Tune up your EQ

This is the fourth of a series of 8 articles about Thriving on Change.

A Company’s Shift From Glass Bottles To Plastic

Back in 1999, a large Jamaican soft drinks manufacturer stopped selling its soda in glass bottles. The shift to plastic bottles meant that it no longer needed a local bottling factory in Montego Bay. The plant was closed and the workers were out of a job.

The company took a socially responsible initiative. Two months before the planned closure, they offered workers money management workshops, provided them with career advice, counselling and life skills training.

How Do You Respond To Oganisational Change?

Have you faced a situation where your job position was made redundant? Have you had to adjust to a new work system or process?

When you deal with a major change in the workplace, do you deal with it as a matter of cool, calculated logic ?

I know that I don’t.

I suggest that there is always an emotional element to organisational change and that you must acknowledge this reality, rather than bury it.

To help you thrive on change, I recommend a roadmap of the processes that you encounter in any major life change. It is based on an aproach that I learnt during my MBA.

The lecturer, Professor Colin Carnall explained that a workplace change affects your self-esteem. The bottling factory workers’ identity was closely tied to the company.

When the factory closed, part of them died.

Our lecturer showed that our self-esteem is intimately related to how well you perform at work. The bottling factory workers had to adjust to finding a new job in a tight job market. I worked with them to help them update their skills and increase their confidence.

Professor Carnall described the 5 stages involved in adjusting to organisational change. They are are denial, ;defence; discarding; adaptation and internalization.

When you’re in denial you develop a very close attachment to the status quo, even if you weren’t such a great supporter until the change came knocking at your door. Your self-esteem can increase during this period because you’re convinced that the old way is best and that the change is wrong.

Denial helps you to by buy some time before you face up to the new realities. However, this stage will harm you if you stay in it longer than you ought.

In the second stage, defence,, it becomes clear that you must adjust to the new realities. You may feel depressed and/or frustrated.

When you behave defensively, you negotiate time and space to come to terms with changes.

The next stage is discarding. Whilst you focused on the past in the two previous phases, you now begin to look to the future.

You become more optimistic and you begin to openly identify with the changes in the organisation. Perhaps you start to solve problems and take initiatives. As you ‘test’ the system, you begin to rebuild your self-esteem.

In the adaptation stage, you begin to try new things out. Through a process of trial and error, effort and setback you adjust to the workplace change.

This can be very frustrating. You may feel angry because the improvements seem to take so long. You’re learning and the learning process can make you feel uncomfortable.

You must balance your desire for quick results with some compassion for yourself.

In the final stage, internalisation, you’ve developed new ways of working and new relationships with other people. Now your new behaviour becomes part of your normal way of doing things.

You’ve become the “brand new you.”

How To Make Sense of Change

For some of the bottling factory workers the closure was the springboard to a new and more rewarding career. They’ve upgraded their skills and thrived on change. Others, even now, seem to be struggling to come to terms with the change.

One of the former union representatives recently confided in me that, although the workers had been well prepared for the change, it was only when the doors finally closed, that the new reality dawned on them.

The preparatory workshops gave a lot of logical information, yet the workers needed to go through an emotional process in order to move on.

4 Questions For You

1. Could this 5 stage model help you understand the stages that you go through when organisational change occurs?

2. Could it kick start you to respond more effectively to workplace change?

3. Could you apply this approach to thrive on change in other areas in your life?

4. What tools and models do you use to thrive on change?

Change is always emotional. Understand the process and thrive on change.

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This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.