Why is Resistance to Change an Issue?
Peter de Jager is a provocative Speaker, Writer and Consultant. His primary focus in on how we manage change, technology and the future.
In addition to speaking at conferences worldwide, he's also written monthly columns for Municipal World and Computing Canada.
His goal is always to question what we think is so, and in so doing perhaps open up new opportunities.
If you'd like permission to reprint any of Peter's articles, please contact him directly.
You can contact him at
pdejager@technobility.com
Or sign the Guest Book and he'll get back to you.
In April I posted the following:
Another way of asking the above question is to ask “Why is the ability to manage Change necessary?”
(For the record, this author rejects outright, the notion that it’s not possible to manage
Change.)
One way to deal with resistance to Change is to overcome it with force, not physical
force (it’s against the law to beat people up when they don’t do what we
want), but economic force. When a manager encounters resistance to an imposed Change they could
simply respond by saying, “I don’t care what you think about it, your job is to do what I say, or else.”
There are companies, even profitable companies, which react to resistance to change in this manner. In my experience, every individual with initiative who can leave such
an organization leaves at the very first opportunity. The company is left with some employees with initiative but no opportunity, and the rest are employees with no initiative.
Yet the fact remains, such organizations can still prosper...
I then collected responses to the following change
management philosophy:
“I don’t care what you think about it, your job is to do what I say, or else.”
commonly known as "My way or the Highway"
That resulted in a flood of responses... which I've compiled and commented upon in a single document. Since it's a long
document (24 pages), I've decided to link directly to the MSWord doc rather than post it here. If you'd like to read it, you can download it
by clicking HERE:
I'd appreciate reading your
comments regarding this article... please take the time to respond.
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