of change is very rare. Few leaders concern themselves with what has been lost or are prepared for the painful emotions—the anger and depression—that result from those losses. Even fewer are able to plot a course as leader that will assist people in the organization to get over the past—in effect to conduct a kind of funeral.
The leader’s first and most basic job is to acknowledge the pain of losing what is customary and familiar, and bear the anger and sadness that accompany the imposition of change. Acknowledging those feelings does not come naturally to most people. When the feelings are directed at the leadership it is doubly difficult for them. “Why didn’t you do something to prevent this?” “Why can’t you turn it around?”
Second, the leader must take an active role in helping people cope. Passivity or defensiveness will not be successful. People deserve answers to understand how it happened, and why it cannot be reversed. Once that information is shared (and shared often enough to be effective), the leader must actively orchestrate a mourning process that will help people give up the old ways and accept the new. Taking ordinary funerals as a template, the leader must join people in expressing regret that this had to happen. While not accepting that it could be any other way, the leader must voice the feelings of the others: “I don’t like the fact that this has happened, and I too am upset and angry at what this has done to our organization.” Again, as in many funerals, a celebration of what was good about the old ways is necessary. A sure way to ruin a change effort is to say, in effect, “Well, what we did before was really not very effective, and we are lucky to be done with it.” After all, much of the time, the people in the organization gave their time and effort to the old way of doing things. To criticize it criticizes them and their commitment to the previous program. Typically, it is only later in the process that a sober assessment of what went before may include recognition of elements that were less than stellar. Instead, if possible the new program should be seen as building on what was good about the old.
This leads to the leader’s third task: to structure the change to reaffirm the basic values of the organization. If it is possible, the change should be viewed as a way of affirming and even strengthening the values that define the core of the organization. Change that is too radical, that violates the basic values of the organization, will likely cause a fatal rupture of the organizational structure so that people will leave for another organization that fulfills their own core values. For instance, a not-for-profit organization that must become for-profit trades its allegiance to a mission for allegiance to a healthy bottom line. That may be unacceptable to staff who are devoted to the mission and not to financial well-being. The result will be a leakage of staff as they seek other mission-driven organizations to satisfy their personal values. The only way to deal with that issue is to convince the staff that for-profit status will actually make it possible to fulfill more effectively the core values that are important to the staff.
Change is a complex and disruptive fact of organizational life. It is also inevitable. For leaders to deal successfully with change involves awareness of the psychological meaning of change as loss, and the skills to assist people to participate constructively in a process of grieving what has been lost so that they can accept and participate in the new order of things.
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