The emotional cycle of change

What creates confusion and chaos in organizations more than change not managed well or not managed at all? Research shows that many change efforts fail, fall short of their goals or result in organizational dissatisfaction and inefficiency.

The research on Change Management strongly suggests that without the support of people, change will not happen. Business managers and change agents must understand the emotional impact that change has on people and how to manage it accordingly. Much research has been done on the emotional impact of change.

What this means is that failure to consider organizational change and how it affects people is a significant factor in causing transitions to fail. In order to facilitate the acceptance of change, it is important to understand the ‘emotional stages’ that a person needs to get through before acceptance. This is illustrated in Figure 5.4.

For all significant changes, individuals will go through this process. At first they enter into a degree of shock, before going into avoidance. This will often manifest itself in increased efficiency while the situation is denied. This is usually a rapid stage, at which point performance drops as people choose to ‘shoot the messenger’ and blame the change initiators and Service Transition team, followed by self-blame as insecurity and the threat of the situation is felt. Performance is now at its lowest. It follows that the quicker the Service Transition team can get individuals through the cycle, the shorter the timescales before acceptance and optimum performance. One can use the experience of those within the affected area to understand concerns, and the nature of resistance in order to communicate at the appropriate stages. This may often take considerable personal time of the Service Transition team, to listen to people’s concerns, but ultimately will get individuals engaged and performing in as short a time as possible.

Figure 5.4 The emotional cycle of change

Appropriate communication through these stages of transition will drive the energy of individuals from low to high, obtaining involvement and generating a more positive attitude as the change takes place. As emphasized, this is a pattern followed by individuals, and different people will pass through these typical phases at different speeds, so understanding where individuals are on this curve and supporting and progressing them can be a significant resource commitment for Service Transition.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-29