5 Tools & Mindsets to Navigate Change Successfully
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Change, change, change.
Five tools and mindsets to help you navigate change more successfully — or at least have it suck less. True for you as an individual, true for companies, true for life.
Change is all around us, it's constant.
In order to navigate change more successfully and and have it not be terrible for you, here are five tools and mindsets that I think are critical for teams, organizations, and for your own individual relationship with change.
Number one: come face to face with the reality that change is constant.
It is ever present. It will always be. It is continuous and continual. Whether you hate it or love it, makes no difference — your relationship with change is irrelevant to the fact that it is constant.
“Whether you are picking up your feet and marching forward with joy, or you’re being dragged reluctantly through the mud, you will experience change.”
Whether you are picking up your feet and marching forward with joy, or you’re being dragged reluctantly through the mud, you will experience change. What it feels like is up to you, determined by your attitude, mindset, and relationship with change.
Number two: change is the path to progress.
Nothing improves, evolves, or gets better if it does not in some way change. Moving forward means change.
If you stay still and stay stagnant and don't change, eventually the result is to die on the vine. We have to move forward to keep living and thriving. It is a law of nature: things change.
Number three: having a resilient spirit. Grit.
You’ve got to have a good, healthy personal relationship with change. Embrace the risk of failure. You will have failures and they will not cause you to die (unless you're skydiving).
An increased tolerance for mistakes, setbacks, failures and missteps is necessary to be more successful when it comes to change. These things are a natural part of the process; they’re healthy and normal. It is vital to accept that in any way that you move forward in life or business, these will also be present at one time or another in one form or another.
“You have to also believe that you can always pivot, rebuild, grow again, and bounce back no matter what you face.”
You have to also believe that you can always pivot, rebuild, grow again, and bounce back no matter what you face. Because the reality is that you always can. Trust that you will find growth in the mistakes and failures and setbacks that you experience as you move through the world and continue to face change.
It is almost a certainty that you can think back in your life at a time when you were going through great change and thought you were losing everything, and at the time it felt like the absolute worst. Whether that is an end of a relationship, the end of a job, etc. And now with perspective, you can look back and see that you are in a way better place. In almost every experience in your life, you can look back now in retrospect and see what you gained from those times and how you are better off for those things now, even though at the time you couldn’t see it.
Adopt a mindset that while you're going through change, even though in the moment you maybe can't see it, to understand that in three or six months, or a year from now, even five years from now, you will look back and see all the benefits from that moment.
Number four: embrace that change is fluid.
Change is not permanent. If you change direction and start going that way, understand that if that isn't the path you're supposed to be on, you can pivot again.
“When you think of change, think of being agile, adaptable, and able to move and course correct along the way.”
Understand the fluidity of change and the fact that you can pivot again. When you think of change, think of being agile, adaptable, and able to move and course correct along the way.
To quote the wise Michele Ottley: "When it comes to change, I write in pencil because I need to be able to erase." Perfect.
Number five: change has to make sense.
Be strategic and ask the right questions.
Don't just run into change for the sake of change. You have to ask the right questions. Here's a list of questions that are important to ask and think about as you are thinking about and planning for change:
What is the why and the reason behind this change?
Who is this change for?
What will the outcome be? What are the results that we're looking for in this change?
What are the risks of this change?
Who owns this change? What are they going to be responsible for to make this successful?
What do we need to make this change happen in terms of time,resources, etc., to support this change?
Critically important: How and what and why and when do we communicate this change, and to whom? This is so important. So much change fails because it's communicated poorly.
And lastly, do we have all the right people in the room helping to give us input before we even decide? People whose perspective is going to matter, people who this change is going to impact? Are we asking them to help us see around corners at the things that we might not anticipate? Are they giving input at the right times along the way so that we can like anticipate challenges and problems, get their input and buy in early on instead of just handing change to people?
Final Thoughts
Change is a big topic, and has a lot of impact on workplaces and in all of our individual lives. Any tools that we can have in our tool belts are useful. Mindset and attitude do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to change. Like it or not, change is coming.
Related Blogs:
How to Help Employees Embrace Change
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This article was created by Galen Emanuele for the #culturedrop. Free leadership and team culture content in less than 5 minutes a week. Check out the rest of this month's content and subscribe to the Culture Drop at https://bit.ly/culturedrop
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