Test Repetition Demonstration
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Liberating Teams podcast. I'm Holly Breeding team psychology practitioner and org effectiveness consultant. Every week around here, we dismantle the outdated hierarchical leadership systems that keeps leaders like you stuck in the weeds and break down how to build a self-managed team that thrives without you at the center.
Because when your team has the clarity systems and ownership, they need to lead themselves. You finally get to lead strategically. It's time to liberate the way you lead.
Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we are talking about change resistance. What the heck it is. Why it continues to perpetuate itself inside of corporate culture today, and what the heck do we need to do about it as leaders
And I feel like before we start we need to talk about what the [00:01:00] heck it is. So I did a little Google. And the definition of change resistance is the reluctance, refusal, or opposition by individuals or groups to adapt to new processes, ideas, or circumstances.
And I think in corporate culture today, we've really started to see change resistance as a trait, right? It's a problem in our people. It's who they are. And so if we as leaders want to introduce a shift, a change, a new idea, it is our job to understand that they are going to resist it, and we need to manage it to get them on board and to accept whatever it is that we're proposing.
And I wanna call this out because this comes from that traditional industrial era management culture that we talk [00:02:00] about so often here. It's that thought process that we as leaders are the thinkers, we're the strategists, we're the ones with all the answers. And we get to sit there with our clipboards and watch how the people on this.
Assembly line are doing their work, and we get to decide where those problems are. And then we get to go back up into our, corporate office, high above, develop this perfect plan, and we got to push it out onto our people. And they are the doers.
They're not the thinkers. We're the thinkers. We're the strategists, they're the executors. They're just running the assembly line. So they need to get on board because we're not paying them to think we're paying them to do. And so if they push back against our plan, oh, that's resistance. And we need to overcome that resistance to ensure that the assembly line keeps operating the best way it can.
Because we as leaders [00:03:00] know best, and I know you because you're in this space, that's not the way you think. It's not that we know better than our teams, but oftentimes I see this pattern still perpetuate itself even in the most forward thinking leaders because it's like, we've done all this research we've, studied this, we've looked at best practices, we've done all the things, we've listened to the podcast, we've read the books, and I so firmly believe that this is what's going to help my team.
And it's coming out of the goodness of wanting to help them, of wanting to build something better for them, of wanting to solve that big, hairy problem that's getting in their way. But we still come at it from this top down lens of, I've done all this work, I've done all this research. I firmly believe this is the right answer. The only thing in my way is you guys getting on board. We start to see it as an us versus them [00:04:00] mentality. . If only they would get on board, everything would be perfect. And when they question it, when they push back against it, when they, maybe agree at first, but then start to revert back to the status quo. We immediately think, what's wrong with them? Because it couldn't possibly be the idea. It couldn't possibly be how we approach the change. We go back to that corporate conditioning of looking at the people as the problem instead of the system.
We see change resistance as a trait of the people instead of a symptom of the system.
And is feeds this ideology of change resistance, we as leaders come out and we say, oh, here's this change we want to put in [00:05:00] place, and we feel it, right? Your team starts asking questions and you see it on their face, like they're not totally bought in. And so you already feel like, oh, they're gonna be resistant to this. But you keep pushing and you roll it out anyways, and then it fails and it doesn't stick. Or it sticks for a hot second and they start going back to the status quo. And we use that as fuel, as fact to fuel our belief, our assumption, whoops.
See? I knew it. I knew they were gonna be change resistant and look what happened. It failed because they pushed back against it.
And it was the moment where I stopped seeing change resistance as a trait, as something we needed to overcome and started seeing it as a symptom that, hey, something isn't right here. That my super smart team who I hired to be strategic [00:06:00] thinkers and thought leaders and connect dots and find gaps. Is pushing back here.
Maybe they're onto something. Maybe I didn't provide enough clarity. Maybe we're not looking at the root cause of what's happening here. Maybe we missed something, maybe they're not resisting the change.
Maybe they're not trying to go back to the status quo. Maybe it's them saying, wait, something's wrong here. Something doesn't quite add up. This doesn't make sense. This plan isn't going to work. We're focused on the wrong thing. It's a warning sign. Not because they're against it, because something's wrong.
And I see this with my clients a lot, is, I was working with one leader who was in a very like old school legacy culture, and they had done some phenomenal work. They brought these two teams together that really were working against each other and they had developed this [00:07:00] solution and they were really excited about it.
And ever from the beginning. They were nervous about the resistance. I don't know if they're gonna be on board. I don't know if they're gonna be, they're gonna accept this. They're not people who like change. They're very set in their ways. And so when they rolled out this solution and one week later, that team reverted back to doing it the old way instead of the way that they had agreed upon.
The leader immediately was like see, it failed. It didn't work. I knew, even though I went through this process of bringing everyone together and having this conversation and we all agreed to it and then they went back on it, and that is nothing against this leader. That is a completely human response, is frustration of what the heck.
We just had this conversation. We just agreed to this. Everyone was on board, and now you go back on it. And we had to [00:08:00] clock that pattern right there of, wait a second, what if, instead of approaching this from a Hey, see, we instead approach it from a perspective of curiosity, of resistance as a symptom, not a trait.
Why did they go back on it? What, what wasn't clear? What scenario were they in that caused them to regress to what they knew? What could we have done in that situation, or what could we have made clear? What could we have provided for them to have stuck to what we agreed to? We forget that the basis of change is taking something that somebody has been conditioned to do time and time again over years, and now we're telling them to do something different and it's not going to happen overnight.[00:09:00]
We're humans. We're not robots. No matter how much, like I want to do something differently, it's gonna take time. Why do we think we all set New Year's resolutions at the beginning of the year? I'm gonna be a runner, or I'm gonna get up earlier, or I'm gonna do this thing and then we regress because we're trying to change built in patterns that have been in place for, we're not even logically thinking about it.
That person wasn't even logically thinking, Ooh, I'm going to, go back on everything we've just talked about. It was an auto condition response.
And I think the second pattern that we need to clock here as leaders is this thought process that we know the right solution the first time. And this is a much bigger issue that I have with how we approach change and strategy [00:10:00] from this lens of, let's look at all the data.
Let's figure out what's happening. Let's decide the one best solution, and then let's blindly implement it. And everyone's gonna get on board and like we're gonna save the day. But again, we're not dealing with machines where when they break down, they're very black and white.
, Find the piece that's no longer working, and you can follow the manual that's going to give you a solution. If X, then Y, and it will work. Our teams aren't machines. They're what we call complex systems. So instead of a machine, I want you to think of say a garden.
, If you're trying to tend to plants, out in your yard, it, there's no manual. Yeah, there's, Hey, here's some ways to think about it. Here's how to learn about it. Here's what you should be thinking about. But we [00:11:00] can't control it. We can't control the weather. We can't control the pests that are in our backyard.
We can't control the soil. Sure, we can like test and experiment and try new things and figure out what works and what doesn't. But it's not black and white. You know what works in. My zone over here in the deep South isn't going to work for you guys in the Midwest, it's very different. We're all operating in different ecosystems with different conditions.
That's how I want you to think about your team. We are dealing with different people who have different opinions, who have different histories regarding change. Our operating in different cultures with different norms. We have complex systems, and there's no way of knowing if our solutions are going to work or not until we test them, no matter how much we plan and try to account for [00:12:00] every possible risk or develop, knowledge sharing manuals and SOPs and trainings when we put it into effect, you will have missed something. You will have not accounted for something because there's no way of knowing until we put it in the system. Just like in a garden. There's no way of knowing until we try it out and see how our garden reacts.
And even if that solution was absolutely perfect in the moment, the next week suddenly we have like insane weather and the temperature drops and we have, 17 inches of snow falling when we usually never get snow. And there goes your entire plant. 'cause it's a complex system, it can't be controlled.
And so when you roll out that change. It likely is going to fail the first time and it has nothing to do with your team or them being change resistant [00:13:00] and everything to do with the fact that, hey, maybe we missed something. Maybe we didn't account for this.
Maybe we didn't think about how that stakeholder would react. Or maybe, hey, spoil alert, this just isn't the right solution for us. We gotta learn from this and go back to the drawing board, and that's okay too.
But what I see is so many teams falling into the corporate conditioning of spending months and tons of resources, we do these massive 12 month org restructures where we put all this time and energy and workshops and PowerPoint decks and moving sticks and boxes and doing all of this stuff.
And then we rolled it out and guess what? The problem still existed.
But crap, we just spent all that time and resource and money in this, so we gotta make it work. So everybody buckle up and get on board even though it's actually making things [00:14:00] worse. We refuse to acknowledge it, but they're not being change resistant because that's fundamentally who they are.
They're change resistant because, hey, maybe this isn't working. Maybe we need to tweak it. Maybe we need to add something here. Maybe instead of writing them off and getting defensive, we need to get curious. We need to ask more questions. Maybe they like the status quo and they keep reverting to it because the new thing that we put in place is making their job 10 times harder because maybe it's not the right answer, or maybe we didn't explain it clearly enough, or maybe, it's too complex. There's a reason why and when we write it off as change resistant of that's just who they are as people. We stop being curious and that's why change fails. It's not the people, it's the system. And I want to acknowledge the fact that [00:15:00] we as leaders are actually in a really dang tough position when it comes to driving change on our teams.
Because here's the thing. Change resistance. This feeling that whenever we propose a change, our teams are hesitant, they're skeptical. That is based off of learned experience. Just Google it. The percentage of transformations that fail, it's something like 70% if not higher. Stop and think about your own experience with change.
Of org structure, re shifts, or technology or solutions that people promised would change everything and then did nothing or made your jobs worse. Leaders in your past who were completely dis connected from the reality of what was happening in the day to day. And they like brought out some massive look at this cool idea, this like leading edge thing that we're gonna start doing.
Meanwhile, you're like [00:16:00] bleeding out because something fundamentally is broken. And you can barely keep things afloat. And they're over here look at this leading edge thing, and it's hello? The ship is sinking, and you're like, they're completely disconnected. You weren't change resistant. This was just really bad change. And all of us can probably come up with a list of bad change that we have been through. And the reality is your team is the same. So whether or not you created it, there's learned experience here that change is usually not something good for us.
I'm not gonna blindly be like, oh, yay. Can't wait. We hired smart people, we hired intelligent people. Of course, they're going to question it. Of course, they're going to doubt it. They have every reason to, and it's insulting [00:17:00] their intelligence to think otherwise. You didn't hire a team of robots who blindly trust you.
You hired people who are here to think strategically, to challenge you, to find gaps, to connect dots. So of course, they're going to question, they're not resistant, they're smart. Let's stop holding that against them. So we have it harder as leaders when it comes to driving change. 'cause unfortunately we're operating on a graveyard of failed change experiences that we had nothing to do with.
And now we suddenly have to convince them that this is gonna be different. And traditional change management techniques are not the answer. Because they continue to perpetuate the same type of command and control change we talked about earlier where we as the leaders are the ones who [00:18:00] go behind closed doors and develop the solution, and then we almost turn into these use car salesmen where, we develop out these why statements and these WM statements and do these town halls with these like Q and As where they get to ask questions but don't really ask questions 'cause we're gonna give you a canned response that doesn't actually answer it. And we send out these communications that sound nothing like us because they've been through 73 rounds of wordsmithing.
Editing and all this stuff to remove any perceived possible risk. And it all just feels very icky. It feels fake. And again, you hired smart, intelligent people and they can see right through it. They know they, can see through the process. They've been through it before. And at this point, to them, words are cheap. It's like we're being [00:19:00] handled and it doesn't feel good. It feels icky. It feels like we're being sold to, it feels like we're.
Almost like we're being manipulated into this like massive change that's gonna be super disruptive and make everything way harder. But it's being sugarcoated as this exciting opportunity. This is gonna be so cool. And you're like, but is it really? And it makes us even more skeptical because at this point we can all see through it.
We all know the horse and pony show. It immediately puts people on the defense. And not only that, a lot of those types of change management type processes are operating under the wrong premise of how change actually happens. They think that if people understand the change, they'll be bought into it, and that will lead to behavioral change.
But that's not how behavioral change works. [00:20:00] Like right now, let's say you want to run more. I can sit here and slam you with a ton of information about why running is good for your health, how it's going to, increase your satisfaction with your life.
Why, it's simple to get started. I can give you a million logical information where you can completely understand why running is so healthy for you. And solve many of the problems you have today. But is that gonna change your behavior and get you to start waking up at 5:00 AM and going for a jogger around the neighborhood tomorrow?
Probably not, because that's not how behavioral change works. There's actually a bunch of brilliant studies that show this if you want to get into the science behind it. And one I'll talk about is the implementation study. And what they did is essentially they gave one group education about a goal.
Around [00:21:00] exercising. Like here's why you said exercise, just like what we talked about. And then the other group, they sat with them and they spent that time helping them make a specific plan, starting to say when they would go exercise and how they would do it, and talk about what would get in their way.
And they created if then statements like, if this happens, then I'll do this. Like they actually planned how they were going to overcome those obstacles. And the group. That did the planning and actually worked through it was two to three times higher to actually follow through on that plan than the education only group.
Because behavior change doesn't happen through communication or understanding. Like most change management processes want you to believe it happens through systemic change. It happens through, instead of giving our teams PowerPoints about like how we're gonna be more strategic or, printing off our team values and hanging them on a wall and everyone abide by [00:22:00] these,
it happens in actually getting into the work and saying, if we wanna be more strategic, what does that mean for our system, how we operate? What do we need to change? What needs to shift? How do we start taking that tactical work off of our plate? How does that change how we start interacting with customers?
We start shifting the system, and this is why we talk about our operating system until we're blue in the face around here, because your operating system is what drives performance. It's what drives behavior. And so no matter how much you talk about a change you wanna make. If your operating system still is designed around something else, still promotes a different behavior, then it'll never change, not becomes your team isn't change resistant, not because your team is change resistant, not because your team doesn't wanna be more innovative or more strategic, but because your system won't allow it.
So change isn't about the communication plan. It isn't about understanding the change or the why statement or the wfam. It [00:23:00] isn't even necessarily about being bought in 'cause they could be totally bought in and still change wouldn't happen because we have to change the system at the root level. All of that time that we're spending on communication plans and work or town halls and q and as and stuff like that's not where we should be focusing.
Instead, we should be saying, if we wanna make this shift, what about our system needs to shift for this to happen? And if you're like, what the heck do you mean when you say system? That's what we talk about, our operating system. I have a ton of posts on my Instagram profile about it. It, but it's essentially how you think about strategy, not strategy on a PowerPoint deck, but like actually how you plan and prioritize work and what actually gets attention focus.
It's about teaming, so roles, ownership, decision rights, but also how your team works together, how they collaborate, how they coordinate around work, how they meet. It's talking [00:24:00] about workflows, so how work actually gets done, what work gets done. How much bureaucracy and complexity is in your processes and your workflows, and how hard do we make it for your team to drive value?
And then it's in how you approach innovation and change how we question the status quo. How we think about doing things differently. Do we make it easy to shift things? Do we have that innovative, creative mindset that's fostered on our team? That's what I'm talking about when I talk about operating system.
It's what's below your org structure. It's how work actually gets done on your team on a day-to-day basis. The unspoken norms, the unspoken ways of working. That's where true behavioral change comes from is by understanding that and systematically shifting that to get the different behavior or performance you want.
But most people don't understand that, and it's hard for us as leaders [00:25:00] to capture that. To get into that. So what do we do? We stay at that high level, at that surface level. I'll make a PowerPoint deck about it. I'll create a change management plan and we'll hope that something changes. So now we understand that change resistance actually isn't a trait that our team has.
It's a systemic response to the system we're using to drive change. It is that warning flag that's saying, Hey, something's not right here. And it's telling us that we need to get curious. We need to start asking questions. And my challenge for you is if you continue to find yourself coming up against change resistance, instead of looking at the people, I want you to start looking at your system for how you go about driving change.
Because oftentimes when I see teams that are highly change resistant. It has very little to do with the team and it has a lot to do [00:26:00] with our current level of mastery around driving and facilitating change. As a leadership team, there is so little time spent with leaders on teaching them how to do good change, and I'm not talking about developing communications and ad car.
Pro sci and all that other stuff. I'm talking about how to actually fundamentally make shifts in how your team operates. True behavioral change shift things at the systemic level. We don't spend any time on that, and then we wonder why our changes don't stick, why our team reverts back to the status quo.
And it's so much easier to blame it on the people than to think about our own mastery, our own ability to facilitate change. And this is not on you guys as leaders at all, because I know you, I know the people in my community. You guys are doing the damn work. You are reading the books, you are putting in the effort, but none of those [00:27:00] resources are talking about it either.
They're still regurgitating these same surface level old school ways of thinking. We haven't been equipping leaders with how to do true change. And so of course we're gonna start to question like, what the heck? I'm doing all the quote unquote right things and it's not working, so maybe it's my people, but actually it's the old school ways of doing change that were being fed.
Okay, so now that we understand the root cause of quote unquote change resistance, what are some ideas or practices we can start putting in place in our teams tomorrow? So the first one is one of our core beliefs here at Liberating Teams, and that is with them, not to them. Always.
People own what they help create. If we are going to be driving change to how our people are operating and they have to execute it, then they should help design it. That is why we [00:28:00] believe that teams need to be included in the change from day one.
So that is why when you come into Liberated Leader, we immediately audit your operating system with your team. From day one, they're in it. They're giving the information about, Hey, here's where things are going wrong. Here's where we're struggling. They're actually helping prioritize what are the biggest problems we need to be focusing on.
Because guess what? You don't need to develop why statements and WS when your team actually was in the room, having the debate and dialogue about what's important. What are the trade-offs that we need to make? Hey, that's critical, but this over here actually is what needs our attention Now. They were in the room, they had the conversations they debated and dialogue over it so they know it.
And we bring them into developing the solution for those pain points in actually proposing what we do differently about them. And I think this process, I don't think I know because a lot of the times when I suggest this to leaders, [00:29:00] they bulk and they're like my team doesn't think in that way. If I got my team in the room like that, they would talk in circles for hours.
But is that a problem with your team? Or is that a problem with, we haven't mastered the ability to facilitate our team through change yet, because oftentimes it's the latter. We just haven't been given the tools to actually have these conversations with our teams in a productive way, which is why that last time you hold that strategy workshop or that offsite.
You maybe came up with a bunch of good ideas, but nothing actually happened because we actually haven't been given those tools. The tool for you to consistently be able to take in with your team what is going wrong in our operating system? What is holding our US back? Where do we need to shift in order to hit our strategy and actually develop proposals with them about what [00:30:00] to do about it and have them put them into practice.
That's what we call the unblock loop inside of Liberated Leader. And it's a methodology about how to drive and develop change with your team instead of to them, so they're actually in it. And here's the thing, because your team is actually in these conversations, we don't sit there and build, surface level PowerPoints that have no understanding of how work actually happens.
We're actually having the conversation with the team about, okay, if we want to change this, where do we need to focus? What needs to shift? The solutions are 10 times better because we're doing it with the people closest to the work we're driving. Systemic change, not surface level. Talking about change in PowerPoint decks, we're putting our focus where it matters.
This process right here alleviates all of the time and energy we're spending on change management plans and refocus it where it matters, which is [00:31:00] actually doing the work to drive change. So first things first, with them to with them, not to them always. We're always driving change with our team. We're not doing it to them.
We're not pushing it out on them. They are a part of the change process. So idea two is going to be focusing on small experiments, not big transformations.
So as we talked about when we're dealing with these complex systems. We don't know what's gonna work and what's not going to work. We can spend all the time in the world planning and developing Gantt charts and waterfalls and all these things. And then we put it into practice and it completely backfires because it doesn't work for our system.
So we want to avoid that wasted effort. And we also want to avoid another scenario that could potentially. Go in the [00:32:00] notebook for our team as oops, another failed change. Instead, we want to build momentum. We want to create a scenario where they're seeing the positive stack up. That makes them more excited, more bought in, more ready to go further, to push the envelope, to try new things.
And so the way that we do that inside Liberated Leader is we focus on small experiments. Once we find a specific problem that we're wanting to solve, we say, okay, what can we do to start to drive change in this area over the next eight weeks? What's one step we can take? Because this allows us to do a few things.
One, it allows us to stop wasting all of our time developing plans and getting, obsessed with a solution that may fail. Two, it allows us to test things out, to actually try and see does this work or not, and if it doesn't work, hey. We put eight weeks into it, that's not a big [00:33:00] deal. We've learned something from it.
What can we take away? What do we need to tweak? It gives us information that allows us to develop a better solution over the next eight weeks, so that way we're getting closer and closer to finding the perfect solution for us and our system. And if it does work, third thing it does is it builds momentum.
So now we've done one little eight week change, and it's built momentum. It's built confidence in our team that, Hey, okay, we're starting to see something. We're starting to see relief. We're starting to see change. How can we push this a little bit further? And what over time is teams start to get riskier and bolder with their experiments, and they start pushing the envelope further because they're actually seeing change.
They're seeing evidence. We're not spending all this time being those used car salesman of this is gonna be great and everything's gonna be better and trying to sell them on them. We're showing them, they're seeing it firsthand, [00:34:00] they're experiencing it, and it allows us to see those things that we didn't account for and start planning for them and figuring out how to combat them at a smaller scale before we're, six months into this.
When we test it, we're actively learning, and then we can adjust and course correct and respond to it in a scenario that's much lower risk. And allows us to come at change from a place of Hey, we don't know how this is going to work. That's where I think so many people get frustrated with change management today is the performative certainty of we know it.
Like this is the solution. This is gonna be the thing that saves everything and everyone can see through the bs. No, it's not, and we all know it like you might think it is, but we have no idea how this is gonna play out. And the performative certainty. Immediately turns people off because they're like, I know we have no [00:35:00] idea.
And you standing up there trying to sell me that we do makes me trust you even less. So this kill it does away with the performative certainty and says Hey. We know this is a problem you guys are facing. We think this is an opportunity that might make it better. Let's try it out for over eight weeks and see what happens.
There's no commitment. There's no we suddenly need to change everything that's been, that we've been doing and go all in on this thing and hope it works out. No, it's, let's just test it and see what happens. Guess what? Your team's gonna be 10 times more okay with that than getting behind something that we have no idea, but looks good on a PowerPoint deck.
And that company over there did it and it worked for them. But that's a completely different scenario. So start small, experiment, test, try new bold things, but at a smaller scale. [00:36:00] And I think the really cool thing, like the thing that I love the most about the Liberated Leader Lab is you are in this community of leaders who are all trying different experiments and new ways of working and testing and failing and learning and testing again.
And you're seeing their progress and you're learning from what they're doing and how they're overcoming change. And it starts to create this community. Not only within this peer group that you now have as leaders, but within your team of them starting to come forward and bring up, Hey, this is a gap I found in an experiment.
I want to try to test to do it differently and it creates this culture. Where change isn't something that's happening top down, command and control. It's recognizing that we've hired smart people who know this work and we're all here to optimize and make this a better place together, and we're all coming up with ideas, and we're all coming up with solutions, and we're all trying new things.
It creates a culture of [00:37:00] experimentation and change and innovation in your team versus a us versus them. How can we force them to change mentality? Okay, y'all, we've covered so much in today's episode. I want you to take one thing that you've learned today and think about how you can start applying it within your team tomorrow, and then DM me over on Instagram.
I wanna hear all about how it goes and if there is a pattern, a topic, a piece of corporate Kool-Aid that you want to discuss and break down on the podcast, definitely send me a DM as well. I would love to know that as well. Let's go do some work.
Thank you for listening to the Liberating Teams podcast. If this episode hit home for you, don't forget to share it with another leader. Or if you've got 10 seconds, drop a five star review and it would mean the world to me so we can liberate more teams together. And if you try something for today's episode, come tell me how it went.
DM me on Instagram over at Liberating [00:38:00] Teams, and I'd love to chat more about it. Now. Let's go change the world of work. One liberated team at a time.
