“Change is not a four-letter word…but often your reaction to it is!” – Jeffrey Gitomer
I talked to a client recently about his adamant desire to fire 2 employees. “They have a bad attitude no matter what I ask them to do they talk back about it,” he told me. Lucky for him I was wearing my Answer Woman outfit and I went right through my litany of HR termination processes. “Document performance, create an Improvement Plan with measurable changes, terminate if progress is not made,” I said hardly taking a breath.
Thank goodness we continued talking because it wasn’t at all what it seemed at first. The real story? He had purchased an affiliated business, moved the two employees into a new office and wanted to immediately change their work processes. They were pushing back with all their might. Firing these two employees would have been the worst possible idea as he would have ended up with a new business and no experienced people to make it work.
The culprit here was not employees with bad attitudes, but CHANGE. We all hate change, whether it is big or small. Your big new idea may scare the socks off me. While you forge ahead, I’m working on fight or flight because I really am scared of change. In this case, the response was definitely to fight. The only way to approach the process was to do a rewind.
- We started with an apology, acknowledging that we got off on the wrong foot.
- We talked one-on-one with them, asking about their processes; what would make their work easier; what they wanted for themselves and their career.
- We shared where the company wanted to go and enlisted their help in planning how we were all going to get there.
I wish I could say it was smooth sailing from there. We had some bumps but kept the conversations going. It wasn’t ‘you or me’, it was always ‘we’. (Side note – simply consciously using the word ‘we’ makes a difference in how we actually feel and act.)
Change is emotional for all of us – leaders and followers. Remember the book, ‘All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things‘ by Robert Fulghum? One of the things he had on his list was: “When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.” Good advice when we go into the world of change – hold hands and stick together. We can hold hands through the honest, genuine conversations we have with each other.
It was gratifying to see my colleague’s new business begin to grow and prosper. Those two employees are now his biggest advocates. The experience gave me pause because I had jumped headfirst into a situation without understanding the larger context. Not so cool for someone who has been an HR professional for many years and co-authored ‘Revolutionary Conversations – the Tools You Need for the Success You Want‘.
A colleague always reminds me that it’s not what we know, but what we don’t know that matters. In the face of a problem keep asking questions. Be sure you get the full picture before you try to respond as it is really easy to jump into a solution but it is often more a case of out of the frying pan into the fire. I had an answer for him, but it really didn’t apply to the underlying problem. I needed to listen, ask and continue to gather data until I got the whole picture.
We can all get ahead of ourselves. It was a good reminder about how important it is to breathe, take a moment and then step forward with an open mind and heart.
P.S. Since writing this article, the COVID-19 virus has created change we never anticipated. We are scared, confused, frustrated, and isolated in turn and maybe all at once. Some of us may be sick, loved ones at risk. Let’s take a breath, get all the information we need from the experts, hold hands, if only virtually, and stick together. Be safe and well, dear readers.