On Resistance

I'm on Day 2 of 12-hour training days, so this is a quick post before I have to embark on a 2.5 hour drive to Paterson, NJ. It's also somewhat incoherent, as it's 5 a.m.

I'm doing training on career assessments and how to use them effectively with people and I must tell you that it's a continual eye-opener. I'm working with government staff who help unemployed people develop career plans and (supposedly) prepare them for the workplace. The training I'm doing is on "best practices," the kind of training that I both love and hate because often the work processes staff are using do not match best practices. Not surprisingly, they feel that I'm training them in things that will not necessarily co-exist very well with workplace expectations. They're right and it's frustrating. Nevertheless, what they're learning can still be adapted for their work environments if they make some different personal choices about their own professional practice. 

One of the chief complaints these staff have is that their clients resist change and have a million excuses for why they can't implement their plans. Yet throughout the training yesterday, for every suggestion I'd make, the group would throw up another reason why they couldn't implement it. They'd give me a barrier, I'd tell them how they could get around it, there would be a short silence, and then someone else would raise their hand to give me another reason why they couldn't make any changes in how they do things, often citing "policy and procedures" or "management" as their reasons for not being able to make the changes.

Of course, when these staff want to, they have no problems resisting policies and procedures. There are a million work-arounds and they regularly engage in them. Even more to the point, many of the "policies" they were citing weren't really policies. More often they were assumptions or unstated expectations that, if staff chose to, could be ignored with impunity.

After a few rounds of "Yes, but. . . " I called the group on their resistance and asked them to consider how they were exhibiting the very behaviors they complained about in their clients. Some faces closed up immediately--I wasn't going to get through to them. But most people laughed sheepishly, recognizing what they were doing. It was a good moment where you could see some light coming into the room. 

One of my most consistent experiences in working with staff is dealing with this resistance to change, which they readily see in other people, but not in themselves. In their minds, change is something that happens outside of themselves--it's changes in management, in policies, etc., rather than changes in individual professional practice that could take place. My challenge, always, is to get them to see the places where they can do things differently on their own, regardless of what other people are doing. I have to help them see that it's the accumulation of their individual practices that creates change, regardless of what's happening around them. They can wait for the "system" to change (and there are plenty of things in the system to change), but they have to realize that they are part of the system. Even if everything else operated differently, if they don't start making some different choices about their individual behavior, the system isn't moving anywhere.

Now I'm off to get another group to think differently about how they do their jobs.

Comments

[Brent MacKinnon]

Your comments capture my experiences in facilitating a group of youthworkers in a workshop titled "Expanding Your Personal Toolkit". I had a difficult time setting up the environment and conditions to reflect on how work was being done and what can you as a staff do differently to improve your work. I think some of the reasons for my difficult time ties into what you describe. My experience confirmed to me that creating new ways to facilitate staff to think outside the box and put aside for a minutes their long list of reasons why "you can't do things like that in my work" is the most important step in designing this type of workshop.
thanks for your early morning thoughts Michele....
Brent

[Sandra Foyt]

Thanks for a thought provoking article!

I encounter these fear-of-change attitudes with my fellow Girl Scout leaders, and other peers, when I mention using Internet tools.

Fortunately, for my sanity, I also work with kids - who are much more open to new ideas.

[Michele Martin]

Thanks for your comments, Brent and Sandra--at least I know I'm not alone! :-)

It did help when I was able to point out to people what they were doing. Most of them did, in fact, realize it and then tried harder to stop themselves from coming up with the "yes, buts." What's interesting is how ingrained it is in people, or at least a lot of the people with whom I work. Maybe it's more a product of some of these specific cultures, rather than a general characteristic. It's one of my own personal barriers to change in working with them, although I try to look within myself to try to create an environment for them to make the changes. I keep hoping that if I can model these things, they will eventually get it themselves. Easier said than done, though, when I end up working with them on a very limited basis.