“It is a terrible thing to look your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and find no one there. ”
——Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Something You May Not Know about "Change"
The real question about change management is whether you can lead through the transition or not!
Change is situational: the move to a new office site, the transfer of the top leaders, the reorganization of the roles on the team, the birth of your first child.
Transition is psychological: it is a three—phase process that people go through as they internalize and come to terms with the details of the new situation that the change brings about.
When certain change has been announced and arrangements made, the real game—-transition just get started, and it can get started off the right or wrong foot. Your change program is most likely to start off the wrong foot when :
you assume people will complete the transition all by themselves
you assume people will understand the rationales behind the change, and naturally come to term of the transition they have to go through
you assume people will stand firm on new norms and new behavior once they’ve just appeared on the horizon.
When change happens without people going through a transition, it is just a rearrangement of the table and chairs. It’s what people mean when they say, "Just because everything has changed, don’t think that anything is different around here." This is often the true 'culprit' for some highly touted change ending up costing a lot of money and producing disappointing results.
The renowned change management guru, John Scott once shared a rather interesting observation. The story took place in a privately owned car maintenance garage with a handful of mechanics repairing cars. The owner/GM introduced pneumatic wrenches to elevate the elaborate manual labor employed in taking off and putting wheels and tires. This would serve the purpose of both reducing the intensity of labor for the mechanics' benefit and improving work lead time for the customers' benefit. It makes perfect sense, right? However, 3 months into the change, the GM, to his astonishment, the mechanics simply refused to use the new devices in their daily work. With further investigation, the GM located the root cause for this "bewildering turn of events". It turns out that one of the rather important motivations for the mechanics on this tedious job is chatting with the workmates during the process of repairing cars. The noise produced by pneumatic wrenches makes intelligible chatting acoustically impossible.
William Bridges gives us another example in a more complex corporate world.
Benetton, the renowned Italian clothing firm, came up with a promising-sounding diversification plan in the beginning of the new century (now 20 years ago). They decided to buy some to-notch goods companies —-Nordica ski boots, Kastle (later Nordica) skis, Rollerblade in-line skates, Prince tennis rackets, and Killer Loop snowboards—-with the idea that buyers of those lines could also be sold cross-marketed workout and after-workout clothing by Benetton. It sounded like an interesting idea, and Benetton spent almost $ 1 billion buying the companies. They went about things as big companies often do: by imagining that every would be delighted to become part of a super-successful international brand. They folded the companies into their new parent, seeking the kinds of synergies and economies of scale that are always featured in stories about acquisitions. They began by combing the sales forces and marketing groups and tightened the bonds by moving the units in question to the site of the new Benetton Sportsystem division in Bordentown, New Jersey.
The trouble was that, in the words of the man who subsequently tried save the acquisitions after things had headed south, the people who are in these businesses are often in them because the love that activity…If you sap that, you have nothing—internally or competitively." At Rollerblade, for example, employees spent their lunch hours skating through Minneapolis’s lovely lakeside parks and playing roller hockey outside the headquarters building. Benetoon hadn’t thought through the implications of that fact—-or of the impact of terminating a large percentage of the employees, three-quarters of them at Rollerblade.
The man trying to save the acquisition got the twenty-one survivors to move to New Jersey, but only by giving many of them raises, promotions, and a promise that if they wanted to return to Minnesota within a year of the move, they’d be moved back free and receive severance packages of up to two years. When they got to New Jersey, many of them found that they were reporting to (former) Nordica reps. The bottom line was that during the year when all this happened, Benetton went from making a U.S. profit of $5 million to posting a loss of $31 million. Incidentally, twenty out of the twenty-one Rollerblades took the company up on its offer and moved back to the land of 10,000 lakes.
When Transition Takes Place
Change takes root only when transition is in place, and managing transition involves not just whopping financial deals but the simple process of helping through three phases:
Letting go of the old ways and the old identity people had. This first phase of transition is an ending, and the time when you need help people to deal with their losses.
Going through an in-between time when the old is gone but the new isn’t fully operational. We call this time the "neutral zone": it’s when the critical psychological realignments and repatterining take place.
Coming out of the transition and making a new beginning. This is when people develop the new identity, experience the new energy, and discover the new sense of purpose that make the change begin to work.
Only when covering the third phase, can one say the change is in place.
However, because transition is a process by which people unplug from an old world and plug into a new world, we can say that transition starts with an ending and finishes with a beginning.
Both car garage and Benetton managed the change—-installing new tools, combining staffs and moving them—-and forgot the transition. They had a difficult ending, which the planners of the change didn’t even acknowledge. They employees incurred huge psychological losses (a motivational habit at work, a favored location, a corporate identity tied to an activity they loved), and the company treated those losses as just another cash deal. The company neither offered nor acknowledged the need for any support during the difficult neutral zone, and their notion of help in making a new beginning was new titles and higher performance targets.
It’s a valuable lesson for managers that changes of any sort—-even though they may be justified in economic or technological terms—-finally succeed or fail on the basis of whether the people affected do things differently. Do they employees let go of the old way of doing things, go through that difficult time between the old way and the new, and come out doing things the new way? If they don’t help people through these three phases, even the most wonderful training programs often fall flat. The leaders forget endings and neutral zones; they try to start with the final stage of transition. And they can’t see what went wrong!
Looking Closer at “Transition”
Several important differences between change and transition are overlooked when managers think of transition as simply gradual or unfinished change or when they use change and transition interchangeably. With a change, you naturally focus on the outcome that the change produces. If you move from California to New York City, the change involves crossing the country and then learning your way around the Big Apple. The same is true of your organization’s change to a service culture or its reorganization into a regionally based sales force. In such cases the affected people have to understand the new arrangements and how they’ll be affected by these changes.
Transition is different. The starting point for dealing with transition is not the outcome but the ending you’ll have to make to leave the old situation behind. Situational change hinges on the new thing, but psychological transition depends on letting go of the old reality and the old identify you had before the change took place. Organizations overlook that letting-go process completely, however, and do nothing about the feelings of loss that it generates. And in overlooking those effects, they nearly guarantee that the transition will be mismanaged and that, as a result, the change will go badly. Unmanaged transition makes change unmanageable.
Transition starts with an ending. Just think of big change in your own life: coming home with your first child, for instance, is any sense, a good change. But as transition started with an ending and a letting go. With the new baby, you probably had to let go of regular sleep, of extra money, of time along with your spouse, and maybe time alone. You almost certainly lost the pleasure of being able to take off spontaneously whenever the two of you felt like it. And there is nothing that makes you feel like you have lost your old sense of competence more than being face with a baby who refuses to eat or just won’t stop crying.
Even in good changes, there are transitions that begin with endings, where you have to let go of something. The failure to identify and get ready for endings and losses is the largest difficulty for people in transition. And the failure to provide help with endings and losses leads to more problems for organizations in transition than anything else.
The neutral zone is what takes place after the focus of ending starts to fade. However, this is the psychological no-man’s-land between the old reality and the new one. It is the limbo between the old sense of identity and the new. It is the time when the old way of doing things is gone but the new way doesn’t feel comfortable yet.
The psychological transition happened much more slowly: instead of becoming a new person as fast as you changed outwardly, you found yourself struggling for a time in a state that was neither the old nor the new. It was a kind of emotional wilderness, a time when it wasn’t quite clear who you were or what was real.
It is important for people to understand and not be surprised by this neutral zone, for several reasons. First, if you don’t understand the expect it, you’re more likely to try to rush through or even bypass the neutral zone—and to be discouraged when you find that doesn’t work. You may mistakenly conclude that the confusion you feel there is a sign that something is wrong with you.
Second, you may be frightened in this no-man’s-land and try to escape. Employees do this frequently, which is why there is often an increased level of turnover during organizational changes.) To abandon the situation, however, is to abort the transition, both personally and organizationally—and to jeopardize the change.
Third, if you escape prematurely from the neutral zone, you’ll not only compromise the change but also lose a great opportunity. Painful though it is, the neutral zone is the individual’s and the organization’s best chance to be creative, to develop into what they need to become, and to renew themselves.
The neutral zone is thus both a dangerous and an opportune place, and it is the very core of the transition process. It is the time when repatterining takes place: old and maladaptive habits are replaced with new ones that are better adapted to the world in which the organization now finds itself. It is the winter in which the roots begin to prepare themselves for spring’s renewal. It is the night during which are disengaging from yesterday’s concerns and preparing for tomorrow’s. It is the chaos into which the old form dissolves and from which the new form emerges. It is the seedbed of the new beginning that you seek.
Ending——neutral zone—-new beginning. You need all three phases, and in that order, for a transition to work. The phase don’t happen separately; they often go on at the same time. Endings are going on in one place, in anther everyone is in neutral zone chaos, and in yet another place the new beginning is already palpable. Calling them “phases” makes it sound as though they are lined up like rooms in a house. Perhaps it would be more accurate to think of them as three processes and to say that the transition cannot be completed until all three have taken place.
Letting going, repatterining, and making a new beginning: together these processes reorient and renew people when things are changing all around them. You need the transition that they add up to for the change to get under the surface of things and affect how people actually work. Without them, there may be dust and noise, but when things quiet down and the dust settles, nothing is really different. Most organizations, however, pay no attention to endings, don’t acknowledge the neutral zone (and even try to avoid it), and do nothing to help people make a fresh, new beginning, even as they trumpet the changes. Then they wonder why their people have so much difficulty with change.