“Resistance is the first step to change.”
In the business world, it is not a new phenomenon to face resistance to change. As a human tendency, we are adapted to change. It’s inevitable for an organization to get pushback from people when they are bound to bring bigger changes in themselves. Even while transforming to agile from the traditional one enterprise has to go through a lot of resistance. In the case of agile transformation, it is more compared to other changes as they require a mindset shift in every person in an organization.
Reasons for Resisting Agile Transformation
Wrong Mindset
Managers and leaders generally resist because they have set their mindset that this will be relieving their power and authority. Whereas employees most time like the authorities system as they don’t have too much to think of making decisions and their failure.
Cultural Issues
In most cases, organizations transform from traditional systems to agile ones. While in a traditional system they are also practiced traditional project management and cultural values. This cultural value makes people resist agile transformation.
Lack of Knowledge
The fear of the unknown is also the reason most times for resisting change. When employees don’t know what they are put into, most times resist it. It’s always necessary to provide knowledge to employees on what they have to do and why as it makes the change easy to accept.
Dislike of Change
Some have a general dislike for change so they resist agile transformation only because of their dislike to change. They think that the change threatens their position, privilege, and power. It will result in their elimination of jobs.
Lacking Effective Collaboration
Due to the hierarchical way of working many people don’t have any experience in open discussions, collaborations, and successful working in groups making them insecure in a new environment hence, resulting in resistance.
There are various ways to express resistance to change. They are mostly inactive and passive way. While active resistance they express directly with their actions or make a point or argument to express it. In passive most time they remain silent and avoid to co-operate with the transformation. They sometimes don’t do the things even after saying they will do them.
Extra Self-Control Resulting in Resistance
Research has shown that resisting willpower will drain your energy. More the self-control is used more it will decrease for the next act. This drainage of energy while using their self-control to resist will further decrease their willpower for completing the upcoming frustrating task. As agile transformation is a form of change, during this transformation we change the older and comfortable behavior into the new one. This change requires a significant amount of self-control. But employees face changes all the time and most of them are fait accompli which means change or risk your job. While facing these changes employees drain out their energy and when it comes to agile transformation which is an optional change they are drained out and have no energy left making agile transformation a threat.
As we know most of the reasons to resist agile let's move towards ways to fix this resistance.
Fixing the Resistance to Agile Transformation
To avoid resistance we first need employees to educate about it. But instead of going with the collected data of a complete workout in a lengthy presentation, it is better to make it understood in three stages.
Doing carefree analysis which will cause a change in peoples thinking, and then lead to their behavioral change.
John Kotter change Leadership expert from Harvard says, that the change can be better brought up with the staging process of
"Make people see something which will further make them have felt something that will further bring back some energy into them making them energized for change."
For example, we can make employees see the competitor’s work they have done and how it’s affecting the market bringing the competing spark, or can bring them face-to-face with customers making them feel empathy, etc.
Whatever method you choose you must know that you need to put what they feel first. As change can only be driven entirely by emotions.
To all these very large list of reasons the solution is quite simple if looked at but also somewhat tricky to be carried out. But it’s worth the actions. And transforming into agile one must know very well that, “Agility is the ability to adapt and respond to change…agile organizations view change as an opportunity, not a threat.”
About Advance Agility
We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting, and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium, and large organizations across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients and move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting the human-centric approach to business agility. Embracing change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with an End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitors.
Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. Please write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.
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