Coping with Change

My post today is based on notes taken from Mark Osborne's (@mosborne01) breakout at ULearn14 on Managing Change.  His presentation really hit home and if you ever get the chance to see him speak, do it, he is a brilliant presenter.

Change is everywhere.  We experience it in every part of our life yet so often it can be a traumatic experience for people.  I think that this stems from the saying people don’t fight change, they fight being changed.  And if we flip that statement to the leader… people are fighting the change you are forcing on them.  The change that fails to take into account the current set of values and practices.  So this blog post today is going to about managing change and how to help people through what can tough times when change pulls the carpet out from under their comfortable world.

To understand why people fight change you need to know that here are two types:

1st order of change - The simple stuff that is within the current framework of what is happening at the moment e.g. going from teacher interviews to student-led conferences..

2nd order of change - this is the big stuff thats is  outside the current framework - eg throwing out year groups, BYOD.

Most changes fall into both categories depending on the person’s perspectives.  But as people lean towards 2nd order change then you will probaly meet more resistance.  These people are the ones who are feeling like they have something to lose.  They will be the ones who feel that the change has the potential to put them in a position to lose something.  As a leader you need to work out what order of change people will experience, then you can understand people when things start getty bumpy on the road to change.

Ron Heifetz says that  adaptive change disrupts the norm and the comfortable.  When this happens people feel loss of control and a loss of skill and expertise if the change falls outside their experience.  We need to remember that  people will have stuff to lose when change happens and there is no bloody way that people cope with this easily.

Marty Linsky said “Leading adaptive change is difficult because it is about the distribution of loss”.  For those on your team that are seeing a loss with the proposed change then you need to reframe the change for them.  You need to show them that the change can provide a personal gain for them.  As the leader of change that is your challenge, your responsibility.  

This also applies as much to the staffroom as it does the classroom.  As the leaders of our classrooms how often do we change programmes and try new things without thinking about the impact on our students.  So do the same as a good leader in a school would do.  Show the students the benefits of what you are doing, explain how it will affect their learning in a positive way.  If might take a little longer but the improved engagement will be worth it.

Change is inevitable… so what can we really do to support our colleagues? Well that depends on what they need.

If they are dealing with First Order Change then they only need:

Procedures

Manuals,

Cheatsheets

How-tos

Role models

You get the idea,  this change is fairly easy to cope with.  It can be MANAGED.

For people going through Second Order Change the needs are a little higher and emotionally based:

Emotional support

listening

space to talk

reassurance

opportunities to contribute

tolerable levels of stress.

This needs trust and relationship building and it require true LEADERSHIP and people skills.

So give colleagues dealing with Second Order Change support, build the relationship so they trust you.  If someone is really upset about a change it means it is a  Second Order Change for them and they need reassurance and support rather than manuals and procedures.

So if you are leading change in your school and people are resistant, upset and struggling.  If they ridicule, boycott, sabotage, show token engagement, reducing output and withhold information the they are probably experience some pretty tumultuous Second Order Change.  Ask yourself if you have a strong enough relationship with these people to help them with change?

It will take longer to effect the change, or at least feel like you are making headway but if you take the time at the start of your change to develop trust and understand the emotional needs to your team the the change you effect will be much more effective and embedding more deeply within your staff culture.

Thank you for reading today’s post.  Thank you again to Mark Osborne for the inspiration and a fair bit of the ideas and information for this post.  - Stand on the shoulders of those who came before you!