If you are a Change Agent who is staying awake nights worrying about how you are going to eliminate resistance to change in your organization, here's some simple advice. Go back to sleep!
Seriously, you will never combat or overcome resistance to change. Sure it's frustrating, especially when you think your change will make things better for the people who are affected by the change. But the truth is that what's positive to you or your senior leaders may not be so positive to the Targets of the change. From their "Frame of Reference," the change may create a lot of uncertainty and disruption.
The level of resistance to change you can anticipate is directly related to the amount of disruption the change creates for the Targets-- not from your viewpoint, but from theirs.
So what to do? What are some effective ways to manage this unavoidable resistance to change and stop the turning and tossing at night?
Here is some tactical advice for Change Agents from the Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM), a structured, practical framework for managing the human side of organizational change.
Effective Behaviors in Managing Resistance to Change
Many organizations focus on "engagement surveys" hoping that high scores will mean that they have engaged employees and have eliminated resistance to change. But the bottom-line is that resistance is not good or bad, it just "is."
If you are looking to drive innovation or transformation into your organization, you should anticipate up-front that you are going to create high levels of disruption, and consequently high levels of resistance to change. The question isn't, "How can we eliminate the resistance?" The question should be, "How can we best identify where the resistance is coming from, and then how can we manage it so we don't slow down our change?"
Now you can turn off the light and go back to sleep.