Aftershock: Helping People Through Corporate Change

By Harry Woodward, Wilson Learning Corporation, Steve Bucholz and Karen Hess

A practical, hands-on guide to helping employees through the often painful process of organizational change--whether from technological innovation, limited resources, or new management. Based on years of experience, this field-tested book will teach the crucial skills and strategies to help managers deal with their co-workers' reactions to change; minimize the disruptions in productivity, creativity, and worker relationships; and make the transition a positive experience. Each section includes a step-by-step treatment of tactics, case-studies of real situations, dialogues, and illustrations. Also includes a list of references.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Nov 1, 1987
• ISBN: 9781620459591

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

From Future Shock to Aftershock

Aftershock. What is it? Imagine a stylized drawing, an aerial view, of a community; picture the houses, schools, parks, a few lakes, churches, stores, a small river, and the offices of a mid-sized corporation. The drawing presents a pleasant scene, a stable, comfortable community.

Now the scene begins to change. Rumor has it that something is about to occur in the corporation, and ripples begin to radiate out from corporate headquarters. The rumors intensify and finally become real: reorganization, job redefinitions, layoffs. The ripples become more pronounced—they radiate out farther and farther and begin to touch other areas of the community. Soon new sets of ripples begin to radiate from houses, stores, schools, and churches. Before long the community is engulfed in a series of interlocking rings, looking like the transformed surface of a calm pond into which you have suddenly thrown a handful of pebbles.

This is a visual image of aftershock—a metaphor. Whether you live in a small community or a large city, the effects of change are like a web of ripples. One event affects another and, in turn, is affected by the reverberations that come back. The process feeds off itself, continually intensifying and building. The effect on people is fear, anger, confusion, and a loss of control.

Even though people know a change is coming and even though they understand it intellectually, it still has an emotional impact that they don’t quite expect and that they find difficult to cope with. The purpose of this book is to help people begin the coping process.

This process, moreover, is not intended to make change suddenly go away. The pond seldom returns quickly to its former calmness. Rather, the task of this process is to give people the tools to deal with the effects of what appears to be a steadily increasing rate of change.

CHANGE

Change is one of the foremost issues, aif not the foremost business issue, of our day. Beginning roughly with the publication of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock in 1970, Change—with a capital "C"—entered the corporate lexicon as a word describing a mixed blessing. On the one hand, change represented growth, opportunity, and innovation; on the other hand, threat, disorientation, and upheaval.

Like it or not, change has become the norm. The relatively steady, predictable economic growth that characterized the post-World War II period has given way to rapid increases in competition, technical innovation, limited resources, and changes in attitude about work, male-female roles, and management.

More recent books such as Megatrends, The Changetnasters, and In Search of Excellence, all underscore the fact that our culture in general and business in particular have come to accept the aphorism: Change is the only constant.

Aftershock: Helping People Through Corporate Change is a response to a felt need on the part of organizations to understand and deal with change. Based on research, on painful experience, and on two successful Wilson Learning seminars developed to help managers and those with whom they work deal with change, the book is written for those who find themselves faced with change issues and feeling the pain. These issues may be reorganization, automation, rapid growth, downsizing, job redefinition, a physical move, the effects of competition, or a shifting market. Whatever the trigger, people are experiencing confusion, worry, anger, numbness, or all of the above. The primary questions they are asking are, What will happen? Will we get through this in one piece? Will it be smooth or will it be rough? John Enright characterizes the situation with an analogy:

. . . a branch floats peacefully down a river whose waters are high with the spring run-off. Although the branch is floating rapidly and occasionally bumps gently into a rock, it is almost effortlessly motionless in relation to the water it floats in. A similar branch has become wedged between some rocks, and is thus resisting the swift flow of water around it. This branch is buffeted, whipped, and battered by the water and debris floating past it, and will soon be broken by the pressure against it. If branches could experience, the one wedged into the rocks would be experiencing change with intense pain and distress; the floating one would experience ease and, paradoxically, comfortable stability even in the midst of rapid motion.

Expanding on Enright’s analogy, people can experience change as being stuck or floating free; pain and dizzying motion or freedom and exhilaration. The key concept in all these experiences, however, is movement, or the lack of it. Likewise, this book has as its operative word . . . movement.

PURPOSE

The purpose of Aftershock is not to prevent or solve or cure, but rather to help people move more freely through the change process. Specifically, the aims of the book are:

•   To provide a set of strategies and skills people in change can use to manage the change process.

•   To minimize the people breakage that often accompanies change, that is, to help reduce the pain and dislocation people feel during a change experience.

•   To maximize the new opportunities that change presents for people and organizations.

FUTURE SHOCK and AFTERSHOCK

Toffler’s Future Shock predicted a rapid increase in the rate of change and offered some general guidelines to prepare for and deal with its effects. His book and the majority of books and seminars on change since Toffler take a strategic approach; that is, they help you discern trends, plan for the future, and be, in effect, a change engineer. They address the question, How can I prepare for and anticipate change so that when it comes, I’ll be ready for it? Aftershock, in contrast, takes a tactical approach. It is not concerned so much with anticipating the future, as with dealing with the present. It answers the question, Now that change has occurred, what do I do?

Typically, when change occurs in organizations, people, particularly managers, tend to hurriedly plan, set objectives, gather information, and sell the change. They have to scramble and often find themselves buying into the change in principle, but feeling like victims because they suddenly have to implement it. They may feel two-faced having to promote a new plan they do not understand or fully agree with. As a result, people tend to focus on the technical issues only; that is, they jump headlong into the mechanics of planning, budgeting, or staffing and ignore their own and other people’s feelings and attitudes. We haven’t got time for feelings, they say. We’re too busy.

In a change situation, however, people problems are much greater than technical problems. This is not to say that the technical problems are not important; they are. But if people are confused, angry, or have misgivings about the change—and their feelings and attitudes are not dealt with—the change will not proceed smoothly. Aftershock focuses on people problems, on maintaining high performance while minimizing people breakage.

People breakage is the result of resistance—hanging on. When people are either unwilling or unable to cope with the effects of change, they cling to the familiar or to the past. They lose their ability to see change for what it can become. They see change only in terms of what it is taking away. One way to understand this reaction is in the terms of Endings, Transitions, and Beginnings.

ENDINGS, TRANSITIONS, BEGINNINGS

When change occurs, something ends. Immediately then, people want something else to begin. They want something to suddenly fill the void that the ending created. Unfortunately, this magic solution seldom occurs. Thus, a transition is needed, a way to bridge the gap from the ending to the new beginning.

Although this progression makes sense logically, it is seldom implemented operationally. Instead, organizations tend to jump to beginnings. Specifically, the culture of an organization in change tends to place its primary focus on the opportunities and promise of the new organization or plan and neglects the reactions of the employees. Indeed, people who express concern, worry, or even confusion about the new system are often told they have a bad attitude.

Further complicating the change process is the fact that not everybody is at the same place at the same time. While some are at the ending stage, others are moving into transitions and beginnings. Also, people in organizations usually experience change less as a single event than as a series of change events. As a result, people in a changing organization are simultaneously in endings, transitions, and beginnings, with a number of different changes. The organization, however, unable to cope at an operational level with such complication, prefers to push forward monolithically. So the change process moves forward. On the surface, the beginning is fully underway. But underneath, the neglected transitions and unresolved endings fester.

Because of this tendency to jump to beginnings, Aftershock places its focus on endings and transitions. It will help you answer two key questions, (1) How is change affecting people? and (2) How can I help myself and others move toward beginnings? The first question will help you focus on identifying the basic reactions to change; the second, on developing strategies to meet the needs underlying the individual reactions.

In all, a successful beginning depends on a successful ending and transition. The value of this process is expressed no more succinctly than in the following dialogue from Hope for the Flowers:

How does one become a butterfly?

You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.

You mean to die?

"Yes and no. What looks like you will die but what’s really you will still live. Life is changed, not taken away. Isn’t that different from those who die without ever becoming butterflies?’

FINAL ISSUES

Many organizational changes involve the elimination of jobs. Whether they are called layoffs, downsizing, or furloughs, the effect is the same. People lose jobs. Thus, in changing organizations you find three categories of people: those who will not lose their jobs, those who may lose their jobs, and those who will lose their jobs. Aftershock offers skills to deal with the first two categories of people. It does not deal with the third category.

In other words, if you want aid in downsizing, Aftershock is not the best tool. That process involves assisting people in such things as writing resumes and offering job counseling and placement services. Other books and even companies specialize in this area.

With those who are not laid off, however, Aftershock offers practical strategies and skills. It discusses not only the process of moving through change, but also addresses the sense of guilt sometimes felt by those who are not laid off—the survivors. It also offers people who may feel that the change has rendered them incompetent or obsolete a method to recognize skills and develop connections, and thereby find a new, secure position in the organization.

Also, because of its focus on application—on strategies and skills—the format of Aftershock is at times unorthodox. In addition to the sentences and paragraphs of standard exposition, the book includes exercises, dialogue in script form, and case studies. Thus, while reading about managing in a changing environment, you, the reader, are asked to manage in a changing manuscript. The purpose of these various formats is to enable you to deal with change not only conceptually, but at certain points to also participate in the process by accessing actual experiences—your own and those of specific cases cited.

Change is seldom easy. And the hardest part of change is most often not technical, but attitudinal—letting go—recognizing what has ended and then moving on through transitions to beginnings. This process cannot be rushed, nor should it be dragged out. The key is striking a balance. The intent in this book is to offer the skills and knowledge that can help you strike the best balance for your own change situation.

1

CHANGE: THE ONLY CONSTANT

The world doesn’t fear a new idea. What it fears is a new experience.

D. H. Lawrence

Yes, we’re experiencing change. My

people are coming to me—mad,

confused, worried, and some of them

I can’t even read—and I don’t know

what to do.

Manager in a change situation

When asked, Are you experiencing change in your organization? people seldom say, No. Change is the norm, the only constant. Indeed, people in organizations often take pride in their ability to ride the waves of change and constantly adapt. They accept change as normal; they have become hardened to it.

People in organizations also generally agree that, of late (usually defined as the past ten to fifteen years), the rate of change has steadily increased, as has the amount of information with which people have to deal. For example, one issue of The New York Times contains as much information as a sixteenth-century person would have had to deal with during an entire lifetime.

In the early 1970s, Toffler and others gave a name to this phenomenon: exponential growth—the geometric doubling and redoubling of change given the rapid advances in our society. Toffler also predicted the results of change. Not surprisingly, he foresaw increased tension and disorientation. To combat these problems, Toffler offered some basic survival skills. We would, he said, have to learn how to learn, learn how to relate, and learn how to decide.

So we were warned and equipped. We accepted change as a continually accelerating process; we had a name to describe the process, and we had a set of generic skills to deal with it. To the question, Are you experiencing change in your organization? the answer was an automatic, Yes. Indeed, if you were not experiencing change, something was probably wrong with your organization.

A DIFFERENT YES

Since Future Shock, the scenario Toffler laid out has generally come to pass, but with consequences and emotional costs nobody could have predicted. In 1984 John Enright observed:

Changes in life and work are coming faster and faster, with every indication that the pace of change will continue to increase. Change is rendering obsolete not only the equipment, tools, and technology in the organizations that managers manage, and the skills associated with that technology, but also the managing skills and attitudes which the manager so laboriously learned. With changes and this obsolescence come, for many, increasing pain and anxiety.

Enright’s observation that change is coming faster and faster sounds like vintage Toffler. But his talk of the pain and anxiety of laboriously learned management skills becoming obsolete strikes a new chord—more immediate, more emotional.

Adding detail to the picture, Velma Lashbrook observes:

Globalization, protectionism, regional economic slumps, regulation, deregulation, takeovers, mergers, acquisitions, diversification, product liability, competition, product proliferation, downsizing, and declining profits—these are just a few of the factors affecting organizations. The scope and pace of change seems overwhelming.

She goes on to describe how in her

short six years in business I have experienced within my own organization the transition from entrepreneurial to professional management, the transition from a sales-driven to market-driven company, the internationalization of the business, our acquisition by a publishing company, our acquisition of an assessment company, the creation of two new divisions, product proliferation, increased customization of products and services, rapid growth, decreased profitability, layoffs, annual reorganizations . . . and I’m not alone. Most organizations with whom we consult have experienced equally significant changes. In most cases the complexity of change is magnified by the size of the organizations undergoing change.

Overall, the change from 1970 to the mid- and late-1980s can be put simply: the tone of the yes has changed. From a matter-of-fact, Yes, of course we are experiencing change . . . isn’t everybody? we now hear a more strident, "Yes, we are experiencing change. My people are coming to me—mad, confused, worried, and some of them I can’t even read—and I don’t know what to do."

Specifically, the increase in the rate of change has made doing business less predictable; the increase in competition has called into question assumptions about marketing and production; and the shifting values of workers has called into question the use of traditional management techniques.

In the past three or four years, we at Wilson Learning have seen a groundswell of clients coming to us asking questions like, Have you got a course on change? or, Do you have something in stress management? Our response to their questions was initially, Yes and no. We had elements dealing with change in the environment and change within business, but they were more strategic in their focus. The questions of our clients, however, seemed to be more tactical. They weren’t looking for a course on predicting or preparing for change; they were looking for a course on dealing with the headaches. So, in response to these questions, we immediately began to develop interventions to help companies work through what appeared to be some pretty large disruptions.

After making it known that we were at work on a change course, we talked with several companies about partnering with us in developing such a course. While it was still in its early developmental stages, we had requests for information and even for some purchases of a potential product, sight unseen. Then, in the midst of developing the change materials, we experienced a radical change in our own company. And we handled it poorly—so poorly, in fact, that a year later we had to repeat a similar process to rectify some of the mistakes we had made the first time.

From these experiences we learned two things: (1) no company is immune to substantial change, not even a company whose job it is to help other people through changes, and (2) change is no longer an issue simply to be discussed. Rather change has become a painful experience—one that has to be addressed immediately.

Enright suggests that change is experienced as painful because: it is easier to see what is going than what is coming. . . . With the stepping-up of the pace of change, we must either prepare for ever-increasing pain, or change how we deal with change.

One interesting aspect of our and other organizations’ sense of pain was its suddenness. After all, one might ask, didn’t we see it coming? Hadn’t Toffler and others predicted it?

The answer to both questions is Yes. But recognizing the onset of change is one thing; dealing with its effect is quite another. In short, many organizations do not recognize the need for change and consequently experience the boiled frog phenomenon. This phenomenon rests on a classic biology experiment dealing with frogs in hot water. A frog placed into a pan of boiling water simply jumps out. But a frog dropped into cool water which is then gradually brought to a boil will not jump out and eventually boils to death. The gradually rising heat at first provides comfort but then saps energy. And just at the point when the frog needs its strength to jump, it has none.

According to Tichy and Ulrich (1984): Many organizations that are insensitive to gradually changing organizational thresholds are likely to become ‘boiled frogs’: they act in ignorant bliss of environmental triggers and eventually are doomed to failure. In other words, they know the water is getting hotter, but have not really considered what they will do when and if it boils—and when it does boil, they do not know how to get out.

A CASE IN POINT

Until now you have been reading about change in conceptual terms such as exponential growth, people breakage, diversification, and boiling water. It will be helpful now to turn to a specific example of a company and of people in change—call it Averco Corporation. Even though this is a fictional name, the Averco scenario combines the events and outcomes of about a half dozen actual organizations which have recently gone through a sudden and disruptive period of change.

Situation

Although sales were up, the cost of doing business was resulting in minimal profit. The reasons were obvious—too many people in support positions contributing to high overhead, uncontrolled expenses, and two expansion groups failing to bring products to market.

The senior management committee spent several sessions weighing the various options for restoring a positive profit picture. These sessions were often emotional and full of debate concerning fear that any solution might contradict the purpose and values the organization traditionally held.