[00:00:00] Kate: What's the craziest response to change that you've ever seen at work? Have you ever encountered a team who just refused to get on board, no matter what? Or perhaps maybe a senior leader who publicly disagreed with the organization's transformation program, or worse, maybe they were eroding it from behind the scenes?
[00:01:26] Have you seen people yelling or crying or sitting back with their arms folded, giving you the silent treatment? I've heard some crazy stories from change managers over the years, and I bet that you have too. And when it happens to you, it can be really tricky to know how to handle things, can't it? I think we should talk about it.
[00:01:46] Today, I'm joined by change management consultant, podcaster, and founder of the Melbourne based change management consultancy, Casa de Cambio, Natasha Redmond. Tash has managed change initiatives at Australia's biggest companies, including ANZ, Telstra, Australia Post, Accenture, NAB and Newcrest.
[00:02:05] She has a huge amount of experience in this space. And in this episode, we share our take on what to do when resistance and challenging responses to change emerge. We cover a bunch of the key strategies that change leaders really need to think about in these situations, including how to better understand your stakeholders, specific ways to improve your change communication, whether or not building change capability within the organization is going to help overcome resistance and how to effectively set expectations with the program sponsor and how leaders can Or maybe can't impact nightmare responses to the change.
[00:02:46] Whether you're in the thick of it right now and you need some specific quick action steps that you can take today, or maybe you just want to reduce the chances of craziness down the track, you're going to find this episode really useful. So keep listening for the tools to use when you're faced with challenging responses to change that you just were not expecting. Tash. Hello. I'm so thrilled that we're chatting.
[00:03:09] Natasha: Hi, Kate. Thank you so much for inviting me to be a guest. I am so excited to be here.
[00:03:13] Kate: I'm excited to have you I'd love to know what is there. What is the craziest kind of response to change, resistance to change, that you have experienced when you've been supporting a change program? Was there something really crazy? Did people really lose it? Tell me about it.
[00:03:29] Natasha: I've had a couple and you know, it's funny because I've turned them into case studies for resistance to change workshops that I run. So I'm always like, thank you crazy people for giving me all of that good content. And it's also been interview fodder, so I've got fantastic answers to interview questions about resistance as well, but I'll
[00:03:46] tell you what, I've got a couple, yeah, two that are springing to mind.
[00:03:50] second one is probably the weirdest one, where I was working. As a change manager on a change program for a large organization, which I won't tell you who it was and I was asked to move on to a particular project because they were having a lot of issues that just cycled through their third project manager because two had quit and the third one had gone on stress leave because she was being bullied quite badly by a group of stakeholders who were refusing to come onto this system that we were rolling out.
[00:04:18] Right, so I was like, okay I'll get in there, let's see what's going on. And it was confusing as to why they were resisting because this had been rolled out to other teams within this business unit and the teams had been getting really good results. So there was a very strong case for changes in why we should do this.
[00:04:36] there was some really. Unprofessional behaviours going on. Um.
[00:04:40] Kate: Tell. Give us an example.
[00:04:42] Natasha: So, I think when I was, you know, freshly joined as the new change manager, and of course they hadn't had a change manager in there before, which I think was a mistake. They should, you know, of course they should have had change in there in the start.
[00:04:54] So, I started, decided I was going to go and spend some time in that team's building, because our project team was in like a filthy, building that, you know, nobody knew about on a gross, dirty floor. So I decided I would go and spend time and sit outside the offices. And my first meeting, there were four people in someone's office.
[00:05:10] I was sitting down and they were all standing up screaming at me.
[00:05:14] Kate: my gosh!
[00:05:15] Natasha: yeah, yeah, I know. And I was just like, okay. Guys, you gotta stop yelling like, this is not okay. And also the things that you are asking of me, they are sponsor level decisions. Like I can't make those decisions. And you know, that. And I think just saying like, this behavior needs to stop.
[00:05:31] And I did say like, you know, poor, the project manager's name has just gone on stress leave. Like, can we behave normally please? And they were all like, oh yeah, okay. Sorry. and you know, because of these behaviors, the people from my project team were also, you know, they were at the end of their rope with this team tried to get to the bottom of what, what are the issues?
[00:05:51] So the first one was something like, we haven't been listened to, our requirements were not taken on board. I'm like, okay, tell me what, let's start from the beginning. Let's, let's talk about what your requirements are. You know, started capturing some requirements. Took them back to the project team. No, we're not doing anything for them.
[00:06:05] Stuff this team. We're so done with them. They are so rude. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I actually had to do a bit of work with my own project team to say, look, we're going to get this over the line, something's got to give. And you guys are going to have to change your behaviour and give these people another chance because they don't feel like they've been listened to.
[00:06:23] they feel like they're being bullied into things. And that's why the behaviour's gotten worse and worse and worse. So. I got members of the project team to go and sit on this team's floor. And again, they were like, we're not giving them additional support. I'm like, it's not about support.
[00:06:37] It's about them seeing our faces every day. And it was also weird because everyone had an office, which is just so 1980s. But when they come out of their offices, they need to see the project team sitting there. And you know, when they're having their water cooler conversation, one of us can jump in and talk about why the project's actually a good idea.
[00:06:53] And the third, I guess the other thing was getting to the bottom of why there is this. It's like deeply understanding what was going on. And I think I got to the bottom of it, It was a very personal reason, but I think that team or business unit, they didn't want their business unit being on this particular system because they didn't want the transparency that came with all the additional reporting.
[00:07:15] Because I don't think they were as profitable as they were reporting on and telling everyone and I think that's the real reason they resisted. So it wasn't the initial things they said, like, we're not being listened to, our requirements haven't been captured correctly. And in the end, like, I ended up building very good relationships with people in that team.
[00:07:34] And also my program team were very, very appreciative because it completely turned around that project and we did get. them onboard and implement it after, you know, kind of a standoff where everyone was just yelling at each other and saying, no. So, but I did have to do a lot of work within my own project team to get them to play nicely with the business stakeholders as well, because they were also behaving somewhat badly.
[00:08:00] Kate: love that you've highlighted that about the work that needs to happen or the the reflection that we need to look at our own team, ourselves, when it feels like we are coming up against. resistance or kind of very challenging responses to the change and how that impacts us and our team and our behaviors and our approach and our strategies to dealing with it.
[00:08:26] gotta love being yelled at by a bunch of four people the first time that you meet them.
[00:08:31] Natasha: I know, that's wild, right?
[00:08:34] Kate: it is, it is, but Thank you for sharing that because that is what happens sometimes with change managers or people on the front line of change.
[00:08:46] Natasha: Yeah, that's an extreme example, but it does happen. And you know, change managers, you've got to have really thick skin to be able to tolerate that. And one, I know, I may be getting ahead of ourselves, but a tip that I have is like, people are reacting to the change. They're not reacting to you or your work.
[00:09:00] So you've got to understand this is about. It's not about you. So you got to let some things go through to the keeper. Like obviously call out unprofessional behavior. You should never allow people to behave in a way that is against your workplace's code of conduct or values and actually standing up for yourself and telling people, Hey, you'd be, this is really uncool. You're kind of being a jerk. Like that goes a long way too.
[00:09:23] Kate: yes, I think that's very true. If you're a change leader or any kind of change agent, in my experience, checking myself and being very clear on. My intent and the energy I'm going to bring into a situation and my role in the situation. can make life a lot easier and things a lot more smooth through the day, through challenging situations, conversations, whatever it might be. Let me rewind a little bit. What is your take on resistance to change? because I know that sometimes you wear an agile hat or a lean hat. Tell me about resistance to change in that, perspective.
[00:10:05] Natasha: So I guess the TLDR is resistance is not a thing and it could be a you problem. So I think that, you know, I gave an exam, a very extreme example, but that's rare, right? But if you get to a point where people are behaving like that, like you've missed a lot of stuff and you've let a lot of things slide and you've ignored a lot of signs.
[00:10:23] So I think if you are seeing what I would call resistant behaviours manifesting in your project or your workplace, you need to actually understand what's really going on here by saying, oh, they're just resisting the change because people naturally resist change and change is hard. That's really lazy.
[00:10:40] That's putting a lazy label on something. And you also need to be willing to look in the mirror and say, well, what have I done? Have I messed up? Have I gone about this in the wrong way? Is the change actually right for this organisation Because there are sometimes some very valid reasons for resistance, right?
[00:10:57] And people are, you know, calling things out because they're passionate about their job. They really care about their organization or their customers or the work that they do. They're not actually being resistant. If somebody says, oh, someone's being resistant, straight away I think, what have you done? What have you messed up?
[00:11:16] Kate: It's an invitation to kind of really reflect on your approach and your strategy to things. You know, there's some really common ideas, different. Strategies or tactics that I hear people talking about in the change space when they're talking about dealing with resistance.
[00:11:32] I want to run through some of them with you and, and get your take on them. The first one that I hear people talking about, I'm, I'm in these conversations as well, is that understanding our stakeholders better is going to help What do you think about that? Is that going to help?
[00:11:48] Natasha: Yeah, absolutely. Getting to know people, also getting their opinions and getting them to co design the change. If you get the right people involved in designing a change, it will manage itself. You don't need a change manager to control everything. You know, the change manager can then more be a facilitator of change, rather than the planner and the controller of change.
[00:12:09] And they will also tell you what's not a good idea, what's not a good time to implement. So, if you haven't spent the time explaining to people this is why the change is happening and communicating about what's involved, they can be more likely to take on a victim mentality and also if they weren't consulted because, you know, why are you making decisions about changes that are going to impact people but not consulting the people who will be impacted? Of course they're going to be annoyed, you know?
[00:12:35] Kate: Yeah, for sure. I agree. I think co design is incredibly powerful. I think there's a lot of power in better understanding your stakeholders and to kind of get really curious with it and think about it like data that is going to help your analysis, that's going to better help shape things. There is a truthiness to the idea that if someone is imposing change on us that we have not had any voice on, it's going to be tougher.
[00:13:02] Natasha: Yeah. you've got to get your back up and we've all been like that where it's surprise change, you know. It's high impact change, and this is the first I'm hearing of it, you know, that can trigger an amygdala response in people. I mean, the classic one of those is restructures, right? You're living your best life at work, going about your day, and then all of a sudden you get a meeting popped into your calendar with your manager and a HR representative, right?
[00:13:27] And it all goes down so quickly, and I know the reason that People keep people in the dark about their stuff is because they don't want to cause panic and but Restructures and org redesigns always get the poorest feedback on how the change is managed because it's a total surprise it's just dumped on you with no warning.
[00:13:43] And so people do have very poor responses to that
[00:13:46] Kate: Yes, and you, that's an awesome segue to another strategy that I hear come up a lot when people are facing resistance or response to change, and that is communication. what kind of advice or tips can you offer people in that realm?
[00:14:05] Natasha: yeah, you've got to communicate early and often and that does not mean sending an email. No, no more emails. so many people think, oh well I'll send an email, that's change communicated, change implemented, you know. And you have to remember that when you're planning a change, you might be talking about it for a year before you actually start telling people about it or six months.
[00:14:25] So you're living and breathing this. This is the first people are hearing of it. So you need to make sure that you give people the opportunity to hear information and have their questions answered. I like using the lean coffee concept. If you have a brave sponsor where people can ask any question. And it's okay to say, look, we don't have the answer to that yet. But I think when people try and control the message too much, then people have unanswered questions that can lead to fear and anxiety, because people aren't getting the information they need.
[00:14:57] Similarly, don't give people too much information if they need time to process. You know, wait until they're ready for information and think about the things that they're saying. But yeah, you have to communicate more than you think. I know there was a stat out there that people need to hear a message six times before it sinks in. And apparently post pandemic or in our current VUCA world, that's now 21 times.
[00:15:21] So don't underestimate how many times you need to repeat messaging and use different message formats like, maybe you could have a face to face meeting, and then follow up with some written content like some FAQs, and then mention it again at a town hall, and then you can yeah, have a lean coffee because sometimes you find people will come to the third or fourth meeting and they're still asking like really basic entry level questions because they haven't fully understood, like, the basic mechanics. you can't communicate too much about a change.
[00:15:50] Kate: Yeah, I love that. And your answer just then really focused on dialogue and communication as dialogue, which is so beautiful I agree, you need to say the message over and over, over and over. When you're sick of it, it is just beginning, my friend, just beginning. But, I know that a lot of people struggle with that idea of, well, how can I say this over and over? Or how can I share this over and over? And a great tip, something I find really useful, is to think about, for each key message, you want to share it in at least three different channels. So you might have a video, you might have infographics or something like that, and you might have a town hall. And that is your minimum. You always want to go for at least three different formats of the communication just to help you if you're thinking about how am I going to get to six? How am I going to get to 20? And how am I going to encourage the senior leader or the senior sponsor to share it over and over because they might start feeling like an idiot. Think about staying on the same message, the same key messages, but introduce new formats that could be really helpful for people.
[00:17:08] Something else that I hear people talking about when it comes to managing resistance or helping to alleviate resistance or response is about this idea of building change capability within the organization. If we build change capability of people get change more and concepts about change, then that is going to help them overcome resistance on this change. Tell me your thoughts. I can see your face right now and a big smile, but tell me what you think
[00:17:40] Natasha: I have an opinion. Hi, my name is Tash and I have lots of opinions. Yeah, so I think you've got to be really wary of victim blaming, right? Because saying that, oh, we'll just put our people through some change resilience training like, again, you're not looking in the mirror and going, what am I doing?
[00:17:56] Because we know that So many organizations have issues with too much change. They've got multiple departments and areas throwing all these changes at the same group of people, whether it's, you know, their call center, or people who work in their stores, or, you know, and they just don't have the capacity to absorb that change, right?
[00:18:14] So it's very unfair to then blame it on the people who are not absorbing the change. So would proceed with caution on that line of thinking. I think... Yes, building change capability, particularly amongst your middle managers, yes, helping people become more change resilient is great, but you have to couple that with, well, are we going to make some hard decisions?
[00:18:35] And are we going to cancel some projects? Are we going to only proceed with business critical changes to give our people more time? You know, because you can't be I mean, Just pummeling people with nonstop change and expecting them to do. I did 2 hours of resilience training. I did an eLearn so you should be able to handle this.
[00:18:55] It's like the classic, you know, when people go through agile transformations, leaders always think, Oh, everyone else has to change. I don't have to change, when they're the ones who need to change the most.
[00:19:04] And I think it's the same when we have changed saturation and too much change in organizations. Because again, like, Today's change fatigue or change saturation will be tomorrow's change resistance because eventually people will turn around and say, I'm done. I can't do this anymore. And you're going to start to see things like absenteeism, turnover, avoidance of the change. They'll just be like, I need to ignore this. I just got to focus on my BOU job because that's what I know. And that's what my KPIs are tied to.
[00:19:32] That's my comfort zone. It's what I'm here for. And yeah, like are businesses going to put in the resources to free up subject matter experts? Because that's another one is we're always asking for business SMEs so we can do the co design. So we can spend time with the stakeholders. But again, we're taking these people away from their day jobs. So are they going to get back filled? Or are we just rewarding good people with more work? That's a very complicated one.
[00:19:58] Kate: Yeah, look, I agree. I think that is a complicated one. I think that operationalizing and delivering the change, bringing it to life, that's everyone's responsibility. If you have a job in the place, no matter the nature of your employment, it is your responsibility. I agree at the same time, everyone doesn't need to be a certified change manager. That has to be a very nuanced response when you're going down that road and you're thinking about building change capability. There is lots of stuff to consider, like you mentioned.
[00:20:31] You just naturally did an incredible segue to another thing that I want to talk about in terms of is going to help us, this is an answer, a silver bullet for you know, helping us to manage or get over the resistance and the response to change. And that's about leadership and the role that leadership can play. And you mentioned, and I'm particularly interested to get your take on this. If a senior leader themselves is resistant to changing, are there any tactics, any tips that you have for someone dealing with that? What's worked for you?
[00:21:05] Natasha: Yeah. So one of the key I guess facets of helping managing resistance often involves upwardly managing Senior leaders, sponsors, and executives. So you're influencing without authority and you have to have difficult conversations. Because yeah, if your leaders are not actively role modeling and communicating about this change, especially if you're already having resistance problems, like it's dead in the water. and you know, leaders get scared.
[00:21:32] So I had it, yeah, my other example when you asked about examples at the beginning of the podcast one of the things that happened was I had a sponsor who got scared and stuck their head in the sand and then stopped turning up to steercos and stopped actively sponsoring because they were like, Oh, well, I don't know if I'm doing the right thing. But they'd also kind of thrown the project team under the bus because then people thought, Oh, the project team are driving this. It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
[00:21:56] This was a strategy that was signed off by executives. Like, we're just executing that strategy. Like, we don't decide and execute. So I did have to have a meeting with that sponsor. And I spent time walking them through the solution and the work that was done to date and they were really impressed and they were like, oh, this is great and I created a comms plan like a sponsor plan for that sponsor to kind of get them back on track and to get them to start actively role modeling and leading the change and that went quite well, but yeah, it's a hard one to tell someone who's usually several levels above you in the hierarchy at an organisation that They're not doing what they need to do.
[00:22:34] And a lot of sponsors think, like, you cannot outsource change sponsorship. You can outsource the grunt work, like, I'll write the comms for you. It still has to come from you, though. I'll write you the talking points, but you've got to practice them, and you've got to make them seem authentic. You've got to help them realise that they cannot actually outsource change sponsorship just because they've paid for a change manager and you have to be careful because you don't want to be exited because I think we were talking about that before we hit record like when you're a change person, you're in a precarious position because you're often challenging you know, your project team, you're challenging your sponsors and some of that, sometimes people just want yes people so you've got to be careful you don't get exited, but then also what's your commitment to the truth, right?
[00:23:14] Kate: that is such a powerful thing to keep in mind. And a clear message to bring into any change program that sponsorship cannot be outsourced. And just by being really clear about that and saying that explicitly as early as possible can be incredibly helpful.
[00:23:33] Natasha: Learning from that example, if I'm in there early enough, when I'm doing all of my planning, I do a sponsor plan and I show it to the sponsor as soon as I can, so I'm already setting the expectations. This is what you're going to do. This is what we're going to do. These are your things and they go, okay, so they're already agreeing to it up front. So I have managed to avoid a situation like that example, because that one was probably, that's about 11 or 12 years old now.
[00:23:57] Kate: That's a great tip to set expectations as early as possible by setting up that plan with them. Tash, I think we could keep talking all day. For people that are listening to this and they would like to keep the conversation going with you. How can people get in contact?
[00:24:13] Natasha: I'd say just link in with me or follow me on LinkedIn. I also have a podcast which is called Casa de Cambio, which is hosted where all good podcasts are hosted. But yeah, LinkedIn is probably the place where I'm posting the most and the most active about change management. So yeah, please stay in touch.
[00:24:29] Kate: And we will link to everything in the show notes. And I'm sure we will keep talking. Thank you so much. You've been so generous in sharing. I really, really appreciate it. This has been a fascinating conversation.
[00:24:40] Natasha: Thanks for having me.
[00:24:41]