How managing change well can help teams embrace joy
Take a minute to consider: What changes are you trying to make sense of right now?
You might be thinking about returning to in-person (or hybrid) work, a long-time leader or staff member leaving your team, kids returning to in-person school, or confusion and decision-making around the health and safety of different gatherings. You may be struggling to maintain your own mental health and sense of safety and calm in the face of racial violence, world upheaval, and climate change.
In leading a number of conversations recently, we’ve noticed how much we’re all working to manage change in some form or another.
This came up in designing a recent retreat for a nonprofit team. The staff had recently gone through the departure of several key organizational leaders, including the Executive Director.
Team members were feeling sadness, anxiety, and uncertainty.
The exciting thing was that the organization had hired a terrific new Executive Director! But staff members were still experiencing challenges and big feelings around this change.
We shared the work of William Bridges with this team, which is helpful in managing change. Here are a few key ideas:
Change and transition are not the same thing:
Change is an external event or situation that takes place such as suddenly needing to work remotely, returning to in-person (or hybrid) work, or a long-time leader or staff member leaving an organization.
Transition is the “inner psychological process that people go through as they internalize and come to terms with the new situation that the change brings about.”
If we are alive, we will experience change. The question is whether we do the individual or organizational work to move forward through transitions.
William Bridges (great name for someone working on this!) created a model to describe the stages of transition:
Endings
The first step to moving through a transition is acknowledging and naming what has been lost – this might include friends, colleagues or loved ones, routines or “how we used to do things.”
Neutral Zone
Bridges suggested that after acknowledging the Endings, people go through an “in-between time when the old is gone but the new isn’t fully operational.” Bridges’ point was that this time needs to be recognized and acknowledged. What does this mean? It is okay, and in fact helpful, to name the uncertainty we are each feeling.
New Beginnings
Only when we acknowledge the Ending and move through the Neutral Zone of not knowing can we be open to whatever is coming next.
Throughout our lives, we will keep experiencing changes and moving through transitions. In fact, in designing the conversation about transition, we were able to dust off and use an exercise we wrote about a few years ago:
Have participants take a few minutes to write privately on what is ending
On yellow Post-it Notes, write some feelings or questions that are in The Neutral Zone – and put these on a large Neutral Zone poster
On green Post-it Notes, write about what participants imagine in New Beginnings
Take a few minutes to read over the Post-it Notes from the group and reflect on what was shared.
So, what happened?
Putting up the yellow Post-it Notes showed that the group was struggling with a loss of hope.
Participants wrote about emotions such as uncertainty, sadness and exhaustion. There were also questions, such as, “How will we do this?” “Will it really change?” and others.
Doing the exercise together normalized the emotions that group members were feeling. By naming those big feelings, those feelings started to take up less energy.
Reading participants’ visions for New Beginnings was a breath of fresh air.
People talked concretely about changes they would like to see. They mentioned freedom, happiness, creativity, curiosity, and joy.
We can’t avoid change. But we can each use our leadership to guide our teams through transition. By addressing them directly, we allow space for our teams to work through the issues together. Not only does this help them to process it, it also cultivates a culture of caring and compassion. This establishes a new dynamic, especially when facing abrupt uncertainties.
For more ideas on building conversations and planning processes now, you might appreciate: