When Adaptability Meets Change

By Riaan Steenberg

Tumi, last year’s employee of the year, storms out of the room after
a major altercation with her boss about poor job descriptions, bad
working conditions and missed deadlines. Tumi believes that she is very
adaptable and impressed her colleagues initially when she was moved into
a new area of the business. Things soon turned sour and the star became
bogged down and missed major milestones in high profile projects that
were assigned to her. She started missing work days and became ill. Her
boss is now considering if she should enter a performance management
process with the possibility of losing a good resource or if another
shift in the organization is required. It is not clear if Tumi has a
future with the organization.

Every time we shift an employee in an organization there is a major
change in that person’s life. Often the employee that is going through
the transition lose their self-esteem, co-workers that contributed to
their success are no longer accessible, there is a change in power
relations and great people start questioning their abilities. Although
we all developed a first order adaptability – we are reluctant to
acknowledge that being adaptable is just a way to delay that fact that
we need to deal with change.

When we introduce change in organizations, we often see a wide range
of responses. Some individuals realise early that change is good and
they become the champions of the new way; others are willing and will
cooperate, others will tolerate change and offer various levels of
contribution and discontent. Change managers manage these categories
statistically. For the most part, people avoid dealing with change and
contribute to creating confusion around key issues. Other responses
include dismissing it; attacking it; or attempting to use the change for
other objectives. People are wonderfully creative and diligent in
expressing their unwillingness to change without ever acknowledging that
it is resistance.

Observing the case of Busi it challenges us to rethink how seriously
we take change management and what we are doing to create a supportive
environment when there are major changes in organisations.
Unfortunately, most change management interventions are designed to get
and arguably force people to say yes, and to get them to realise that
there is a change happening without looking at how to support the
emotional and constructive issues in change.

Classically, managers get trained to answer the question of “what is
in it for me” for the employee when signalling change. This paradigm
needs to change to “this is how we will support you to succeed in the
new approach”. Managers must deliver support systems that will enable
employees to understand goals, access support and socialize new
approaches and their own and organisational issues in a non-threatening
way. Managers also need to consider the eco-system that the person will
enter and create links and connections that will facilitate a new
approach. Things will take longer than before while each employee builds
up new micro-skills and while the learning curve gets fulfilled.
Training and development during this time should focus on coaching,
building micro-skills in new areas and enhancing perspectives to support
new work systems. Research shows that 3 months in – the employee will
start settling, 6 months in – the organisation would have dealt with
most of the change and that only 9 months into a change – we will only
start seeing the full effect. Complex changes can take much longer.
Often managers are not as patient and expect change to deliver immediate
results and employees have learnt to adapt – but have managers really
learnt how to manage change?

About the author

Riaan Steenberg is a director of business school where he works with executive education clients and lectures on various topics. Riaan has a very varied background with experience management consulting, project management, software development, private equity, commercial property and international non-profit organisations. He brings a wealth of experience in managing execution, strategy and delivery. He has an MBA, is a certified project management professional, is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt and carries various financial qualifications. He enjoys learning Russian, hiking, archery, writing articles, researching for his PhD and being a father.