What If Your Employee Isn’t Resistant to Change?
When an organizational change isn't going well, one explanation tends to come up quickly: employees are resistant to change.
Sometimes they are. People can prefer familiar routines, disagree with a decision or simply not want to do something differently. But labeling an employee as resistant can also end the diagnosis too early. Before deciding the problem is the employee's attitude, I would want to understand what the organization is asking that employee to do and whether the conditions around the work actually support it.
An employee can understand a change, agree that it makes sense and still struggle to carry it out. That isn't necessarily resistance. Sometimes the organization has created competing priorities that make the expected behavior difficult to sustain.
Employees Pay Attention to What Leaders Prioritize
Mindset Alignment is one of the six JL³ Performance Levers. It looks at whether employees understand what matters and whether leadership decisions about attention, people, time and money are consistent with those priorities.
Imagine a leader tells a team that improving customer service is now the top priority. Employees are expected to spend more time understanding customer needs, resolving problems completely and creating a better customer experience.
Nothing else changes.
The team has the same number of employees. They have the same workload and productivity expectations. Calls still need to be completed within the same amount of time, and employees are still evaluated partly on how many customers they handle each day.
An employee who continues moving quickly through calls might appear unwilling to adopt the new customer-service approach. But slowing down to provide the experience leadership says it wants could hurt the employee on another measure leadership still expects them to meet.
That isn't simply an attitude problem. The employee has been given two priorities that compete with each other.
What Leaders Say Matters and What They Support Can Be Different
Organizations communicate priorities in more ways than announcements, meetings and strategic plans. Employees also look at where leaders spend money, how positions are staffed, what gets measured, what receives attention and what happens when priorities compete.
If leaders say employee development matters but consistently cancel development time when workloads increase, employees learn something about the actual priority.
If leaders introduce a new process but continue rewarding employees for results that are easier to achieve through the old process, employees receive conflicting information.
If collaboration is described as important but employees have no time in their schedules to work together, the problem may not be that employees don't value collaboration.
Employees make decisions based on the conditions they encounter every day. When those conditions conflict with what leaders say they want, employees have to decide which expectation is more important.
They will often choose the one that has the clearest consequences.
Capacity Can Look Like Resistance Too
Shared Capacity can complicate change in a similar way.
A new expectation usually requires something from employees. They may need time to learn a new process, practice a new skill, attend meetings, enter additional information or complete work differently while they become comfortable with the change.
If that work is added without anything else being adjusted, employees have to absorb it within their existing capacity.
Consider a team that is already struggling to meet deadlines. Leadership introduces a new documentation process intended to improve quality. Employees understand why the change is needed, but the new process adds 20 minutes to work they were already having difficulty completing on time.
Some employees begin skipping parts of the new process.
A leader could interpret that behavior as resistance. I would also want to know whether employees were given enough capacity to meet both the old expectations and the new ones.
The answer matters because those two problems require very different responses.
Diagnose Before You Label
Calling someone resistant to change puts the problem inside the employee. Once that happens, the solutions tend to focus there too. Leaders may communicate the change again, provide additional training, coach the employee or increase accountability.
Any of those actions could be appropriate if resistance is actually the problem.
They won't fix competing priorities or insufficient capacity.
Before deciding employees are resistant, look at what they are being asked to do. Compare the new expectation with the other expectations that remain in place. Look at what is measured, rewarded and funded. Determine whether employees have enough time and resources to carry out the change successfully.
Then ask a more useful question: What would an employee have to believe is most important based on the decisions we are making?
The answer may match what leadership has been communicating. If it doesn't, the organization has useful information about the conditions surrounding the change.
Look at the Conditions Behind the Behavior
Employees are responsible for their choices and their performance. Examining workplace conditions doesn't remove that responsibility. It helps leaders determine whether they are addressing the right problem.
When employees aren't responding to change as expected, resistance is one possible explanation. Mindset Alignment and Shared Capacity are two others worth examining before reaching that conclusion.
The JL³ Performance Pulse™ helps leaders examine six workplace conditions that can make performance easier or harder.
Take the JL³ Performance Pulse™ to identify which workplace conditions may be affecting your team's performance.