How to Get Others to Change

Businesses in particular are forever implementing change, on the basis that one is forever striving to improve. They might have few problems in identifying the ones needed, but often suffer when it comes to making it sustainable.

I remember hearing the former Chief Executive of Jaguar Cars, Sir John Egan say, “Sustainable change is 70% people and 30% process, not as many people may think, the other way around”. It’s a figure that’s always stuck in my head.

How many relationships have resulted in breakdown, through one party's frustration at the other's apparent inability to alter?

How many times have you seen mergers and acquisitions fail to reap their full benefits, because they hadn’t give full consideration to the ‘people’ element?

So how should we deal with groups or individuals who resist changing?

In 1969 Swiss doctor, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who spent much time amongst dying people, wrote the book ‘On Death and Dying’. It included the emotional states that are often referred to as the ‘Grief Cycle’. Since then it has been suggested that this emotional cycle is not exclusive to the terminally ill, but to other people affected by ‘bad’ news (or being negatively affected by events). Whether it is good or bad is irrelevant, the important point is that they perceive it as negative.

From the relative calm, the cycle that those go through in desperate effort to maintain the status quo, can be summarised thus:

Shock -- Initial reaction to any proposal

Denial -- Attempting to avoid the inevitable

Anger -- Expression of frustration and bottled up emotion

Bargaining -- Looking for a way out

Depression -- Realisation of the inevitable

Testing -- Looking for realistic solutions

Acceptance -- Finding the final way forward

So when we meet such resistance in people, it’s doubtless because at that time they don’t want to change. You see what often happens is that when people are going through the above cycle; they get stuck in one phase.

Do you remember that character in the film ‘The Full Monty’, who although he’d lost his job, he still went out every day ‘to work’ as if nothing had altered – he was stuck in denial.

One way to move them on is to support them through the subsequent stages, as they move towards acceptance. I said they move, not you move them!

I recall a delegate coming up to me at a coaching workshop. He said “So many of my prospects seemed to want free consultancy – how can I get them to change?”

Once we discussed it in a little more detail, it appeared that the delegate always treated his prospects in the same way. On the basis of ‘If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got’, it wasn’t surprising. I made some suggestions about how he might try something different. He did and lo and behold, his prospects soon stopped expecting free consultancy.

Isn’t it strange that in getting others to change their behaviour, the resistance we meet often evaporates, once we change our own behaviour towards them!

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