Integrating yourself within the natural ebb and flow of change will ensure a fulfilling career experience. A career without change is likely to be one that lacks personal development as well as excitement, adventure and growth. Each change in your career is an invitation to try a new experience or take advantage of a new opportunity. Of course, these invitations can be declined, but it is important to consider the benefits a new experience or opportunity will bring you or your project.
It can be all too easy to dismiss these chances as risky. This is potentially detrimental to your personal development as taking risks and managing failure is all part of the process we call life. However, knowing how to manage risk effectively is a process that can be learnt, with a little training and guidance. Accepting an opportunity, employing a new team member, or even trying an entirely new project role all count as constructive changes that should be embraced.
Whether it is incited by you or whether it occurs organically, change is your ticket out of any situation or any place where you are unhappy or unfulfilled. So long as you embrace change, you will find that your situation does not have to last forever and you will progress on to something bigger and better. If you reject change, experiences and opportunities in your career are likely to pass you by. By taking a course to improve your skills or managing a new project, you will be presented with the chance to enhance and develop.
Sometimes the past can hold us back, but moving on is a slow and steady process that should be nurtured rather than rushed. Those little changes that occur every day stimulate your progress and put you one step further away from the bad situation you have left behind. It is common for individuals to let their past be the be-all and end-all of their personal development. This can lead to stunted personal growth and means full potential is never met.
Your personal development should be continual and is a crucial part of moving on. Implementing change in your life and kick starting your personal development by investing in training will help your past to seem like a distant memory and help you to step into the career role you always dreamed of.
When you feel as though your development is slow going and you are still miles away from your career goals, take a look back at how far you have come. In past year alone you are likely to have progressed, even if the changes are only small. Looking back on the last five years you are sure to have progressed in many more ways than you have realised. However, it is actually the employees of your organization who have to ultimately change how they do their jobs.
On the other hand, if employees engage with and adopt changes required by the initiative, it will deliver the expected results. Organizations do not change, people do. Change management is the application of a structured process and set of tools for leading the people side of change to achieve a desired outcome.
While all changes are unique and all individuals are unique, decades of research shows there are actions we can take to influence people in their individual transitions. Change management provides a structured approach for supporting people in your organization and helping them move from their current states to their own future states. When people talk about change management, they may be referring to the competency itself or the change management process.
In both cases, change management occurs on three levels:. While it's a natural psychological and physiological human reaction to resist change, we are actually quite resilient creatures.
When supported through times of change, we can be wonderfully adaptive and successful. Individual change management requires understanding how people experience change and what they need in order to change successfully. It also requires knowing just how to help them make the transition. What messages do people need to hear? When should they be sent and who should they come from? When is the optimal time to teach someone a new skill?
Market changes may also create internal changes as companies struggle to adjust. For example, as of this writing, the airline industry in the United States is undergoing serious changes. Demand for air travel was reduced after the September 11 terrorist attacks. At the same time, the widespread use of the Internet to book plane travels made it possible to compare airline prices much more efficiently and easily, encouraging airlines to compete primarily based on cost.
This strategy seems to have backfired when coupled with the dramatic increases in the cost of fuel that occurred begining in As a result, by mid, airlines were cutting back on amenities that had formerly been taken for granted for decades, such as the price of a ticket including meals, beverages, and checking luggage.
Some airlines, such as Delta and Northwest Airlines, merged to stay in business. How does a change in the environment create change within an organization? Environmental change does not automatically change how business is done. In , brothers Kurt on the left and Rob Widmer on the right founded Widmer Brothers, which has merged with another company to become the 11th largest brewery in the United States.
It is natural for once small start-up companies to grow if they are successful. An example of this growth is the evolution of the Widmer Brothers Brewing Company, which started as two brothers brewing beer in their garage to becoming the 11th largest brewery in the United States. This growth happened over time as the popularity of their key product—Hefeweizen—grew in popularity and the company had to expand to meet demand growing from the two founders to the 11th largest brewery in the United States by Anheuser-Busch continues to have a minority stake in both beer companies.
Change can also occur if the company is performing poorly and if there is a perceived threat from the environment. In fact, poorly performing companies often find it easier to change compared with successful companies.
High performance actually leads to overconfidence and inertia. As a result, successful companies often keep doing what made them successful in the first place. For example, Polaroid was the number one producer of instant films and cameras in Less than a decade later, the company filed for bankruptcy, unable to adapt to the rapid advances in one-hour photo development and digital photography technologies that were sweeping the market.
Successful companies that manage to change have special practices in place to keep the organization open to changes. For example, Finnish cell phone maker Nokia finds that it is important to periodically change the perspective of key decision makers.
For this purpose, they rotate heads of businesses to different posts to give them a fresh perspective. Research shows that long-tenured CEOs are unlikely to change their formula for success. Changing an organization is often essential for a company to remain competitive. Failure to change may influence the ability of a company to survive. Yet employees do not always welcome changes in methods. According to a survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management SHRM , employee resistance to change is one of the top reasons change efforts fail.
In fact, reactions to organizational change may range from resistance to compliance to enthusiastic support of the change, with the latter being the exception rather than the norm. Active resistance is the most negative reaction to a proposed change attempt.
Those who engage in active resistance may sabotage the change effort and be outspoken objectors to the new procedures. In contrast, passive resistance involves being disturbed by changes without necessarily voicing these opinions. Instead, passive resisters may dislike the change quietly, feel stressed and unhappy, and even look for a new job without necessarily bringing their concerns to the attention of decision makers.
Compliance , however, involves going along with proposed changes with little enthusiasm. Finally, those who show enthusiastic support are defenders of the new way and actually encourage others around them to give support to the change effort as well.
To be successful, any change attempt will need to overcome resistance on the part of employees. Otherwise, the result will be loss of time and energy as well as an inability on the part of the organization to adapt to the changes in the environment and make its operations more efficient.
Resistance to change also has negative consequences for the people in question. Research shows that when people react negatively to organizational change, they experience negative emotions, use sick time more often, and are more likely to voluntarily leave the company. These negative effects can be present even when the proposed change clearly offers benefits and advantages over the status quo.
The following is a dramatic example of how resistance to change may prevent improving the status quo. Have you ever wondered why the keyboards we use are shaped the way they are? When the typewriter was first invented in the 19th century, the first prototypes of the keyboard would jam if the keys right next to each other were hit at the same time. Therefore, it was important for manufacturers to slow typists down.
They achieved this by putting the most commonly used letters to the left-hand side and scattering the most frequently used letters all over the keyboard. Later, the issue of letters being stuck was resolved. In fact, an alternative to the QWERTY developed in the s by educational psychologist August Dvorak provides a much more efficient design and allows individuals to double traditional typing speeds.
Yet the Dvorak keyboard never gained wide acceptance. The reasons? Large numbers of people resisted the change. Teachers and typists resisted because they would lose their specialized knowledge.
Manufacturers resisted due to costs inherent in making the switch and the initial inefficiencies in the learning curve. In short, the best idea does not necessarily win, and changing people requires understanding why they resist. People often resist change for the simple reason that change disrupts our habits. When you hop into your car for your morning commute, do you think about how you are driving? Most of the time probably not, because driving generally becomes an automated activity after a while.
You may sometimes even realize that you have reached your destination without noticing the roads you used or having consciously thought about any of your body movements. Now imagine you drive for a living and even though you are used to driving an automatic car, you are forced to use a stick shift.
You can most likely figure out how to drive a stick, but it will take time, and until you figure it out, you cannot drive on auto pilot. You will have to reconfigure your body movements and practice shifting until you become good at it.
This loss of a familiar habit can make you feel clumsy; you may even feel that your competence as a driver is threatened.
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