Overcoming Resistance to Change in the Workplace

Consequently, at no other time has leadership ability in overcoming resistance to change in the workplace been more critical. Do your executives possess the change management skills to meet the communication challenge of managing organizational resistance to change?

The challenge of multigenerational, multicultural, and flatter organizations

In fast-paced market environments, successful organizations are driven by strong leadership. However, the art of leadership itself is also evolving rapidly. Three key dynamics have shaped how inspirational leaders act today:

• Workforces are multigenerational
• Teams are culturally diverse
• Organizational structures have flattened

Organizations have flattened their hierarchies as they have reacted to developing societal culture. Leaders can no longer take an autocratic approach to managing their teams when challenging organizational resistance to change. Employees consider themselves as stakeholders in your business. Good leaders help them achieve this identity.

Leaders must bridge cultural and generational gaps to lead change effectively

Flatter organizations have been impacted by the new dynamic of multigenerational teams. Millennials and baby boomers work side by side. The benefits of this include the mix of experience, energy, creativity, and innovation – all key ingredients in the recipe of success.

For leaders to access the benefits of multigenerational teams in a rapidly changing market, they must understand the challenges they face when managing both millennials and baby boomers in the workplace.

Different generations have different outlooks on work and life. They have different communication styles, adjust to new technologies at various speeds (or, perhaps, not at all), and work differently. This cultural diversity can create new conundrums, confusion, and conflicts. Your organization must employ a stakeholder engagement strategy internally which is as dynamic as the workforce itself, and which is delivered by leaders who influence rather than dictate.

To achieve this when tackling the challenge of how to overcome resistance to change in an organisation, leaders must first embed the skills to bridge culture and generation gaps.

Communication is key when handling resistance in the workplace

“Few things are more important during a change event than communication from leaders who can paint a clear and confidence-inspiring vision of the future.” – Sarah Clayton

Communication breakdown is a key challenge facing today’s leaders during periods of rapid transformation. Study after study has shown that ineffective communication, mixed messages, and confusion are among the top reasons for failure of change initiatives.

Strong leadership survives the challenge of dealing with multigenerational and multicultural differences. Adept leaders communicate with clarity when managing change through the cycle of resistance. They employ different communication styles and channels to convey key messages with meaning.

During rapid transformational change, organisational resistance to change is managed by answering the questions that employees and other stakeholders need to be answered.

Too often, change management teams – who fully understand the whys and wherefores or the need for change – attempt to answer these questions with change documentation that is pages and pages long, and shrouded in numbers, accounting terms, and technical descriptions that even astrophysicists would find complex. The result is confusion, resistance, and poor execution of the transformation program. The project is a failure before it starts.

Transformational leaders create vision, build teams, and model required behaviors. They employ effective communication techniques across the generational and cultural divide to motivate and encourage collaboration. They identify and nurture talent, providing mentorship, coaching and training to develop today’s executives into tomorrow’s leaders. They broker a culture of change by treating every person with equal respect.

Successful change leadership begins with future-proofed leadership logic

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” – Peter Drucker

Our eBook, ‘Overcoming Resistance to Change’, puts the challenges of rapid change dictated by a fast-paced marketplace into perspective. It examines the key challenges facing today’s managers and leaders, offering valuable insight to the knowledge required to overcome multicultural and multigenerational diversity with a range of future-proofed interpersonal skillsets.

You’ll learn how to negotiate the difficulties of having several generations in the workforce, using effective internal communication at the organizational, team, and individual levels. Key communication tactics are discussed, helping leaders and organizations to

• Account for generational diversity
• Facilitate working and learning from each other
• Employ appropriate communication styles and techniques
• Recognize the efforts of their employees
• Listen to concerns, desires, and ideas

Additionally, you’ll learn how your habitual thinking dictates how you act and react, helping you to discover how to manage personal change and transfer these skills to the task of eliminating organizational resistance to change.

The eBook also examines the two dominant leadership styles utilized in organizational change, discussing the difference between transactional and transformational leadership and how they are used in overcoming resistance to change in the workplace. You’ll learn how transformational leaders are able to provide impetus to meet the challenge of change, seek solutions, and become problem solvers – resilient leaders who reduce and eventually eliminate resistance to change in organisations.

Finally, you’ll read about a few tactics used to engage staff in change at some of the best companies to work for. These tactics help to motivate and incentivize employees in flat organisational structures in which promotion is not always available.

Of all tactics to overcome resistance to change, the most overlooked and underprepared is change management capability of executives, managers, and supervisors. This eBook will arm organizations, their executives and managers with a greater knowledge of how to overcome resistance to change by using effective employee engagement, management and leadership skills and competencies.