In many organizations, understanding and implementing change management are often two very distant cousins. While as individuals we see and understand the need for change management, or the “people side of change”, in reality few have an understanding of the value or the influence to actually implement a change management plan in their organization. Perhaps the challenge in accepting the opportunity is our choice of words. An interesting anomaly that I have encountered is the cultural misunderstanding of the word “change” as it relates to many aspects of an organization. Whether you are talking about change management, change agent, leading change, organizational change, climate change, etc. The word “change” and our societal fear of change can be a barrier to understanding and accepting what an organization is actually working to accomplish. An organization can spend valuable time simply defining change and managing the fear people naturally have about how that change could impact their lives/work.
While it is unlikely that any one organization can change our intrinsic fear of change, we can do a much better job of helping our teams be more fluid and resilient to the constant state of change that we find ourselves. Change will never stop and that’s a good thing. We need to keep moving forward, but we need to equip our people to be more adaptive and less fearful. This happens over time and in a very intention matter.
What are your pain points with managing change?