Every organization needs change leaders. These people believe in the need for change, commit to adopting the required activities, and have the knowledge and skills to support and guide others through the process.

The changes facing most organizations are too complex and the pace of change too fast to be driven only from the top and managed by a few specialists. It would help if you had leaders at every level with sufficient knowledge, skill, and capability to lead and manage change effectively. Here are seven ways to create effective change leadership throughout your organization:

1. Adopt a readiness mindset. Many unwittingly adopt a resistance mindset — the belief that human beings naturally resist change. Leaders with a resistance mindset equate employee reactions to change with resistance and grow frustrated when employees question or balk at change. A readiness mindset interprets these reactions not as a sign of resistance but as a sign that people are not ready. It is characterized by the belief that people will move toward something new and different when they understand the need and feel prepared, capable, and supported. Adopting a readiness mindset allows you to engage with curiosity to seek feedback, prepare, and guide people through the change process.

2. Demonstrate empathy and implement change from the perspective of the change recipients. Empathy is the ability to see the world from a different perspective. When you practice empathy, you can recognize two essential factors. The first is that the initiator of any change starts their transition before others in the organization. The second factor is that every organizational change involves risk. A change that may appear low-risk and easy at the executive level may, at the frontline level, be complex and perceived as riskier. Successful change leaders strive to understand the perspectives of those who will be doing the heavy lifting.

3. Create time and space within your operational environment for people to engage with and adopt the new activities and behaviors. Few companies have the luxury of shutting down business while implementing a change. And the day-to-day activities that keep a business running almost always take priority over those required for change. Therefore, you need to create time and space for people to unlearn old actions and behaviors, learn new ways of working, and embed the latest activities and behaviors into their daily operations.

4. Actively involve the people who will do the heavy lifting in the design and planning of the change. It always surprises me when leaders say they don’t have time to involve everyone in a change process. Involvement is not optional. To think otherwise would be like believing you could get fit by someone else working out! A 2017 McKinsey study found that only 3% of organizational change efforts were successful when managers and frontline employees were not involved. Active involvement does not mean everyone is involved in every decision. However, you can create structures to help you actively involve people at the right level and at the right time.

5. Create a straightforward, concise, and concrete outcome story. Stories drive our decisions and actions. You need reliable, accurate qualitative and quantitative data to decide whether to initiate a change. However, facts and goals are not enough. Creating healthy and sustainable change requires people to connect emotionally and intellectually with a shared story about why the change is necessary and what the outcome will look like. Create a shared outcome story that describes the look, feel, behaviors, and activities of your organization/department after the change has been successfully adopted. Doing so decreases stress and uncertainty and makes it easier for people to let go of their current state and move toward something new. A shared story of your intended outcome helps everyone make better decisions and expands your organization’s intellectual capability.

6. Apply holistic systems thinking. Every organizational change creates ripples or, as one client described it, a tsunami in your organization. Failure to recognize interconnections and treating each change initiative as an isolated event contributes to change fatigue. However, when you identify and plan based on these interconnections, you can leverage collateral change — achieving strategic or desired outcomes within existing rather than new initiatives or projects. It also reduces the risk of burnout and change fatigue.

7. Demonstrate curiosity, compassion, and commitment. Be curious about what you see and hear, including having self-awareness of your reactions. Then practice self-compassion as you navigate your journey and help support others through the change.

To be an effective change leader, you must commit to the whole journey. Achieving real change that sticks takes time. You need the energy and stamina to continue until the intended outcome has been achieved and the new activities have become routine.

Very, very few employees in the history of human work have faced corporate change of the sort that we’ve seen during the past two years. Even now, companies continue to face a constant barrage of change as they attempt to adapt to a business landscape that continues to move beneath their feet. 

You would think that as change has become a part of their daily lives, employees would learn to accept it — or maybe even embrace it. But that’s not usually the case, as evidenced by the ongoing negotiations between employers and employees worldwide over returning to the office, which is demonstrating that some employees are actually very resistant to change.

But “resistance to change” creates a self-perpetuating cycle that leads to frustration, defensiveness, and organizational paralysis.

How Should Leaders Respond When They Feel Resistance to Change?

It happens all the time. With the best interests of the company and employees at heart, a leader obsesses over a problem, doing the grunt work necessary to find a workable solution — only to find that the solution is received with precisely zero enthusiasm, causing the leader to frustratedly ask, “I’m trying to help! Why are they fighting so hard against this change!”

Asking that question is an indication that you’re working with a flawed mindset. The question is itself a label, based on your reaction to the event. And it’s the belief that people are resistant to change that’s the real problem.

People actually don’t resist change. We know this because people are changing voluntarily all the time. Once we understand that the people we work with aren’t resisting change in general, it becomes much easier to ask pointed questions about what the specific objections to this change might be, and how the team can move forward productively.

Here are the three questions to ask when change gets tough.

1. First, pause and ask, “Why do I believe they are resistant to change?” The specific actions that we tend to notice include things like negative knee-jerk reactions, predictions that it won’t work, or failure to follow through after being trained for change. But each of these things are perfectly normal, human workplace behaviors. Interpreting these as a sign of resistance to change may say just as much about your mindset as your team’s. And labeling these behaviors as change resistance can set up the toxic cycle of defensiveness that makes successful change impossible.
2. Once you pause, ask the next question, “Where are these reactions coming from? Why are they reacting this way?” Knee-jerk cynicism may simply be a personality trait. A prediction that the change won’t be as effective as predicted may be an honest attempt to preemptively address an issue the employee sees coming down the line. The crucial behavior for the leader is to work from the assumption that the team wants to succeed as badly as you do, and their behaviors tell you something important about what they’re thinking.
3. Finally, pause a third time and ask, “Do I know something my team doesn’t know, or do they know something I don’t know — but need to?” The first question helps you avoid the mistake of forgetting that your team doesn’t actually have access to the inside of your head, and it’s entirely possible that if they knew everything you knew about the situation, they’d be on board with the change. So tell them! 

Likewise, it’s possible that if you knew everything your team knows, you might have reached a very different decision. After all, you hired them to know things you don’t know and do things you can’t do. The proactive solution to this, of course, is to make sure that employees are consulted about major changes before the day they’re announced. But if you find yourself meeting resistance, it’s wise to pump the brakes and ask yourself if what’s actually happening is that team members with specific and valuable domain knowledge are seeing something you’re not.

By this time next year, we’ll have a pretty good idea of the way many companies handled the return to the office, what approach they used with their employees, and how successfully — or disastrously— it all went. In the meantime, Dr. Dawn-Marie Turner will continue her work helping organizations view change as an asset, rather than a liability.