Managing Change - When Adaptability Becomes Liability

I've written in the past about the emotional rollercoaster and how you should think about it for the purposes of productivity and team building.

I got this basic picture from Dr. Alan Watkins in his book Coherence. It is based on the emotional range that we experience during any change, based originally on the stages of grief. For the record, the negative emotions laid out by Dr. Watkins are:

Denial (at the top left)
Resistance
Anxiety
Frustration
Despair (at the bottom)

Yikes. Yes, those are the negative emotions we experience during change.

My original article is here.

Another way that this impacts organizations is that leaders often become extremely adept at handling these emotions in themselves, and this presents two risks:

The first risk is that the leader can be in a very different place on this roller coaster than where there fellow employees are. Leaders often get advance notice and have more time to process. They also may have more experience dealing with change all across their organization.

Employees with less flux in their day-to-day duties may not be used to riding this roller coaster, and so the leader struggles not only to understand why someone isn't already on the right hand side, going up, they miss that the struggle is there at all.

The key tool to avoiding this pitfall is awareness. Are there big changes going on? Expect that everyone is somewhere on this continuum. Talk about it. Ask questions, don't accept "I'm fine" as an answer. People may be coping, people may be struggling, people may actually be fine.

But as a leader you need to know for sure and it may be that someone who is really on the right hand side has some insights that could benefit you or someone else. For this reason alone, don't accept "fine", even if they're fine.

The second challenge is that leaders can believe that they are so good at this that it doesn't apply to them. They may believe that they don't feel the negative emotions or that they know how to speed through the emotions on the left quickly. They probably can do this for small or medium sized changes.

Leaders often thrive on change - this is certainly the mold that our culture has laid out for us.

But what happens when the change is large, unexpected, or drastic? What happens if you aren't used to processing the negative, left-side emotions? What happens if you've become so accepting of the leadership norms of change that the negative emotions are unfamiliar territory.

Today's norms say you can't be afraid, desperate, or angry about change. You can't be anxious, frustrated, or in denial. You certainly can't feel despair. You need to understand and move to acceptance quickly. How else will we lead others effectively?

But things happen. Some times a change seems personal. Some times a change is personal. Sometimes a change originates in the personal sphere and comes crashing into the professional. Sometimes we end up on the left half of this roller coaster, going down, and we don't have the ability to simply fast forward through it.

When this happens we need to accept in ourselves that there is a probably a reason and look for it. It may be that a trusted friend can help, it may be something that you do on your own.

If you are stuck (just as employees, peers, and bosses often get stuck) this is not wrong. This is something that can help you go higher and achieve more when you understand it, work through it, and get yourself on the right hand side, going up.

What's most important is to not let your normal adaptability and capability force you into believing you're somewhere you're not. Leaders ignore their own emotions on the left-hand side at their own peril. You're likely to come off inauthentic and fail to help others on their own journeys if you automatically skip ahead to the right.

This lack of self-awareness can lead to lashing out or feeling disconnected. If you are angry or disconnected people will assume even more negative things about the change. At best this means they will think you are an inauthentic jerk. At worst this means that they'll think you're hiding something, which, in a way, you are.

They will make their own guesses about what you're hiding. Usually what they assume or gossip about will be worse than your own struggles with a big change.