Navigating Changes? Start with Step Zero

How many big changes are you dealing with at work right now? Two? Five? Ten? More?

No matter how many changes you’re juggling, each one still comes with a jolt: our brain is doing its survival job of trying to fight the change, or flee the change, or for some of us, just freeze (American physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon, Harvard, 1914).

Fight, flight and freeze are the typical automatic reactions to change. Then there’s fawn, which is the urge to appease others in times of change. There’s also a fifth one, forge, the urge to find a way forward to engage the change toward a positive outcome.

In a time when changes at work, big and small, are piled onto each other at five times the rate they were 10 years ago, it’s no wonder that we are having more of these survival reactions. At the same time, employee willingness to change behavior has collapsed from 74% to 38%, and over half (52%) of C-suite leaders admit their organizations are not equipped to absorb it. This reality explains why 70% to 90% of strategic plans, digital transformations, and mergers continue to fail.

When Are You Telling Your People?

I’ve found that most change management focuses almost entirely on the object of change—the new software, the restructured department, or the M&A deal. The problem with focusing on the object of change is that it misses the most foundational ingredient to the success of that change: people. And, let’s be honest, strategy is useless without people who are ready for it.People typically learn about change in the middle, after leaders have spent months planning it behind closed doors. Managers and staff are often thrust into the middle steps of change on a Monday morning and expected to perform instantly without time to prepare. Instead of being thrown into change in the middle, I believe we need a “Step Zero” of change, one that starts at the beginning, focusing on the subject of change—the human beings tasked with living through it and making it function.

Take a Step Back

Step Zero is the space for individuals, and then teams, to get grounded in their own understanding of the change, how it fits with their organization, and how they can succeed in it, before the first step of a typical change management process begins.

You and your team can get grounded at every step of change by stepping out of the chaos and thinking about how you want to engage the change, rather than have those automatic fight, flight or freeze reactions.

That grounding you do at Step Zero, and which you should revisit as you approach each step of change, gives you the space to explore some fundamental questions and allows you to proceed with the clarity essential to its success: What’s actually changing? How does the change fit with your organization? What resources do you have currently, and what do you need in order to be successful in the change?

Grounding helps you engage with these questions from a place of balance and strength so that you’re not on autopilot, simply reacting to what’s in front of you.

Grounding

In our chaotic times, grounding is more essential—and powerful—than ever. Giving yourself a moment to pause, to actually stop and breathe so you can reflect and choose what to do next, is you having strength and agency. This helps you prepare for change yourself, and helps you prepare your team, too.

Here are three grounding moves you can make the moment you’re done reading this article:

• First, give yourself 5 minutes of quiet right now to get out of the proverbial pool of water you’re typically swimming in at work and think about the changes you’re currently going through. This is you separating yourself from the automatic responses that naturally occur in your environment.
• Second, pick one workplace change you’re going through. Ask yourself “What would help my team and me show up for this change with strength and agency?” Maybe it’s a sharper definition of the change so you can be sure you all mean the same thing, or a roadmap for how your team could work together internally and with others to make the change successful. Maybe it’s a clarifying conversation with your team or with stakeholders about what success looks like.
• Third, plan your next move with your team, and make sure you set aside 5-10 minutes of quiet each week to jump out of that choppy water you’re all swimming in so fast, so you can get some perspective, and lead through the waves.

Keep this grounding practice going so you and your team can show up for all the changes ahead.