How do people process change?

- What if I told you that while change itself is unpredictable, your reaction to it isn't. It's true. We all have a basic human instinct for survival. Embedded in us since cave people times. Change threatens that instinct and triggers a predictable emotional journey. Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross detailed this journey in what's called the change curve. Modeled after her work on the stages of grief, it's what every human being goes through when facing change. Understanding this curve ignites your empathy as a change leader and helps you move employees through change more successfully. Knowledge of the curve enables you to remind employees that they're not alone, that everyone goes through this curve. To help leaders better understand the emotional change journey, I've taken Kübler-Ross's work and blended it with my own to share this. Let's walk through the curve one step at a time. First, when change happens, status quo is shaken, aggravation, and even shock arises. How could they do this? How could this happen to me? And there's a lot of denial that the change is even happening. This blends into the next phase, resistance, which is often laced with anger, finger-pointing, dejection, and getting stuck at it's not fair. Ah, I've been there. When COVID-19 hit, for example, suddenly, live events evaporated overnight, and with it, the cancellation of many keynotes I was scheduled to give. I had worked so hard to get a reputation as a top leadership speaker, and in instant, it felt like it was all for nothing. If I'm honest, I struggled with how unfair it felt. For a short period of time, it even kept me from moving forward. The resignation phase is next. This is when it's accepted that the change is indeed happening, and when energy and morale drop to low points. It's in this phase that showing empathy, active listening, and support is especially important as people could finally be accepting really painful reality as a truth. Eventually, people start adapting and enter the next stage, emergence, where they productively engage in the change and they explore the possibilities, that change holds for them. After losing all those in-person keynotes I began exploring how I could pivot to do online virtual keynotes and leadership training, which honestly, has become something I really, really love doing now. Then it's onto evolving where behaviors change and new approaches are integrated into new routines. Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, turned around his company's fortunes, at least in part, due to the fact that he asked his company to evolve from the all Microsoft products all the time approach to working across technology platforms through many collaborative partnerships, even with traditional adversaries like Salesforce. Employees have evolved their behaviors and elevated results. In the final stage, the aftermath, you reflect and realize that change wasn't so bad after all. Maybe you've even grown from it. When Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, announced that the use of PowerPoint in meetings was banned, it caused angst in the company, as you can imagine. Instead, meetings would start with quiet time for reading pre-prepared briefing documents that combine all the information that a PowerPoint would, but that also required an entirely new meeting habit. After the aftermath, the status quo is interrupted again and the curve starts all over. Now, we all go through the change curve at different speeds and intensity levels. I know people who love change. They move to adapting and evolving with blinding speed. That's not most of us though. You can also go back and forth on the curve. For example, you could be in the emergent stage only to encounter something that pulls you back into resistance mode again. So keep the change curve in mind to help you show empathy, support, and understanding throughout your employees' change journey.