Dealing With Resistance to Change by Will Phillips April 2010 For three decades, I've been consulting and trying to understand what change is all about, and the paradox of resistance to change. I was pleasantly surprised to see a recent Harvard business review article on the subject (Decoding Resistance to Change, HBR April 2009). Whether change is motivated by a parent, teacher, or a boss, the common response to resistance often is to speak louder, speak stronger, and talk about consequences. Invariably, as the person in authority escalates the effort to change, resisters dig deeper. Therein lies the paradox. You're doing what you believe is most appropriate to encourage change, but your result is the exact opposite. A deeper paradox occurs when you embrace the resistance and welcome it. To do this you must first accept that in all cases, resisters are making perfect sense to themselves; they have good reasons for believing what they do. However, you may not believe the reasons are appropriate because you don't understand their world. Because of this peculiar problem, we often use a beach ball at REX Roundtables meetings to help one another see the problem in a visual form. When you hold a beach ball between two people, neither person can see both sides of the beach ball, yet each person believes they can see the whole thing. In order to move ahead, you must each put down your beach ball. That is, put down your arms, your impatience, and your frustration. The person attempting to affect change must also adapt an extraordinarily respectful approach so they can identify and eventually understand the nature of the resistance. The key to responding to resistance is meaningful and ongoing communication. Some of the simple things you can do when you realize that someone is resisting your attempts for them to change their behavior include the following: Stop trying to get them to change. Take a few deep breaths to calm yourself down. Ask: "Can you tell me some more?" When they tell you some more, ask again, "Can you tell me some more?" When they stop, say, "This is very interesting, I'm learning some new things. I'd like to learn even more. Can you give me a better perspective on why it is that this new program or behavior doesn't make any sense to you?" You must do this without cynicism or skepticism. Of course, this requires you to control yourself. Clearly, this is why most managers, parents, salespeople, and human beings generally don't do a very good job with resistance; it's difficult to be this mature under stress. Don't be too offended by that fact, maybe just a little chagrined. Know that when you're frustrated, your attitude casts a shadow over everything you're communicating. The result is that the resister sees that you are not on their side, that you do not respect them or their position. This is a perfect way to NOT get the results you want. In my book, Responsible Managers Get Results, we point out an example of ow United Airlines brought together its pilots, ramp workers and managers for the first time to brainstorm about fuel conservation. The idea was to use electricity instead of jet fuel to power planes idling at the gates. But ramp workers strongly resisted these new ideas. "In the past, we would have sent out an edict and nothing would have changed," says Robert M. Sturtz, United's top fuel administrator. But through patient listening and respecting the ramp workers resistance, "we were finally able to extract what the real problem was." It turned out that the ramp did not have long enough ladders to deal with the change, and now with taller ladders, United began saving $20 million a year, every year. Sometimes it's just a small thing that holds people back but you won't know what it is unless you ask. In the last of this series on change in next month's GTE, we'll look at Immunity to Change, a specific and in-depth method for analyzing resistance to change. Stay tuned!