Transcript for:
Kotter's Solutions to Overcome Resistance to Change

Let's have a session on Kotter's solutions and methods to overcoming resistance to change. We'll start with the basics. Managers make change. Resistance to that change is inevitable, and that resistance will come in four forms. Click the card up there for more details. But what we're dealing with here is what are the solutions to this resistance? There are six solutions to the resistance. We'll go through the first one. The first one is education. and communication. It might be that the employees, for example, they have a misunderstanding, but they do have trust in management, but they have a misunderstanding of what that change is. Maybe they have a lack of information and you need to explain why the change is necessary through communication and education. Question. Do you have the time to convince them? How quickly does this change need to happen? Is the business in a crisis? Because education and communication is a long term approach. That's the problem of this type of solution. The second one is participation and involvement. Maybe it's reason three in terms of the resistance and the fact that you have people or stakeholders that see it's a different way. They see the change differently. They don't agree with the manager's perception of that change. Maybe you want to get these people involved in the process. You want to give them a sense of ownership because then there's more willingness for them to get involved and maybe they could help. But. It might slow the process down if you introduce these people into the process of change. But they maybe provide extra skills or extra input to allow the change to be more effective, to be better. You could loop in here stakeholder analysis because. Who is it that you're trying to get involved in? Because if it's stakeholder analysis, if they've got high power, high interest, then maybe you definitely want to involve them in the process. But if the stakeholder has low power and low interest, maybe you don't want to include them in the process. You might want to question that. Number three is facilitation and support. It could be that you have workers that. they're not interested in change. They've got low tolerance for change. So their resistance is low tolerance to that change because maybe they're bricking it. They fear the change. They fear the change. So there is resistance. Therefore, you might want to support them. You might want to hold their hand with the training so they can cope when it changes, when the change comes out. issue here is the cost. It could be expensive to do that training. How many people are we talking about? How many employees are we talking about that need to be trained? But are those employees necessary? Is automation coming down the line? Question that. So is it necessary for them to get on board? And also you might want to question the fact that you're just looking for their compliance. You just want them to say, okay, we'll give you training, we'll hold your hand, and you can be compliant to this change. which would in that case suggest that it's a paternalistic management style. Now let's move on to number four. Number four is negotiation and agreement. The idea that you could bargain, you could negotiate to win the agreement. This might make sense if you have stakeholders with different assessments of the situation. But if you do this, you're going to have to compromise. And if you compromise, it might lead to a change, but it might lead to a slightly different change. And it might be a slightly different change that you didn't want in the first place. Now, the next one is manipulation and co-option. and the idea that you could offer rewards to win over key, influential, high-powered people, which might make sense for reason one, if you have people in the organisation with high power and you want to manage them closely or keep them satisfied, you might want to do this. The idea is that you would win over the key influential people because they might get others beneath them to agree. Maybe they're subordinates. They might get others to agree. But... The trade-off to this is the fact that they might cause mischief. Mischief is the word that Kotter used. Please click the video here to check more out on that. But in terms of that, it leads into the last one, is that if you can't use manipulation and co-option, then you could use coercion. Coercion is that it's explicit or implicit coercion, and it's the idea that if not one to five don't work... just force it through. Just make the change happen. Who cares about them? Just leave them, force it through. And again, in the words of Cotter, it's just distract them, distract them, force it through, get them out the way. Because in the long term, you might change behaviours and they might come to agree. I hope that helps with Cotter's resistance to change solutions. And I'll see you at the next sesh.