Reason: They are too full of fear and emotions and fears to think straight. The Fix: As soon as you hear a new idea, your brain categorizes it as 'good' or 'bad.' Create space for the team to consider a third category - the 'interesting' elements of the change. To do this, pull the team together, grab a whiteboard (virtual or otherwise), sketch out these three columns, and facilitate a discussion exploring each.

Reason #1 Why People Resist Change & How To Help

Reason: They don't know how big a deal the change actually is. Have you ever started a project so overwhelming that you didn’t even know where to start? This is how change can feel, too. The Fix: Try using the 4-door approach to give the change some edges.<ol><li>What are the things we used to be able to do and still can?</li><li>What are the things we couldn’t do before and still can’t?</li><li>What are the things we used to do but can’t now?</li><li>What are the things we couldn’t do before but can now?</li></ol><img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/38/1*LqlJhGZ6WrKLsmd1bjIAOg.png?q=20">

Reason #2 Why People Resist Change & How To Help

Reason: They don't see how they fit into any of it. This reason highlights the difference between ownership and authorship of a change. The Fix: Ownership doesn't work, but authorship does. Try using the renovator's delight approach to help the team become authors of change.<ol><li>What do you want to keep going forward</li><li>What do you want to chuck?</li><li>What do you want to change?</li><li>What do you want to add?</li></ol>

Reason #3 Why People Resist Change & How To Help

“You can keep things the same or you can make a difference. You cannot do both. That is the choice you’ve got to make.”

You can help others embrace change by using these three change management whiteboard exercises shared by Jason Clarke in his TEDx Talk, "Embracing Change."

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

The Real Reasons People Resist Change (But Won’t Tell You)

Feedback is backward-looking and corrective. It doesn’t allow for exploration or possibility. Coaching is preparative. It involves less telling and more <a href="https://medium.com/swlh/how-my-boss-taught-me-to-think-like-a-leader-ea67565a22ac">questioning</a>.

The Difference Between Coaching and Feedback

ockquote>Talk less and ask more.<blockquote>Your advice is not as good</blockquote><blockquote>As you think it is.</blockquote>

"What's on your mind?"This question is open enough that it grants your team member autonomy to guide the conversation whichever way they’d like, while also being focused on cutting right to the chase and getting after what matters most to them. Once they’ve shared what’s on their mind, simply say, “So, there are three sides of [insert problem] that we can look at here — people, project, or patterns. Where do you want to start?”

The Coaching Habit: The Kickstart Question

<h4>“And what else?”</h4>Ask this question more than once. Stanier says he typically asks it at least three times, and rarely more than 5 times. “As a general rule, people ask this question too few times rather than too many,” he says.This question slows you down and holds you back from giving advice too soon. Too many leaders are quick to jump into problem-solving mode.While this might feel helpful to you in the moment, it doesn’t teach your team members how to solve problems for themselves.

The Coaching Habit: The AWE Question

“What’s the real challenge here for you?”When we jump into problem-solving before we have a complete understanding of the issue from the employee’s point of view, we tend to solve the part of the problem that we assume they are struggling with which may or may not be accurate.By asking this question, you’ll get a clear picture of the precise element that your team member is struggling with. Now, you’re ready to help them explore their options to achieve better outcomes.

The Coaching Habit: The Focus Question

Coaching is an essential skill for leaders. But for most busy, overworked managers, coaching employees is done badly, or not at all. They're just too busy, and it's too hard to change. But what if managers could coach their people in 10 minutes or less? In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact. Coaching is an art and it's far easier said than done. It takes courage to ask a question rather than offer up advice, provide an answer, or unleash a solution. Giving another person the opportunity to find their own way, make their own mistakes, and create their own wisdom is both brave and vulnerable. It can also mean unlearning our ''fix it'' habits. In this practical and inspiring book, Michael shares seven transformative questions that can make a difference in how we lead and support. And, he guides us through the tricky part - how to take this new information and turn it into habits and a daily practice. -Brené Brown, author of Rising Strong and Daring Greatly Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how---by saying less and asking more--you can develop coaching methods that produce great results. - Get straight to the point in any conversation with The Kickstart Question - Stay on track during any interaction with The AWE Question - Save hours of time for yourself with The Lazy Question, and hours of time for others with The Strategic Question - Get to the heart of any interpersonal or external challenge with The Focus Question and The Foundation Question - Finally, ensure others find your coaching as beneficial as you do with The Learning Question A fresh, innovative take on the traditional how-to manual, the book combines insider information with research based in neuroscience and behavioural economics, together with interactive training tools to turn practical advice into practiced habits. Dynamic question-and-answer sections help identify old habits and kick-start new behaviour, making sure you get the most out of all seven chapters. Witty and conversational, The Coaching Habit takes your work--and your workplace--from good to great.

books

Books

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

The Coaching Habit

"A manager can’t make change because that’s not his job. His job is to complete tasks assigned to him by someone else in the factory. Leaders, on the other hand, don’t care very much for organizational structure or the official blessing of whatever factory they work for. They use passion and ideas to lead people, as opposed to using threats and bureaucracy to manage them. Leaders must become aware of how the organization works, because this awareness allows them to change it.”

If you're not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, then you're probably not living up to your potential. 

Gain followers. Make change. Get uncomfortable.

Discomfort is Required for True Leadership

"Managers manage a process they’ve seen before, and they react to the outside world, striving to make that process as fast and as cheap as possible. Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change that you believe in.”

Where managers have employees, leaders have followers. 

Where managers make widgets, leaders make a change.

The Difference Between Managers and Leaders

Describes how individuals can become successful leaders through passion and connection with an interested group, and provides real-life case studies that illustrate this method.

Tribes

In short, because you will never feel ready.

The Case For Taking Action Before You Feel Ready

If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting the results you’ve always gotten.
If you want to get different or 'better' results, you have to do different things. And you have to do those things before you feel ready.

There Will Never Be A 'Perfect' Time To Chase Your Dreams

Your body takes cues about your own identity based on your actions. Your mind is always watching what you do and you can change your mind with new behaviors; not the reverse.
Once you act differently, your mind will take notice and it will actually change your self-image.

The Psychological Concept of 'Self-Signaling'

"You can’t think your way into right action, but you can act your way into right thinking".

Many years ago, a friend and I were talking about our dating lives while driving. He was a kind, solid-looking guy who was struggling, so I encouraged him to talk to more women—but he hesitated…

loveandrelationships

Love & Relationships

Why You Should Take Action Before You Feel Ready (Not After)

Ask your employees to score these 8 statements on a scale from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree.’<ol><li>I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company.</li><li>At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me.</li><li>In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values.</li><li>I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.</li><li>My teammates have my back.</li><li>I know I will be recognized for excellent work.</li><li>I have great confidence in my company’s future.</li><li>In my work, I am always challenged to grow.</li></ol>

The 8 Questions That Reliably Measure Employee Engagement

The more strongly your employees agree with these statements, the more engaged your workforce is. The statements with the lowest levels of agreement are the ones you should focus on improving to increase engagement.

Use The Feedback From The 8 Questions to Increase Engagement

“We experience” questions “deal with the elements of a person’s experience created in their back-and-forth interactions with others on the team” and include the odd-numbered statements above (#1, 3, 5, and 7).

'We Experience' Engagement Questions

“Me experience” questions “deal with the individual experience of work” and include the even-numbered statements above (#2, 4, 6, and 8).

'Me Experience' Engagement Questions

We ask you to give us this sense of universality — all of us together — and at the same time to recognize our own uniqueness; to magnify what we all share, and to lift up what is special about each of us. When you come to excel as a leader of a team, it will be because you've successfully integrated these two quite distinct human needs.

Engagement surveys tell us how engaged employees are at work. High engagement leads to lower turnover, increased productivity, and higher profitability.

You Can Measure Employee Engagement In Just 8 Questions

Most people think that if they simply work harder, then they'll be more successful. And if they're more successful, then they'll also be happier.  The problem is that this logic is scientifically broken and backward.

Most People Get The Path to Happiness Backwards

What we found is that only 25% of job successes are predicted by IQ, 75% of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support, and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat.

Every time your brain has a success, you change the goalpost of what success looked like. You got 50 followers, now you want 100. You got 100, now you want 200. So, if success is a prerequisite to happiness and the goalpost of success keeps moving, then your brain will never get there.

The Science-Backed Proof That More Success Won't Lead to Greater Levels of Happiness

You can rewire your brain with just 2 minutes a day by writing down 3 new things that you're grateful for every day for 21 days. Doing so reprograms your brain, allowing it to work more optimistically and more successfully. After 21 days, the brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world not for the negative, but for the positive first.

Train Your Brain to be Happier

Dopamine, which floods into your system when you're positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • The happy secret to greater success and fulfillment in work and life—a must-read for everyone trying to flourish in a world of increasing stress and negativity “Thoughtfully lays out the steps to increasing workplace positivity.”—Forbes In the book that inspired one of the most popular TED Talks of all time, New York Times bestselling author Shawn Achor reveals how rewiring our brain for happiness helps us achieve more in our careers and our relationships and as students, leaders, and parents. Conventional wisdom holds that once we succeed, we’ll be happy; that once we get that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But the science reveals this formula to be backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. Research shows that happy employees are more productive, more creative, and better problem solvers than their unhappy peers. And positive people are significantly healthier and less stressed and enjoy deeper social interaction than the less positive people around them. Drawing on his original research—including one of the largest studies of happiness ever conducted—and work in boardrooms and classrooms across forty-two countries, Achor shows us how to rewire our brains for positivity and optimism to reap the happiness advantage in our lives, our careers, and even our health. His strategies include: • The Tetris Effect: how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility so we can see and seize opportunities all around us • Social Investment: how to earn the dividends of a strong social support network • The Ripple Effect: how to spread positive change within our teams, companies, and families By turns fascinating, hopeful, and timely, The Happiness Advantage reveals how small shifts in our mind-set and habits can produce big gains at work, at home, and elsewhere.

The Happiness Advantage

The ADP Research Institute’s research revealed two main drivers of resilience which are:<ol><li>Resilience is a reactive state of mind created by exposure to suffering.</li><li>The more tangible the threat, the more resilient we become.</li></ol>

There Are 2 Main Drivers of Workplace Resilience

"Humans do not function well when our senior leaders gloss over the reality. We don’t need them to sugarcoat in order to make us feel better. It won’t. It is far more frightening, and damaging to the psyche, to downplay tough or dark realities, or to pretend they don’t exist, because then we allow our imaginations to run riot, and who knows what kind of demons we can conjure in our mind’s eye.” - Marcus Buckingham

The Leader's Role in Building Workplace Resilience

Buckingham says resilience levels increase the more intimately exposed your team members are to suffering. They looked at people who had personal connections affected by Covid-19 to prove this. “Instead of downplaying the reality, tell it to us straight. Don’t rush us back to normal in an effort to assuage our fear and anxiety. Instead, describe in detail what the threat actually is." - Marcus Buckingham

Leaders Can Build Workplace Resilience by Exposing Their Team to Suffering

In addition to transparently exposing our teams to tough realities, we develop resilience in our team members when we get specific about what suffering means for them.  They looked at people who experienced changes at work related to Covid-19 to prove this.

Leaders Can Build Their Team's Resilience by Getting Specific

"Show us up close and personal what real-world changes we will have to make in our lives, and tell us the truth about how these changes are designed to protect us. Show us in practice what our ‘new normal’ is and why, and then trust us to figure out how to live happily and healthily inside this new normal.” - Marcus Buckingham

Marcus Buckingham on How to 'Get Specific' and Build Your Team's Resilience

A study of 25,000 people in 25 countries sheds light on what resilience is and how leaders can cultivate it.

The Real Reasons People Resist Change (But Won’t Tell You)

The Coaching Habit

Tribes

Why You Should Take Action Before You Feel Ready (Not After)

You Can Measure Employee Engagement In Just 8 Questions

Jessica Donahue