Management types who think "people hate change": Give 'em Shel, Holtz!

I've been reading Shel Holtz since I was the editor of his weekly Technology Corner column for The Ragan Report, back in the mid-1990s. The best thing he's ever written, as far as I'm concerned, he wrote last Sunday, on his blog. He had me at his headline: "People like change; just not your company's change."

"I’ve always been amused by the assuredness with which people throw out the old chestnut that 'people resist change,'" Holtz wrote. "People do nothing of the sort. They change their hairstyles, their cars, their homes, their fashions, their jobs and all kinds of other aspects of their lives with frequency and glee. People love change."

As far as organizational change, Shel points out: No, employees don't like it when it costs them overtime pay or throws them into weeks and months of uncertainty about their livelihoods or bores the hell out of them because it has nothing to do with the actual work they do every day or honestly strikes them, in their studied opinion (employees have those, you know) as stupid or unnecessary.

Yes, Shel concludes, it's hard to get a whole workforce to change the way it operates. But that's because doing so requires talking everybody into your fancy idea, making them see how they fit in and convincing them it's as good for them as it is for you.

That's hard to do. Hard as hell to do. But it's not hard because employees hate change. It's hard because employees aren't robots.

Oh, and one more thing—and this is from me, not from Shel, but I'm sure he won't disagree with it—employees already know that change is the only constant. They've had effervescent loved ones get cancer and die. They've watched their young gorgeous faces turn fat and gray in the bathroom mirror. They're dealing with all new judges on American Idol. And when a CEO or an HR conehead tries to tell them about the nature of change, they realize that they are working for thoughtless, self-seeking jerks.

And they think to themselves, "Some things never change."

Comments

[Robert J Holland, ABC]

The thing I dislike most about US business leaders is their propensity for treating employees like they have the intelligence and ability to reason of a four-year-old. The condescending attitude of many leaders is what leads a lot of otherwise good and talented employees to disengage. Who wants to work for someone who doesn't respect your intelligence?

If you look at the most successful US businesses, I'll bet they have this in common: their leaders treat them with respect and don't resort to lectures about -- among other things -- how change is a constant.

[james green]

This piece is one of the best that I have ever read. Well done David

[Jennifer Wah, ABC]

Wait. I don't like change. And yes, my hair is stuck in the 80s. (Good piece, though, Bob Dylan...)

[David Murray]

@Wah: You ever see those 70-somethings who go around in their 1970s get-ups? That's going to be you someday. (Somebody once said we dress and style our hair in the decade in which we were happiest. I don't know if that's true.)

And I agree that people have a complicated relationship with change. That is, they try to control how much how fast, and when. I think people are more likely to "embrace change" in the springtime than in the fall, for instance.

But most of all, they delineate between what KINDS of change they want. I may want to take up tennis, but not if it means I have to stop playing golf. Does that mean I "resist change"? No, it means I have a mind.

I wear Red Wing boots every day in the wintertime. Does that make me a creature of habit? Well, I suppose you could say that ... if I, after a lifetime of Stouffer's, I didn't recently take up cooking for the first time in my life and bask in the outsize joy.

And though we worry about changes coming, I'm always amazed at the grace that I and others I know, actually deal with them when they arrive.

People don't like change foisted upon them from on high. Especially free people, who grew up in a society that values individualism and independence.

Which is as it should be. Companies shouldn't be surprised at that, and the fact that they're annoyed by it is further proof, as if we needed it, that companies are dumb.

[Steve C.]

Interesting article, given what's happening in Egypt right now! I would say that the Egyptians aren't afraid of some change . . . but Mubarak? Not so much.

Steve C.

[K Bosch]

Having said all this, what would you advise an organization to do to get out from under this? In my experience, once employees feel this way, it's quite difficult, if not impossible to shift their thinking.

As a low (lowest of the low) manager at a big corp, I was the one who had the face-to-face contact with the individual contributors and was constantly faced with putting logic to the messages that were handed down from upper mgmt. Very difficult when (1) most people weren't even listening to begin with, and (2) those who would listen, did so with an already skeptical, untrusting mind.

[Carol]

My exhusband works for the Calif DMV. They spent millions trying to upgrade their computer systems. It was sabotaged from within by the old farts that had worked there for ever and were just biding their time til they could retire and didn't want to learn a new way of doing things. It was awful and pathetic and cost the state millions. Laziness is another reason people don't like change. and state workers are renowned for laziness.

[David Murray]

Carol:

How do you think those old farts learned to act that way? Did they all have bad parents? Did they all have a genetic marker for laziness? Did they all go Schools for the Lazy?

No: Their training was, they all worked for the DMV for 30 years.

Not saying the culture's not sick. But laziness is learned behavior--usually learned by doing stupid jobs in a stupid system.