navigating workplace change
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Navigating Workplace
Change
Lifestage, Inc
"Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes — it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm."Peter DruckerManagement Challenges for the 21st Century (1999
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“Technology is evolving at
roughly 10 million times the
speed of natural evolution. For
all its glitz and swagger,
technology and the whole
interactive, revved-up
economy that goes with it, is
merely an outer casing for our
inner selves. And these inner
selves, these primate souls of
ours with their ancient social
ways, change slowly. Or not at
all.”
Brian Arthur, “How Fast Is Technology
Evolving?” Scientific American (February
1997): 107.
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The accelerated pace of change impacts every aspect
of 21st century life – the environment around us as well
as our inner life
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“Change is like tossing a
pebble into a pond.”
“Change creates ripples, reaching
distant spots in ever-widening
circles. The ripples disrupt other
departments, important
customers, people well outside the
venture or neighborhood, and
they start to push back, rebelling
against changes they had nothing
to do with that interfere with their
own activities.”
“Ten Reasons People Hate Change” hbr.org,
9/25/12
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“It isn’t the changes that you do you in,
it’s the transitions. They aren’t the same
thing.”
William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making The Most of Change,
Change is situational-
It hinges on new directions, new plans, and
on what is emerging
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Transition is psychological
It hinges on letting go of the old reality and the old identity we had before the change took place.
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Even positive change can trigger a
sense of threat.
• Loss of control
• Loss of status
• Challenge to familiar habits of
mind
• Heightened uncertainty
• Need to make sudden
adjustments
• Concerns about competence,
e.g. we will lack the skill to
meet evolving challenges and
fall behind as a result;
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Transition is an emotional and
psychological process
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“Even positive and resilient people find
workplace change challenging.” Gregory Shea and Robert Gunther, Navigating Workplace Change
Change involves loss
Change is physically and emotionally stressful
Workplace change often demands difficult psychological adjustments while maintaining the same or bigger workload
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“Our sense of self-determination is often the first
thing to go when faced with a potential
change coming from someone else.” “Ten Reasons People Resist Change” Harvard Business Review Sept 25, 2012
Change violates habits of mind that are protected by an arsenal of defenses. These defenses can produce intense emotional reactions and sometimes flat out resistance to what is happening.
New policies require adjustment and adaptation to a new system, authority structure or requirement that changes roles and relationships
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Change that has a significant
psychological impact can
trigger the stress response-an
“amygdala hijacking” “When the amygdala is active
with blood and oxygen, there is less activation in the prefrontal cortex. Our thinking power is disrupted and there are deficits in our problem solving, because the blood and oxygen are in the amygdala versus the prefrontal cortex. It is like losing 10 to 15 IQ points temporarily, which explains “what was I thinking?” So we are thinking but with less capacity and brain power.”
Lieberman, M.D., “Social Cognitive Neuroscience: A Review of Core Processes.” The Annual Review of Psychology, 2007. 58:259–89
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For effective renewal:
its not how long,
its how well we relax and
recharge“The importance of restoration is
rooted in our physiology. Human
beings aren’t designed to
expend energy continuously.
Rather, we’re meant to pulse
between spending and
recovering energy.”
Tony Schwartz, “Relax! You’ll Be More
Productive” New York Times, Feb. 9, 2013
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The US Marines report remarkable results
from training soldiers in mindfulness
meditation.
After 8 weeks of meditating
15-minutes/ day, the soldiers
reported enhanced capacity
to:
• Deal with anxiety, stress,
depression and insomnia;
• Stay calm and focused in
the thick of battle, while
improving overall mental
and physical fitness.
Danny Penman, “Mindfulness: Finding Peace In A
Frantic World” www.franticworld.com
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“In physical training, muscle strength
grows during periods of rest and
renewal”
The same principles that
apply to athletic performance also hold true for business
and work performance.
It is in periods of sleep and downtime that our minds recharge. The key is to
have the biggest waves between activity and rest.“
Tony Schwartz, “Relax! You’ll Be More Productive” New York
Times, Feb. 9, 2013
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The perception that we have some
power over our response to events
lowers stress levels
It is possible to change
perception of events that we
cannot control and strengthen a
sense of autonomy through:
• Self-knowledge
• Mindfulness practices
• Cognitive-bias modification
Safiya Richardson, Jonathan A. Shaffer,
Louise Falzon, David Krupka, Karina W.
Davidson, Donald Edmondson. Meta-Analysis
of Perceived Stress and Its Association With Incident Coronary Heart Disease. The
American Journal of Cardiology, 2012; 110
(12): 1711
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“Cognitive bias” drives
perception of events.
Common cognitive biases impacting workplace change:
Ambiguity effect: The tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown.”
Attentional bias: The tendency of our perception to be affected by our recurring thoughts and mental patterns.
Backfire effect: When people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their beliefs.
Bandwagon effect: The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.
Baron, J. (2007). Thinking and deciding (4th ed. ed.). New York City: Cambridge University Press
“Cognitive biases are instances of evolved mental behavior. Some are adaptive because they lead to more effective actions in given contexts or enable faster decisions when faster decisions are of greater value. Others presumably result from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms, or from the misapplication of a mechanism that is adaptive under different circumstances.”
Gigerenzer, G. & Goldstein, D. G. (1996). "Reasoning the fast and frugal way: Models of bounded rationality.". Psychological Review 103: 650–669.
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What leads to new insights & discovery
also recharges creative energy for
renewal – it is most accessible to us
when we break up our routine.
"Only when the brain is confronted with stimuli that it has not encountered before does it start to reorganize perception. The surest way to provoke the imagination, then, is to seek out environments you have no experience with, e.g. chemist Kary Mullis landed on the principle of polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, not in a lab but on a northern California highway.” Gregory Burns, Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How To Think Differently
Harvard Business Review Press, 2010
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Some ideas for self-care during
periods of
workplace transition
Make time for positive interpersonal connections;
Identify people in your network who have been through a difficult workplace change and managed the process effectively;
Recognize negative people and environments and limit contact;
Engage in unfamiliar creative activities that require focusing of attention and skill development – these trigger the reward chemistry of the brain in place of stress-chemistry in the face of uncertainty;
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“You cannot control the river,
but you can control your
progress through it.”
“ Even in a racing, rushing river, there are pockets of calm, behind rocks usually, where the river is actually flowing upstream. And you can pull into those eddies once you learn how to do it, and you can actually sit still while the river is racing downstream all around you. And by using a series of eddies, you can move into one eddy, look downstream, then go down to the next eddy and then go down to the next, making your way in a sort of slow and orderly process through an extraordinarily chaotic environment. And in our work life, we see the same type of thing where we feel like we’re faced with a racing, rushing river that we cannot control.”
—Gregory Shea and Robert Gunther, Navigating Workplace Changeg
https://portal.lifeworks.com/materials-uk/HPSActiveAssociatedFiles/16838.pdfWorkplace Change CD
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