In my last post, The Top Ten Keys to Successful Change, I talked about how to make changes successful. An interesting blog post by Margaret Heffernan in BNET raises an interesting question: Do people even notice when change is happening?
While the video on change blindness (see below) may not appear to directly correlate to changes within an organization, my observation is that people do not necessarily realize that change is happening--even if they do recognize the personal impact.
As leaders, our job is to make sure that people don't just feel the effects of change. It's critical to be explicit about change. Be sure to communicate that change is happening--no matter how obvious that might seem (again, check out the video below). That will enable people to prepare themselves mentally and emotionally. Remember: even change for the better can be difficult for people.
I would add that setting the expectations for future change is even more important. If the people in the video were told to pay attention to the guy behind the counter they would have noticed the switch.
ReplyDeleteWhile I agree that it is important to highlight the changes while they're happening, if the expectations of what "may" happen were established at the outset, those intermediate updates would have greater impact.
Thanks for the input to the discussion, Stew. I agree with you on the importance of anticipating change. This is a large part of the reason why some organizations are very good at change while others are very change resistant. The challenge is that, even as leaders, we don't always know what those changes will be (so we can't put people on the "look out" for them specifically).
ReplyDeleteFor organizations (whether it's your team, your department, or your company), the ability to recognize change and respond quickly and effectively is a major competitive advantage. I'll explore ideas on how to develop those capabilities in future posts...