The big issue with managing resistance to corporate change is that we expect our managers to lead changes they have not yet fully embraced themselves. We expect them to ignore their own misgivings and motivate their teams to go for the planned changes full tilt without any resistance. This simply does not work since it triggers a duality that, at minimum, causes them personal stress and, at worst, makes them ineffectual in leading the change efficiently and effectively.

Change is Personal

Corporate changes mean that people need to change (procedures, tasks, behavior). Before any manager can motivate and lead that change in their team they have to assimilate the change for themselves. I like Prosci’s ADKAR model for individual change. This model focuses on guiding individuals through a particular change based on the understanding that organizational change can only happen when individuals change.

Regardless of the model you use, it’s important to realize that this process takes time. As in transformational learning, there is a change in understanding, beliefs, and actions. A manager must undergo this process while simultaneously guiding his/her team through it. This is where external support/ coaching has proven to be invaluable.

Change (Grief) Curve

When one changes one’s understanding, beliefs, and actions, there is a sense of loss involved—loss of what, most probably, has served you well up until now. This loss will trigger the grief stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. How someone goes through these changes is deeply personal, meaning that there is no one-size-fits-all checklist we can include in the corporate change management process.

The best bet is to provide personal coaching, which is based on an understanding of the individual’s personal values, building trust to achieve emotional courage for change, and nonjudgment.

Personally, I like to combine individual and group coaching sessions. The group sessions are an opportunity to obtain feedback that can be used to uncover personal blind spots but also push the participants to discover their unconscious (limiting) beliefs. These discoveries can then be built upon in the individual sessions together with the more personal aspects of individual change and the change leadership managers must display.

I am happy to see that transition coaching slowly but surely is becoming a standard in our corporate change toolkit. Providing that personal support for your managers will enable them to embrace the change faster which in turn will enable them to lead their team through it better. Whatever issues they have with the change will be dealt with in the privacy of their coaching sessions rather than having it come out through (hidden/passive) resistance.

Change coaching is a definite value add with ROI being measured in terms of the rate of adoption. Therefore if you have corporate change or transition, definitely engage a coach.