When Someone is Resistant to Change, Start with Empathy

As part of YellowSeeds Creative Coaching and Consulting Services, one of our Seed Service is Empowering Virtual Teams. In the previous post we talked about how to create Team Social Contracts to work from Home.

This time I would like to talk about what is the most challenging topic on Leading Virtual Teams Colorfully. This is a Violet topic, because as you probably learned from my posts about colors, Violet is the color of change.

All teams which never worked from home before 2020, have something in common, no matter in which part of the Planet they are, they all are facing resistance to change. The reason of that is that Team are a group of Humans, and Humans have a brain, and the human’s brain is always trying simplify life for them.

When you learned a little bit about neuroscience and how our brain works, you can understand why humans resist to change. I won’t speak about neuroscience, I learned a lot about it when I started leading teams, so I highly recommend it to anyone leading a team.

What I will talk about is how to support your team while going through change, but you might need to inspire yourself first, so I would still recommend you to read some books about neuroscience :o)

When someone is resistant to change, the best way to start with is to understand them, put yourself in their shoes. Empathy is key to understand why individuals and teams resist change.

The second step is to talk about fear of change, creating safe spaces where people can share their fears openly and freely. It helps a lot when leaders shared their fear to change too. For example: as a leader, in your first days working from home you probably have some of these fears:

• How can I lead a virtual team if I never did it before?

• How can I know if they are going to deliver things on time if they have kids at home?

Whatever fears you have about working from home, share them with your team, show them you have a brain that resists it too.

The third step is to make them part of the change, for example by creating New Team Social Contracts, how the working from home will bring new dynamics for the team and how they all agreed on those. Making the team part of the change reduce a lot the fear of it, because what people is most afraid of is the uncertainty, the unknown.

The fourth step is to keep a transparent communication about change. The most important aspect of transparent communication is not only that you shouldn’t be hiding anything, but the content of it. When we are driving big changes it is important to share the reasons of the decisions being made. Individuals might agree or disagree with the reasons, but it is important to share the logic behind the decisions we make as leaders.

For example, if you want to have the team in the office at some point in the week or in the month, explain them why and plan it, have an agenda for it, and if for one day you don’t have an agenda to go to the office, just change the plans and stay home.

These are just some steps I followed while driving cultural changes, you might find others that worked. But I am sure that in the end, everything starts with empathy.

Next post will be about the Future of Work. Stay colorful!