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Ditch Change Fatigue and Embrace Continual Evolution
Learn How Embracing Change Leads to More Innovative Cultures
The idea that there’s a quick fix for culture can cause lots of problems. Cultural change is what you get after you’ve put new processes or structures in place, and it evolves slowly, along with the organization.
It’s challenging to get employees to embrace change — they may feel they’re constantly told they need to change processes and practices, only for the leadership team to keep on doing what they always do, and for managers to maintain the same old routines. Despite an initial surge of enthusiasm, nothing ever changes.
The irony is that “change fatigue” can set in, despite “the way we do things around here” remaining very much the same.
Change fatigue is one of the top 2 challenges leaders face when building organizational cultures, we found in a survey with corporate leaders. Other research has found that change initiatives flounder because companies lack the skills to sustain and embrace change over time.
When the reasons and need for change are poorly communicated, everyone feels frustrated and deflated.
Combine with that the fact that all changes, even positive ones, come at a cumulative cost for your workforce.
Overcome Change Fatigue & Build Change Resilience
How to Get Employees to Embrace Change
David Altman, our Chief Research and Innovation Officer, argues for giving leaders and employees a short, sharp shock: In effect, “If you think change is constant now, then you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
“What leaders must do is to help employees and managers recalibrate their expectations,” Altman argues. “This is the world we live in now — change is constant. There’s no ‘getting back to normal.’”
“The message from leaders needs to be: ‘Let’s get ourselves in shape as individuals and as an organizational culture to embrace the opportunities and to manage the challenges of constant change in the dynamic world that we live in. Let’s equip ourselves together to become more resilient to accommodate that.’”
According to Altman, leaders can help employees — and themselves — cope with and embrace change by taking the following steps:
- Help the organization continually prioritize change efforts, and focus on the change initiatives that are the highest priority.
- Recognize and talk about how change is both the beginning of something new and the ending of something that previously was embraced as a best practice.
- Teach employees evidence-based techniques for managing stress, building resilience, and deploying coping skills in the face of high demands. Build organizational resilience, too.
- Focus on building a psychologically safe culture in which people can take interpersonal risks by speaking their truths. Psychological safety is critical for candid conversations.
“The last step will help leaders understand the challenges and opportunities that exist throughout the organization, which in turn will help leaders be more effective in leading their teams through change,” Altman says.
View Culture Change as Continual Evolution
As an example, Altman relates the experience of a large company in the energy sector attempting to reinvent itself in the face of volatile market conditions.
“This is an organization that realizes, given the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) world of energy — whether it’s oil and gas prices, competition, government policies, and so on — that what worked in the past doesn’t work anymore, which was just generating energy and selling it at a good price. It’s also not just about hiring more good engineers.”
Engineers are trained to identify problems and come up with a solution; they are steeped in LEAN and Six Sigma.
“But they’re not set up to take risks, to be innovative, and try new things out,” Altman adds.
Across all industries, many traditional, hierarchical global companies struggle to innovate and adapt with sufficient speed and, as a result, must change their mindsets about what’s needed to survive and thrive in the new world order.
Legacy organizations with ingrained cultures have to understand that “there is no endpoint — this is a continual evolution,” Altman says. The ability to be innovative and flexible is directly linked to the ability to seek new opportunities and embrace change.
“Most successful change initiatives start with baby steps, even transformational change,” he adds. “If you want to lose weight, you don’t starve yourself for a week — that isn’t sustainable. Instead, let’s get ourselves in shape as individuals and as organizations to embrace the opportunities and to manage the challenges of constant change in the dynamic world that we live in.”
It may be a tough message. But it need not be a harsh reality. Forget “change fatigue,” Altman says; instead, think of change energy.
Dynamic, innovative, changing, and constantly learning: This is the new reality. And with the right leadership, it’s an exciting and galvanizing message for employees. Generating excitement around new initiatives helps organizations and their employees embrace continual change and distruption.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
Does your organization react to marketplace change rather than proactively lead it? Go beyond change management, overcome change fatigue, and build greater organizational change resilience and innovation by partnering with us to create a customized learning journey for your leaders using our research-backed modules. Available leadership topics include Emotional Intelligence, Innovation Leadership, Leading Through Change & Disruption, Psychological Safety, Resilience-Building and more.
