Leadership and Workforce Alignment & Engagement Session 10: Overcoming Resistance to Change Overview | Operational Excellence Quick Hits

In today’s session, we’re gonna continue on a series on leadership and workforce alignment and engagement. And, again, to get to be a high performing organization, we need that alignment with leadership, we need engagement from the workforce. That’s a necessary condition for a high performing organization.

Today’s session, we’re going to continue on the series on overcoming resistance to change. So we’ve gone through the last seven sessions talking about each step of the layers of resistance and how to overcome those. Today, I’m just going to do a review of those. So we could put all those together and understand the process of how we go through overcoming layers of resistance, and how do we get buy-in and alignment with the organization with the leadership in the workforce?

Just review the layer of resistance to layer zeros: Why change? There’s a disagreement that there’s actually a problem. Layer One is disagreement on the problem. Layer two is disagreement on the direction of the solution. layer three is disagreement on the details of the solution. layer four is disagreement on negative ramifications. layer five is disagreement on the details of the implementation. Layer six is disagreement on the risk or the unverbalized fear.

So as we overcome each of these layers, we’re going to have agreement. The techniques I talked about here is how to overcome the resistance to change and how to achieve buy-in.

Layer zero is, again, why do we even need to change, I don’t even understand that there’s a problem. So the technique we use here is our force field analysis, where we’re looking at the customer needs, we’re looking at the business needs, we’re looking at the critical factors of the customer needs, the critical factors of the business needs, that we’re ranking those in terms of the importance to the customer or the importance of the business. And we’re then saying how well we’re performing on those. And then once we go through this analysis, what we see is that we’re not doing so well on all the things that are important for the customer, we’re not doing so well on things that are important for the business. And so this usually gets us past layer zero.

Then we move to layer one, and we’re using the current reality tree here to understand what the change. And of course, we’re looking at all the symptoms, and then we’re doing an analysis to understand what are the root causes, and then also, what’s the core conflict. And then once we identify those, we can easily eliminate a bunch of symptoms by looking at the core conflict and eliminating that core conflict. And what we want to do is focus on the few core problems which caused the biggest positive systematic changes.

Next is overcoming layer two, which is we disagree on the problem. And so here we’re going to use the generic cloud technique in the generic cloud sits at the base of the current reality tree. So once we agree with the current reality tree, then we look at the base of the current reality tree. And we understand what is the core conflict. And of course, we want to raise the assumptions of why we believe this action is going to satisfy this need, we’re looking for false assumptions and trying to break those faulty assumptions and breaking the core conflict and evaporating the cloud.

Then, layer three, what to change to, we’ve got to use a future reality tree here. We start with the core conflict, we put in the objections to break the core conflict. And now we’re looking for negative looping, or where our objection doesn’t solve the negative effects in the current reality tree. If it doesn’t solve the negative effects, we need another injection to overcome that issue. So again, we’re using this as a tool to identify all the objections we need to make the current reality tree our future reality tree and change it from a negative aspect to a positive aspect.

Then we’re going to take all those objections that define our future reality tree and we’re going to sequence those and come up with our goal tree, identify the critical success factors, and then this becomes our roadmap for implementation.

Then before we move to implementation, we’ve got to understand if there are any negative implications of the solutions that we’ve come up with and those negative implications we call negative branches. We need to trim those negative branches in order to make it a complete solution. Once we have the negative branches trimmed and we have all the injections, then we can put those additional injections into our goal tree.

Then the next step is the detailed implementation. So we’re using our a three proposal process here for each injection. So we have the injection, what is the what we need to do? The proposal three is the how we need to do that. So it gives us all the details of how to get to our future state injection, using this process of proposal a three, which explains the background and why the current state needs to be improved, the proposal of what we’re going to do, so what does good look like, any data analysis that needs to be done that supports our future state, the details of how it’ll be achieved, and the negative implications arising from the future state, and then definition of our implementation team and their roles?

Then the last step is when we have that unverbalized fear, how do we overcome that unverbalized fear? So again, we’re gonna have a whole group of people that don’t really agree, but they don’t really disagree, they’re in that fence-sitting mode. And when we want to get them flipped to the positive side, we want to get big wins early. So those fence-sitters will flip to the positive side, and that will get momentum.

Provide one-on-one coaching to influence the organization using this Socratic method, ensure the correct performance measures are in place so people behave in the way they’re measured. So we got to recalibrate our measurement system, establish a follow our one rule which is the wrong rule, we follow the rules period, and then provide immediate corrective action when we’re not following the rules, reduce that management window, and build accountability into the process.

That’s our session for today. How to achieve buy-in and get alignment by overcoming the layers of resistance and the techniques we use to do that. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Visit our website, go to our YouTube channel where we have lots of videos on how to become a high-performing organization.