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Treat Employees as Resources, Not Resisters
Like most leaders, you have likely participated in and probably helped shape some type of organizational change, whether a reorganization, new information technology system, or compliance with different regulations. Organizations routinely undergo change, but the disappointing reality is they routinely fail to implement change effectively.1 Leaders often blame employees for change unraveling, claiming employees resist change—or even outright sabotage it.2 Such a viewpoint is not grounded in fact. It is also practically dangerous. By treating employees as resisters to change, leaders can create a self-fulfilling prophecy that turns them into resisters. Instead of thinking of employees as change resisters, you need to think of them as valuable resources to help them initiate and implement change. By considering employees as resources, you enlist an often eager group of individuals who recognize that the status quo is more dangerous than an unknown future. Although there is often inevitably a handful of resisters in any organization, you need to be careful not to let these distractions sidetrack you from focusing on the more important task at hand: turning employees into resources for change.
The Importance of Being Resourceful
Although organizations frequently need to change, leaders often have limited resources. During periods of decline, organizations may not have the critical resources needed to foster important strategic renewal. Or leaders may be reluctant to invest what precious resources they do have for change.3 During good times, leaders may hesitate to foster organizational change, arguing the status quo is working just fine. Employees are often caught at the crossroads of this situation: asked to continuously adapt, but often not provided sufficient resources to do so. Worse off, leaders often blame employees for resisting change, overlooking their own culpability.4 This blame game may create the very resistance leaders are attempting to eliminate. But by changing the story from “employees resist change” to “employees are resources for change,” you can become more resourceful by unlocking the potential of employees instrumental to the success of change.
Being “resourceful” describes how leaders and employees take actions to make things more valuable—whether those things include material resources, such as products and factories, or immaterial resources, such as relationships. For example, viewing employees as resources and not resisters during change makes employees more valuable as they become enrolled in trying to change the organization versus working against it. The following section offers three strategies for employees to become more resourceful during organizational change initiatives; these are followed by three corresponding practices for leaders to transform employees from resisters to resources for change.
Three Strategies to Become More Resourceful During the Implementation of Change
This section describes three strategies for employees to become more resourceful when implementing change: “cut off the straps,” storytelling the big picture and benefits, and integrate self-affirmation with doubt. These three strategies are complementary approaches.
Strategy 1: “Cut Off the Straps”
Being resourceful during change includes taking items that might appear to be of limited value and turning them into something to help implement change.5 Individuals have a tendency to view a resource as a fixed entity.6 For example, people might think a chair is something you sit on, but it can be used in countless ways: from stepstool to exercise equipment. Entrepreneurs, whose nascent organizations wrestle with change on a daily basis, often take critical resources other organizations do not value and make them into something useful.7 My own research has found that rank-and-file employees are amazingly resourceful in transforming objects of seemingly inferior value into something extraordinary.8 This capacity for resourcefulness allows employees to generate change, even when their options appear limited.
An example of Strategy 1 involves a retail store manager named Ethan who worked for a chain of women’s clothing and accessory stores. He received a dress of suspect quality that was not selling very well at this store. Other stores in the chain also struggled in selling this dress, leading to a potentially large inventory write-off—just as the organization was hoping to grow. Ethan, as the leader of his store, decided to cut off the straps of the dress and relabel it, changing both its physical appearance and meaning. As a result, Ethan turned the dud of a dress into a best-selling beach cover-up. The founder of the company phoned Ethan to ask how his store accomplished what no other store could: he sold the inferior “dress.” Ethan replied that he worked with the materials at hand, in the best possible way, recounting how he both physically altered the dress and then relabeled the dress as beachwear. Ethan also did not consider his role as fixed and instead transformed his role, at least temporarily, into a product designer. Ethan’s story offers a lot of wisdom for change in other organizations. Often, employees think they lack the necessary resources to implement change, such as during a restructuring when they may be left with fewer employees to do more work in their groups. Instead of viewing everything as fixed, employees can identify their own “straps” and cut them off, thereby reinterpreting their roles and resources at hand in the face of seemingly formidable challenges.
Strategy 2: Storytelling the Big Picture and Benefits
When leaders consider employees as resources instead of as resisters, they no longer primarily view their role as motivating employees to change and, especially, not to resist change. Sure, motivation is often important for action, but the story shifts in a dramatic way. Employees can create their own motivation to implement change. In a study of entertainment product retail clerks, employees were found to be remarkably capable of creating the motivational resources that can foster effective change implementation: efficacy, a sense they can perform what is needed for the change; commitment, a desire to implement the change; and identification, attachment to their organization.9 Employees create these resources by the stories they tell themselves and others about change. These stories have two main properties. First, they place the change in the context of the organization’s larger strategy, which allows employees to understand the general direction in which the organization is heading. Second, they find the silver lining in the change by reinterpreting any potential disruption to their work routines, relationships, or practices in a way that can create benefits for the employee or organization.10
Let us consider two employees who worked at the same location of a large multinational chain of entertainment stores. The first person will be called “Rebecca Resister.” When asked about the organization’s strategic change, which involved integrating two operating divisions, Rebecca told the following story: “What is the point? Our store is just not big enough to [successfully implement the change]…. It’s harmful to the company because it raises customer expectations to a level that we cannot support…. As for the future, I don’t think much will change.” No doubt Rebecca will be working hard to protect the status quo, not so much because she is a bad employee, but rather because she does not understand the benefits of the change and its larger purpose. Without focusing on the big picture and its benefits, Rebecca lacks efficacy, commitment, and identification—critical motivational resources to spark action to implement change. Now consider “Betty Believer.” Betty works at the same store as Rebecca, but tells a radically different story of the change: “I enjoy the fresh appearance of the new store. I also like the increased impact the … marketing has on our store [such as] customer recognition of the … brand…. It also helps align … stores to the marketing and promotions used by the [rest] of the company.” Betty rates substantially higher on the three motivational resources because she has integrated into her story of change the benefits of the change and its larger purpose.
Strategy 3: Integrate Self-Affirmation with Doubt
During change, employees often ask themselves questions that focus on uncertainty and doubt: Will my organization improve? How will my job change? What will happen to our culture? These are important and natural questions to ask. But employees who are resourceful ask an even more important question: What contribution can I make to help implement the change? Even employees who approach change from this proactive stance often struggle with a sense that their contribution will never be enough, no matter what they do to advance change. Unquestionably, change involves significant work on the part of employees who sometimes feel despair despite the best of intentions. But some employees can overcome this despair.
In the extreme example of environmental change agents, research has found that these change agents often take incredible action to advance environmental issues, from walking to work, to constantly pushing their colleagues to recycle, to trying to convince top managers to make their organizations greener. Nevertheless, these change agents often doubt whether they are doing enough. But alongside this doubt came a remarkable finding: these same change agents also frequently affirm themselves in such statements as “I have the experience, knowledge, and values to be a good environmentalist.”11
This counterintuitive mix of self-assurance and self-criticism can help employees become more motivated to implement change. On their own, high doubts are bad because they freeze employees’ action, stifling them with the enormity of the task at hand. But resourceful employees use low forms of doubt to create resources around urgency, springing themselves and others into action to institute change. These doubts serve as gentle reminders of improvements employees can make by having them question whether they are doing enough to advance change. During change, convincing organizations’ members of the urgency for change is the most important aspect of starting a change initiative.12 At the same time, resourceful employees constantly affirm themselves, serving as an antidote to their doubts and helping them see themselves as valuable change agents with something important to contribute.
Three Leader Practices to Transform Employees from Resisters to Resources for Change
Although employees can undertake any or all of the three strategies previously discussed in this chapter, leaders can help accelerate these strategies across their teams or organizations. In this section, three practices that correspond to each of the three strategies are offered to help leaders transform employees from resisters to resourceful agents of change.
Practice 1: Foster Ownership and Experimentation
Individuals who have a sense of ownership at work and are encouraged to experiment are more apt to “cut off the straps.” Humans and organizations commonly share a natural tendency to preserve the status quo.13 It is familiar and does not require an act of commission—simply doing more of the same gets us the status quo. For an employee to be empowered to be resourceful, it is important that the person feel ownership over their outcomes and have the latitude to experiment in order to optimize those outcomes. In Ethan’s example of cutting off the straps, when asked why he took this rather radical action for a retail employee, he replied that the founders “always encouraged us to … own it and take responsibility for what we were doing, and I think that the best way they were able to get us to do that … is to also give us a lot of flexibility.” Fostering ownership and experimentation, especially during change, might strike many as counterintuitive. During change, practitioners often divide work between strategists, who have ideas, and implementers, who simply apply those ideas. But such conventional wisdom discourages employees from being resourceful, causing leaders to miss the tremendous opportunity of mobilizing their staff to find novel ways of implementing change from a group of individuals often closest to products, services, and customers.
Practice 2: Focus on the Big Picture and Hidden Benefits
You can encourage employees to create motivational resources by taking steps that help them to understand how change is part of a larger strategy and to find the hidden benefits. During change, employees understandably worry about the costs of change, such as lost political power, changed relationships, or extra work. These are natural concerns for anyone. Human psychology leads us to focus on losses, not gains.14 You can reorient employees by focusing on hidden benefits by helping them ask questions such as the following: What skills will you build during this change? What new relationships might you be able to forge? How will you grow as a person? By shaping the questions employees ask, you can nudge them to shift their stories of change toward benefits, and not to focus exclusively on costs.15
Another important way leaders can shape employee storytelling is by helping employees understand how change is part of a larger plan. This understanding is important because employees often get cynical during repeated change efforts and sometimes view managers as capricious actors proposing a “change of the month.”16 Instead of restricting information from employees, you can help employees understand the larger objective of the change. Giving employees this information will make them more apt to create the essential motivational resources to implement change in ways that help the organization, often in ways not anticipated by leaders.
Practice 3: Remind Employees of Their Capabilities … But Also the Urgency of the Situation
Under the traditional tale of employee resistance to change, employees often get discouraged because leaders not only write off their potential contributions to change but also label them as counterproductive for change. Reminding employees of their knowledge, experience, and values can help them interpret themselves as resources, that is, as having key capabilities making them ready and able to implement change. Ironically, a focus on the positive, without raising doubts, is likely to sideline employees who might feel good about themselves, but do not recognize the urgency of the situation. Seeding mild forms of doubt, such as gentle reminders about the severity of an organization’s challenges, alongside strong reminders of the valuable resources employees possess, helps employees view themselves as important—and also motivated—contributors to change.
Putting It All Together
Looking across all three strategies and practices raises a challenge for leaders: to be resourceful themselves, in addition to helping their employees be resourceful. Leaders can “cut off the straps” in treating employees as obstacles to change, transforming what many have historically considered an obstacle into one of the most valuable resources for change. When you interpret employees in this light, it makes focusing on the big picture and hidden benefits much easier. Leaders approach change with a more open mind about employees, and interpret them as eager participants, rather than as stubborn obstacles. This approach will fundamentally reshape the story of change as a battle between strategists and implementers to one of a collective contribution across all levels of an organization. It will benefit employees, leaders, and the organization at large.
RESOURCEFUL LEADING IN THE RETAIL SECTOR
Ethan serves as an exemplar of a resourceful leader during change. In addition to “cutting off the straps” (Strategy 1), Ethan also exemplifies the other two strategies outlined in this chapter. Ethan serves as “storyteller of the big picture and benefits” (Strategy 2) when, despite the growing pains he experiences at this rapidly expanding organization, he nevertheless finds hidden benefits. He discovered having “a larger infrastructure … to ensure success and to ensure that we could weather some major financial disaster or some huge mistake.” By storytelling the big picture, Ethan helps encourage his employees to be resourceful themselves in the service of a larger vision for change.
Finally, Ethan “integrates self-affirmation with doubt” (Strategy 3) when he creates positive meaning about his job experience while raising important doubts that generate urgency. Ethan remarks, “I’m kind of not sure if I’m … taking my store on the right path…. And that’s coming from someone who’s been doing this for six years.” Ethan’s joint acknowledgment of doubt and affirmation of experience recognizes an important humility needed when facing difficult challenge. It is a humility leaders often struggle to achieve. But it also underscores the need for Ethan to continue to be resourceful at his organization because solutions to difficult problems rarely come easily. Finally, by acknowledging his own tentativeness, Ethan is much more likely to reach out to his team to help him collectively tackle his unit’s challenges, thereby turning his employees into more resourceful agents of change.
TWEETS
Employees can be resources, not resisters, to help advance change … only if leaders allow them.
Cut off the straps during change: enable employees to promote change by transforming the invaluable to the valuable.
Doubt during change can help create the urgency needed to successfully implement change.