As we prepare for the next two years and the continued recovery from a global pandemic, we as leaders must not embrace growth and profitability strategies that frame up our organizations as machines. Over and over during strategic planning consultations, I am hearing people use machine based language such as “we just need to swap out the old parts for new and improved ones” or “we need to install new people like we do new software.” This kind of language and the resulting scaling up can often create a monoculture that relies on replication, standardization, and compliance. It does not support scaling across, i.e. networks of relationships across the organization through which ideas and beliefs could travel, adapt, evolve, and grow.
On the other hand, as I pointed out last week, scaling across invites teams to learn from one another and to solve their own problems in their own particular way. As Margaret Wheatley reminds us, “People don’t support things that are forced on them. We don’t act responsibly on behalf of plans and programs created without us. We resist being changed, not change itself.”
In order to be successful between 2022 - 2024, we must differentiate between change management and transition management. To review, change management is situational and outcome focused. Transition management is the internal, psychological and emotional process of dealing with endings. As the late William Bridges noted, “The starting point for a transition is not the outcome but the ending that you will have to make to leave the old situation behind.” Thus, a transition starts with an ending and finishes with a new beginning. This ending begins with the letting go of the old ways of working and dealing with the resulting losses.
For us here today, we need to recognize that “new beginnings involve new understandings, new values, new attitudes and - most of all - new identities”, again referencing the work of William Bridges. As he notes, in a new beginning, people want it to happen and are relieved. And at the exact same moment, they fear it because they will be required to make a commitment to a new way of thinking and doing things.
Therefore, people resist new beginnings because they reactivate old anxieties that were triggered by “the ending”, e.g. the ending of work as we knew it back in March 2020. This may also include the risk that the “new beginning” may end again, i.e. we go back to hybrid or all remote work due to another wave of COVID-19 based on a new variant.
This week, be mindful of endings and new beginning. Be consistent in your messaging and your actions. Remember people are trying out new behaviors and new perspectives. Therefore, create planned quick successes or short term wins, and celebrate these moments of achievement.
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