You may now be returning to the workplace after a long two years of absence. You may be pleased to get back to the office, or maybe not so much. You liked the flexibility of working from home but now you are called back. Whether you like going back to the workplace or not, you will experience the push and pull of change. A quote by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus comes to mind. It is as true today as it was thousands of years ago, “the only constant is change.” Life changes, workplaces change, organizations change, sometimes slowly and sometimes very quickly. One of the keys to meeting change head on is to realize that is it not necessarily the change that happens that is important, but how you react to it. To cope effectively with changes, you need to develop key skills that will help you adapt and grow into your new reality. Below are seven ways to do just that. Respect Change Respecting change means accepting that change happens and striving to do what needs to be done to move through the change process. Finding balance and understanding between living with and adjusting your thinking to meet the challenges of change is a key coping skill. Accepting changes shows your strength. You may not like the changes that are taking place but understanding what you can accept versus what you can’t control helps you cope. The next step in meeting changes within the workplace is finding your comfort zone. This usually means clarifying for yourself what you have control over and searching out how the change will help you become better at what you do. Most people don’t like changes, but they can push you beyond your normal boundaries and help you grow. Give It Time Forever is a long time. Most changes don’t last forever because another change takes their place. One coping skill to deal with change is to remind yourself that your current situation can change too. When you learn to respect changes, you build the skill of moving yourself through them to a new and better situation. It’s meeting Heraclitus’s philosophical dictum head on -‘the only constant is change”. Both good and bad changes can happen slowly or unexpectedly. Either way, remember to frame the change as a part, not all, of your life. You don’t know how the next change will affect you, and it may be better. When you work on yourself to meet any kind of change, give yourself time to learn and grow. Learn from Mistakes There are a lot of stops and starts in organizational change. And, sometimes mistakes are made. You may be a person who wants to get on with it. Yet, the change may not go as smoothly as planned. It’s easy to become impatient when you want to make a change – or to adjust to change. Another key coping skill is to learn from the mistakes so that you can construct a better way to handle it. Don’t look at mistakes to find fault. And for goodness sakes don’t approach them with a mindset of failure. See them as mistakes that can be corrected. Use them to learn new skills and better ways of dealing with changes. Mistakes should be a teacher, not a barrier. Learning from your mistakes in the workplace helps you move past them and make better choices about how you will deal with future changes. Practice Self-Care Practicing self-care is also a key coping skill to deal with changes. Self-care includes taking the time to focus, build, and balance your mental and emotional health. The stronger your mental and emotional health is, the better you will be able to deal with changes. Self-care can include meditation, relaxing activities, or simply time spent pursuing hobbies and interests you have. Practices such as these outside of the workplace can help you deal with changes within the workplace. Even in the workplace you can slow your pace down by taking deep breaths and spending five minutes relaxing your brain with a quick meditation (see the 3 Minute Mental Break here). Taking the time to focus on yourself helps you build the mental and emotional strength needed to remain calm during changes and prepares you to make changes that will improve your life. Practice Gratitude When you struggle through the change process and discover what you can control, you will also learn to understand that changes can be opportunities. These opportunities can help you reach your personal goals by increasing your knowledge, seeking help from others, or committing to a course of action. When you see changes as opportunities, you become grateful for the chance to move forward. The skill of being grateful for even difficult changes helps improve your mindset. With a healthy, positive mindset, you will deal more effectively with changes now and into the future. Use Humor Scientists have studied the effects of humor on people’s physical, mental, and emotional health. Humor is a key coping skill for dealing with change. Laughing, smiling, and seeing the humor in situations can lower blood pressure, decrease stress, and boost your mood. Humor can put changes into perspective and remind you that not every change is as bad as you may think. Humor can also help you connect with other people who can support you during changes. Stay Physically Healthy When you are experiencing changes, you need to stay physically healthy. Poor health adds stress that can make changes more difficult. Needing to deal with health problems can steal your time and focus away from dealing with changes. Eating right, getting enough sleep, and exercising your body will help you deal with changes. In conclusion You can see by how this article unfolded that changes you face in the workplace are fundamentally how you deal with change in all aspects of your life. Approaching workplace change with a sense of respect, gratitude and humor, a recognition that it could really be a time for personal growth, an attitude of learning from setbacks and mistakes, and a need to keeping healthy and looking after yourself, will help you become the best version of yourself. Use these key coping skills and it doesn't matter how big or small, good or bad the change is you can deal with it more effectively. Thank you for reading and as always take care, be safe and continue your journey of self-discovery. Richard F.
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You may have heard the saying: "We are only as good as our people." When business owners and managers utter these words they recognize that the value of their organization comes from those who work within it. They know this propels growth and prosperity for them, their employees and the community at large.
A business is like a container. Take a can of paint for instance. What makes a can of paint a real can of paint? It's the paint within the can. The can is the container that holds the paint. The paint within the container is only as good as the mix of chemicals and manufacturing process that made the paint. Poor chemical mix and manufacturing process results in poor paint. The opposite is also true. The right chemical mix combined with the right manufacturing process results in good paint. Like the can of paint the mix of people combined with the strategies, processes and behaviors fill up the container. In this case, however, the container is called the business, hence the saying: "We are only as good as our people." Owners and managers who recognize that business growth comes from "good people," encourage them to be even better by:
Unfortunately there are those who say, "we are only as good as our people," but their behavior works against creating an environment where skilled and dedicated individuals cannot be as good as they would like to be. Here are some of the behaviors owners and managers exhibit in this case:
What to do: Take the time to hire the right people then rejoice because your container is full. It is filled with individuals who want to actively participate in creating a successful organization. Let them shine. Draw upon the special talents they bring to the workplace - their knowledge, skills, values and attitudes - and fully engage them in your business. Join the ranks of those who say,"we are only as good as our people," and then, work hard to give them opportunities to become even better. In the end you will have a more productive and happier workplace. Author: Richard P. Fontanie MSW, FCMC Up-dated from the archives of FontanieLearningSolutions. Something I discovered while working with business owners and leadership teams suggested that many of them viewed organizational change as a theoretical construct. They talked change, discussed change models, and at times, were frustrated and paralyzed by it. It became mind boggeling. Yet, the most crucial element regarding change is not at the intellectual level; it's at the emotional level. It hits people in the heart and gut. Perhaps you can relate to these statements: "We're reinventing the organization but change is too slow." "Why don't my employees get it." "We've had meeting after meeting about the new vision for the company, but so little has changed." "My Board is getting impatient it wants to see people acting differently now." "We're in a process of changing our culture but it isn't happening fast enough." What's going on here? What's going on is that the leadership team doesn't fully understand, or is reluctant to accept that organizational change is a slow process, and could take up to seven years to come to fruition. No matter what the change is some aspect of the organizational culture will change as a result of the process. The fact remains, however, that organizational culture only changes when people decide that the change has value for them. That's the rub. People need to "feel" that the change will benefit them in some way. If they don't, the change will be long and fraught with difficulty. At its core, the leadership team want individuals to let go of something that defines them and replace it with something new and different. Imagine a large organization with all its systems and processes predicated on a hierarchical structure and the leadership team now deems that a vision-value driven organization with interconnected teams' delivering services and products within a flat structure is the way for the future. This is a tsunami change for almost everyone in the organization and becomes a huge challenge for them. Here the "what" and "how" of work is literally turned upside down. What was "valued and rewarded" in the past is now slipping away. Now imagine a small or medium sized business that's going through rapid change as it comes to grips with a fast paced evolving marketplace. New people are hired while others are let go. New products are brought on stream, and others are dropped. People are confused about the direction of the company, how to relate to each other and what they are supposed to do. Again, people are challenged about the "what" and "how" of their work. Most people define themselves not by who they are (which is the subject of another post) but by what they do; and, what they do is wrapped up in their self-image and ego. When people define themselves in this way, letting go of what they do means they need to redefine themselves in some way. This poses both an intellectual and an emotional challenge for them. Letting go, however, is precisely what has to happen if any change is to occur. The process of redefinition takes time and many will try to protect their ego, their self-image and their job (what they do) by initially denying that the change is real. They say such things as: “I don't think anything will really change." “Let's wait it out – this too shall pass,” “I’ll make some surface changes to show I’m willing, but I'm not going to really change what I do," and, "This new approach is too much for me, I can't go along with it." Leadership teams need to fully appreciate that organizations are made up of individuals who have different personalities, attitudes, habits and behaviors. When change is introduced they are asking each one of these individuals to accept a level of personal change. Some will want to hang on to their comfortable past, others will “get it" and will want to move ahead, while others won't be sure which action to take and will vacillate back and forth from one position to the next. Let's consider just one aspect of what we are asking people to change, their habits. Ask any leader two simple questions: 1) Did you have a well wired habit that you tried to change? and, 2) How hard was it to change that habit? If they are honest they will tell you that it wasn't easy and it took some time to feel comfortable with the new habit. When a leadership team embarks on changing an organization it is asking not one individual but many individuals to change their habits and behaviors. If those individuals have been working the same way and using the same processes within the same structures, they have developed a habitual way of completing their work. They now must break away from what they have interpreted as acceptable to something different and new. They are being asked to change their habitual pattern which over time has become part of their identity; and, taking on new habits is not necessarily easy and usually time consuming. At the root of all this is that the leadership team wants individuals to take a leap of faith - to trust them that the new is better than the old. Individuals need to be convinced that it is better to let go than to hang on. This requires the leadership team to constantly communicate and reiterate the positive aspects of the new direction with patience, practical learning opportunities, engagement, and the willingness to adjust when required. Lasting organizational change only happens when people are ready. They are ready when they intellectually recognize the benefits for the change and integrate them emotionally. That's when it becomes a new way for them. Some will grasp, celebrate, and incorporate the change quickly; others will recognize the benefits but will still be reluctant to change, When they do they may slip back to past behaviors and require continual encouragement and support. Eventually the organizational culture will change and those who have accepted the change will evidence a new habitual pattern. It is also my experience that there are those individuals who are unwilling to change. People around them have embraced or a least have adjusted to their new reality, but they haven't. In these cases the leadership team has three options, they can:
Questions to Ponder: Do you consider the mired of people issues when you embark on a change process within your organization? Do you think organizational change takes too long? Do you say: "Change, or else!" Do you believe that individuals have to integrate the change both intellectually and emotionally? Are there times when the leadership team can't wait - they need to move quickly and accept the fall out? What process do you follow when introducing change within your company or organization? You may also be interested in the series found under LeaderManager on the Front Page: "The Middle Muddle" Updated from the archives of Fontanie Learning Solutions. During the 90’s, due to the expansion and access to information through computerization and the advent of the internet, a new way of conducting business began to emerge. Many industries adapted to this new reality and many remain still searching for a path forward. Here, I'm referring to the movement away from the industrial economy towards what we now call the knowledge economy. The industrial economy spawned organizations which enshrined power, order, predictability and control as their foundational framework. These organizations are efficient and organized to meet the demands of a mass production economy. They are structured to ensure that job security is tied to obedience, jobs are organized into segmented hierarchies or silos, tasks are made simple and are reproduced with maximum repetition, remuneration is made according to the type of job one has and workers are an extension of machines. The difficulty is that they are also rigid, slow to change and not flexible enough to meet the demands of today's fast paced business environment. Governments, military, large corporations, religions, schools, and unions were and are designed this way. The emerging information economy is birthing organizations based on shared power, flexibility, creativity and flow. They are designed to empower employees, encourage creativity and seek constant improvement. Organizational control comes through an adherence to a common vision, a set of values and corporate goals. The model looks messy from the outside looking in, but it does have structure and form, albeit flexible and fluid. Long term job security and company loyalty are not as prevalent as they used to be in the industrial economy. In the industrial economy structures, the individual finds him/herself inside the management structure. Individuals are told what to do, how to do it and when to do it. Teams are driven by management. In the Information economy, the management structure is inside the individual. In this model individuals become self-managers, self-leaders and teams grow in independence and are interdependently linked to one another. Power, order and control, are found in an alignment with a common vision, a set of common values and shared goals. People are engaged, creative and flexible. During the transition period, as organizations transform from one organizational structure to the other, individuals move from the dependence upon the organization found in a highly visible pyramid, to more independence within a constantly changing and fluid organization; and, end at a place where the pyramid is in the shadow. Work has been with us for untold centuries, but it was only in the turn of the 20th Century that the study of work and how it is organized began in earnest. Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915) was the first person to approach work scientifically, and many of the gains made in productivity over the years are traced back to his theories of ‘scientific management’. The basis for Taylor’s theories was embedded in the way work was done during his day. During his time the economy was driven by the industrial complex typified by the assembly line. However most people today find work in what Dan Stamp, the former Chairman and founder of Priority Management International and Dr. Peter Honey, a world renowned Industrial Psychologist, have called “The Invisible Assembly Line.” The Invisible assembly line is comprised of knowledge workers, deals with ideas and information, and centred around people rather than solely around the production of material goods. It is estimated that over eighty per cent of present day workers are now classified as knowledge workers and primarily found in the service sector. Dan Stamp and Peter Honey recognized the significant contribution that Taylor made to the understanding of work but wondered how it applied to today’s knowledge workers. After extensive research into the behaviours of knowledge workers they began to piece together a “productivity platform’ for knowledge workers based on a decide, do and deliver model, underpinned by learning and determined by eight distinct processes which make up The Invisible Assembly Line. The first stage of The Invisible Assembly Line which sets a strategic direction identifies those processes which: 1) define purpose and 2) establish goals ; the second stage relates to executing the plan identifies those processes which: 3) focus resources with flexibility, 4) manage priorities, and 5) measure effects; and, the third and final stage which is about exceeding expectations identifies the processes which enable people to: 6) take ownership, responsibility and accountability, 7) influence others while maintaining interpersonal relationship, and 8) continue improving people, processes and productivity. Author: Richard P. Fontanie, MSW, FCMC Your work assembly line may be invisible but the results can be seen. Dan Stamp |
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