3 Types of Employees Who Always
Resist Change
Got innovation-phobic team members?
Use this handy guide to classify and overcome their objections.
In business, just about everybody
claims to be for creativity and finding new and better ways to do business. Not
only does innovation sound exciting, it also sounds profitable. But studies have revealed that while lots of folks claim to
love change,
when they’re faced with the reality of actually altering their usual way of
doing business, they’re skeptical if not downright hostile.
Creativity
may be cool but it’s also scary, so how can you get your team to actually
embrace fresh ways of doing business? The first step, according to Dana
Brownlee, the founder of productivity consultancy Professionalism
Matters,
is to take a careful look at your team’s foot draggers. Not every
innovation-phobic employee is the same. Once you know what sort of change
resister you have on your hands, you’re better placed to overcome his or her
objections.
Intuit Fast Track columnist Alexandra Levit recently
rounded up Brownlee’s insights into a handy field guide to change
resisters, laying out six types of innovation-unfriendly employees, as well as
ideas on how to prod them to adopt new ideas, including:
The
“Positive” Change Resister
“In group settings they seem
positive, but often make passive aggressive comments that are really thinly
veiled jabs (I’m sure the new shipping process makes complete sense and I’m
fully onboard, but I’m just wondering what we should say if customers complain
about longer wait times?)” explains Levit.
The solution: Try to ensure they air
their grievances in public so you can deal with rather than allow them to
curdle the office environment with barbed comments and whispered insinuations.
How can you accomplish this? “During a group session, ask each person to write
their top concern about the change on an index card and ask everyone to pass
them to the front of the room for review and discussion.”
The
“Unique” Change Resister
“This is the person who feels that
their situation is different. For some reason, they’re special and
shouldn’t change along with everyone else,” Levit writes.
The solution: The fix here is
straightforward. Simply stress that that the change will benefit everyone but
that this positive impact requires 100 percent compliance.
The
“We Need More Time to Study” Change Resister
This type is the victim of analysis
paralysis, Levit says: “They don’t want to make a change until they’ve analyzed
every possible scenario and option.”
The solution: Puncture their
perfectionism by explicitly saying that “the goal is ‘directionally correct’
but not ‘perfect.’” Then get moving by setting out a limited time to study the
issue. Once that time has elapsed signal that you meant what you said by taking
decision action.
Jessica
Stillman http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/3-types-of-people-who-always-resist-change.html?cid=em01020week25d&nav=su
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