This was the question posed to me recently by an HR Director taking up a new post with a big change agenda. He was attracted to the idea of positive change, but working with an organization with a long and successful history, he was challenged about how to galvanise the workforce into engaging with the necessary changes. I thought it was a great question and it has stayed with me.
Posts Tagged ‘resistance to change’
Ways to use Positive Psychology Concept Cards: Ten ideas to get you started
General
You can use these cards in a number of ways to stimulate discussion; create commonality and motivation; and to identify agreed action. Some general ideas are:
- Use the cards as they stand, the questions and the action points
- Use a rating scale ‘To what extent is this present in our team/organization/group at the moment on a scale of 1-10? What would we like to be? How can we move towards this?’etc.
- As a prioritizing tool. ‘Which five of these are most key to our future success/our development/our strategy?’
- As playing cards. Each person has some. Someone starts by laying down a card they think is important (to the topic under discussion) explaining why they think so, the person who thinks they can build on this with one of the cards in their hand lays it down with ‘yes and…’. This is a cooperative card game, with no winners or losers.
The plan is not the change
All too often those involved in creating the plan for change believe this to be the most essential part of the process, worthy of extended time and effort, while implementation is seen as ‘just’ a matter of communicating and rolling out the plan. Plans are a story of hope. Change happens when people change their habitual patterns of communication and intervention in a meaningful and sustainable way.
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We all know rudeness is an unpleasant aspect of life, did you also know it has a cost attached? Two researchers, Porath and Erez, have spent years exploring the effect of rudeness on people at work, this is what they have found:
- Between 1998 and 2005 the percentage of employees who reported experiencing rudeness once or more in a week doubled from almost 25% to almost 50%. Indeed in 2005 25% of employees reported experiencing rudeness at least once a day.
Leaders and managers are increasingly expected to introduce changes in work practices, routines and structures as part of their management role. Myths abound about the challenges of doing this. Here we lay five to rest.
A Self-Organising Meeting
The Open Space process allows people to contribute to conversations that interest and energise them. It ensures that all topics that need to be discussed, are discussed. It allows people to add value to the discussions in a way that works for them. It disrupts established patterns of organisational behaviour, allowing new voices, views, opinions and perspectives to be heard and developed.
In this conversation we got interested in:
- Stepping up and stepping back
- Getting out of the way without giving ‘power’ away.
Q: What do I do to enable others to lead?
Trust
Trust gets withdrawn in a crisis -> Q: What is we want people TO DO? [as opposed to not do].
Its never only 1 answer but there can be common goals.
Q: Who is the most important customer/client in this particular context?
What’s It For?
The World Café process is designed to help people talk together, exchanging ideas and developing their thinking about an issue in a relaxed, informal, yet purposive way. In small ‘café groupings’ of no more than six people, groups discuss particular questions or topics with the aim of expanding their understanding of their own and others’ views and of the possibilities. World Café is useful in many contexts, and excels when the main object is to connect and explore around a particular topic. At its best it produces conversation that connects, has energy, is emergent, magic and values not knowing as well as knowledge.
Simu-Real is a technique used to represent an organisation to itself by showing its members how the different parts of the organisation affect each other in their work. By showing how the behavior of the constituent pieces of the whole have unforeseen or unappreciated consequences elsewhere in the organisation it allows the participants to analyse and change their ways of working to be more helpful to each other. Here are answers to some commonly asked questions about Simu-Real.