Overcoming Resistance to Change: Insights from Pam Marmon

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Pam, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you for having me, Kwame. It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you. So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Absolutely. So my name is Pam Marmon and I founded a company called Marmot Consulting, which is a change management consulting firm. We help companies transform. I have been in this space of change management for over a decade working with Fortune 50 clients as well as smaller startups and nonprofits. And I absolutely love the process of transformation that leaders guide their organizations through. I'm extremely passionate for it and I'm so delighted to have this conversation with you today.

Yeah, and we're excited to have you. Rumor has it you have a book that's come out recently.

Yes, I just published a book called no One's Listening and It's yous Fault. It's a book on communications and helping leaders understand. How do you lead your organization through a large transformation to get your message heard? Because Oftentimes, leaders struggle with that concept of communicating and making sure people are engaged so that they can launch a large initiative successfully.

Today, the three things that we want to focus on. First, we're talking about the origins of resistance. And then we're going to talk about mindset shifts that we need to make in order to be successful, focusing primarily on the belief that change is difficult. I think that's so cool. And then we're going to actually talk about, at the end, talking about behavior change. What types of things do we need to do and say in order to actually change the behavior? So let's go ahead and start off with the first one, origins of resistance.

Yes. So oftentimes we as people have been taught that change is hard. Right. And so this idea that change is difficult leads us to resist it because of this belief. And so I'll just throw out a couple of different reasons why people resist change. One may be discomfort of the status quo. And so the moment you introduce change, it could potentially shift the status quo of the person. There could be a threat of the security or a loss of control, or maybe there's some inconvenience or some failure that is associated with the change. There could also be a lack of trust, maybe trust in the organization, trust in the leader, concerns about the work itself. So if you're introducing signs, something new, and you're asking people to do something different, there may be a skill set, also new skill set that they have to learn, or just unfamiliarity. So as we think about the different reasons why people resist change, I guess you could summarize it in terms of loss of power. In some sense, there could be a loss of control. There could be a loss of social status. There certainly is a level of risk and a level of unknown that you would have to overcome. The financial stability. And then also perhaps a loss of knowledge, which knowledge is power. And so if you are shifting the way people are doing their work, you could potentially be asking them to let go of something that they're very comfortable with and know very well and embrace something new that they have to learn.

Yeah, this is great.

And when we think about it from a psychological perspective, we know that people often conflate familiarity and safety. Familiarity and what is good.

Right.

And so when we're trying to take these initial steps toward making changes and recognize, recognizing these barriers, the sources of resistance, where do we even start?

Yeah, so that's a great question. And I think we need to look at the behavior. So what's associated with some of those behaviors? Sometimes the resistance is active and sometimes it's passive. And so we as leaders need to be able to understand what is resistance, what does it look like, what does it sound like, and be able to evaluate am I seeing resistance in my organization and my people, or is there something else that I need to address? So, for example, active resistance could be just verbal opposition. Maybe they just don't like it and they're verbally aggressive, or maybe there's a reduction in the work and so they're not performing, people are not performing to the level or hostility within team members. And so oftentimes we see that under elevated stress we see hostility come up or just people not responding to emails or not showing up to meetings. Those are symptoms of active resistance. When we think of passive resistance, this one is a little bit trickier because oftentimes it's people withholding information. So maybe they're coming to the meeting, but they're not disclosing everything. Maybe they're holding back, maybe they're not confronting people, but they're also lacking some productivity there as well. Maybe they're not attacking an individual, but they're not supporting the change. So their behavior is not following or they're nodding their head yes, everything sounds good. But then you go live with this initiative and there's no action taken. So those are some of the passive and active resistances that we see in the workplace. It's very important that leaders are able to recognize what would resistance look like. And then prior to launching a large initiative, how do you mitigate that along the way so that you don't come to a point where it's too late? You've built the system, you've opened up the new process and then nobody is following through.

Right?

Oh, this is great. And I love the fact that you really pushed on the preparation. You have to anticipate resistance. And I think a lot of times people make the mistake of thinking that they're idea is just so brilliant that everybody's going to get on board and it doesn't work that way.

Yeah, and everybody will get on board or I don't care if anybody gets on board. And I think that's even more dangerous. As a leader, our role is to be able to identify who is impacted. So who are the impacted stakeholder groups? To what degree are they impacted in terms of process, technology, people, so a skill set or something like that. And then for the stakeholder groups that are highly impacted, this is where we layer in extra communications, extra support, extra engagement, extra training that they need. And guide them through that journey so that when you do go live with a large initiative, you've overcome a lot of those barriers.

Right. And I like that we're not looking at the organization and the people within the organization as a monolith. There are going to be people who are going to be impacted in different ways and different people are going to need different types of persuasion. And again, you can't allow yourself to be surprised by that reality in the middle of a conversation. And for the listeners, if you haven't yet downloaded your free negotiation guides, there's going to be a link in the description. Make sure you do that. Go to americannegotiationinstitute.comguide and it'll help you to prepare for these difficult conversations so you're not surprised. And going back to active versus passive, this is a really interesting point because it almost seems as though we would prefer to have active resistance, because at least we can see that. Because it's hard to solve a problem if you don't know it's there.

Exactly, exactly. And so to me, as a change leader, I think of resistance as a gift to any organization when you're able to address it early in the process. Because if you don't see it and it's not expressed and there's a culture of putting down resistance or shying away from conflict or shying away from negotiations, you go on this journey to a point where there's a point of no return. Now you're launching it, it's about to happen. Yet you fail to engage people and to bring them along that journey. And if there is a place, there's a give and take, really with change, there's a give and take. We're going to take something away from you, we're going to give you something else. We need you to embrace it or whatever it may be. We have to be mindful of the people. And we can't forget that there are individuals involved who are motivated by different things, yet not quite different. So if I can reference Dan Pink's motivation theory, I think this is really fascinating as we think about change. On one hand, people want the to know what their purpose is. So they want to align to something big and grand and a beautiful vision that they can support. They want autonomy, they want to be able to be given the freedom to do the work that they need to do as they they see best. And then they want to master that work. They want to be really good at it. And so if we couple motivation theory with resistance, with negotiations, with Change like it is such a beautiful space that we can truly as leaders help our people if we have this mindset that change is not hard with the proper process. And this is what I talk about in my book, with the proper process, change is not hard. And it comes down to our ability as leaders to listen. And that to me is such a key component of what I practice. Because when we as leaders become good listeners, we're able to tap in and understand what people, what they need from us, what we can offer to them. And this is the space of that negotiation that is truly beautiful because it doesn't have to be a win loser. You could have a win win and frame it and stage it well throughout the duration of the change.

Right.

And what's really interesting about this is because when you talk about listening, we're not just talking about listening in terms of what people are saying with the active resistance, we're also talking about listening to what they're not saying through passive resistance.

Exactly. One of the activities that I do with organizations that launch large change is called the readiness assessment. And essentially the readiness assessment is a set of interviews with highly impacted stakeholders. And I walk through a set of questions including understanding the culture of the organization, understanding effective communications, understanding the role of the leaders within this organization, who are the influencers, what could resistance look like, what behaviors may surface, what's the level of change, saturation in the organization, all of that, along with potential training that may need all of that. When you bring it together and you look at holistically, how do we stage this change so that it's effective and so it sticks, it really helps us to be able to well prepared as leaders to listen to the organizations, to hear what has worked in the past, what hasn't worked in the past, and how can we improve, how can we do this better? And surprisingly, over the last decade of me doing this work, the part about engaging people never fails. There is always this hunger and this need for people to participate, participate in the decision making, participate in the design. That ownership that we expect from people stems from us being able to give them that accountability which truly comes from decision making. Because it's hard to hold somebody accountable to a decision they didn't make is not the truth. And so listening is critical, absolutely critical in this entire process.

This is fantastic. And so for the listeners who are listening only on audio, Pam, you can see it, big smile when you said that. I think that is the five star quote of the episode. So listeners, again, if you find something very valuable out of this just leave us a five star review so other people know that there is some good stuff in there and we can share the knowledge. And this was fantastic. I feel like I almost want to spend the rest of my time on this first point, but I think it's important to transition because this next point is really important. The mindset around the belief that change is difficult. And we started to touch on this, but I want to dig deeper into it. So can you tell us a bit more about what you mean by that?

Yeah. I've noticed over the years working with leaders that we have bought into this mindset that change is hard. And so when we believe that change is hard and we start to behave like change is hard. And this is something that is so dangerous for us as leaders because the moment we accept that change is hard, we start to plant seeds of discontent and fear in our organizations. But if we believe the change, with the proper process, change is not hard, that we can overcome any potential challenges that come our way, we start to behave like that and leaders model behavior. And so this is a critical component that I'm so extremely passionate about. I have noticed that there's a significant amount of fear when it comes to change. Fear from organizations and fear from individuals. Whether it's in the workplace or at home, there is fear. And I want to help people overcome this fear because I truly believe that when we overcome the fear and we address the essence of why we fear change, which is, as we talked earlier, power, control, all of these things, then we can proactively mitigate it and we can catch ourselves and we're aware of our just mindsets of how we think about the world and we can stop that behavior, we can stop those thoughts and we can redirect them in a positive way so that we can get the outcomes that we want.

This is fantastic. And it sounds almost as if the belief that change is difficult serves as a self fulfilling prophecy.

Exactly, exactly. And so if you walk into it thinking this is going to be hard, people are not going to like it, we're going to have so much trouble launching this work. Yeah, probably you're right, you will. But if you walk into it thinking, you know, we have a good idea of how we're going to do this, we don't know all the right answers, but we have smart people that we work with and we care about them and we care about engaging them and we want to empower them to be part of this process. We want them to be successful in the future. We want to equip them with the right tools. As leaders, we start to put these things in place so that success comes from every level, not just our own interpretation of what success would look like, but for every single stakeholder.

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I'll catch you later. That makes sense. And so let me play a little bit of devil's advocate here. So how do we reconcile the potential of creating the self fulfilling prophecy? By believing change is more difficult than it actually is and then the other side, the other extreme, which might be maybe not recognizing the pitfalls or challenges that could be coming your way. How do you balance those two things?

Yeah, so I balance it with the proper process. And so if you have the process and you trust the process and the process works, then you can put in place the elements to lead to that successful outcome in itself. Without the proper process, without the tools, without the activities. Yeah, you're going to stumble. There's definitely pitfalls in this journey. But if you put healthy practices in place such as leaders are engaged, leaders, understand what's changing and they're able to advocate it across their different departments. So across the organization, that is a healthy activity to do. If you can align on the vision, that is a healthy thing to do. That's part of the process. If you can identify the proper communication channel so that you're doing push communications and pull communications. So push will be in the form of emails being sent out, and a pull communication would be discussions and conversations and those organic dialogue that has to happen within an organization. That is a healthy process. And so I walk in the book, I talk about the process of putting all of these things together so that you can be successful and you're not blindly walking into a transformation, thinking all is well. That is not wise. But if you can assess where the potential goes, pitfalls, both organizationally and also within that project, you can truly prepare for them. And I guarantee you it will not be perfect. Nothing is ever perfect. And it's certainly in the change space, but it will be much, much better than if you hadn't done the activities themselves.

This is great.

And I think especially that last point that you made there about the fact that there will be some challenges. I think that's really important for people to understand because a lot of times when we make the mistake of underestimating the amount of resistance that we will face, when we do face that resistance, we say, wow, I'm failing, I'm done, I quit. And so an important part of the process is anticipating the resistance, feeling it, and saying, okay, great, this isn't something that's a threat to me. This is more information that I need in order to be more effective in utilizing this process and moving forward.

Absolutely. And sometimes it's systematic challenges that we face. So the challenge, and as you mentioned it, it's so easy to say, well, my project is failing, therefore I am failing, therefore I'm a failure. That is not true at all. We don't want people to think that they're failures because I know that we have good listeners on your show who want to do good work. What we want to be able to do is step back and say, what are the systematic challenges that we face in our culture? Is our culture accepting of decisions and how decisions are made? Is there a culture holding people accountable? Is there a culture okay with us telling people what to do, or do they prefer not to be told what to do and kind of figure it out on their own and then troubleshoot and continuously do that throughout the duration of the work so that if something is not going down, the proper process, then you can address it early on. I do want to highlight and when it comes to resistance, there's a really great book that I love called beyond the Walls of Resistance by Rick Maurer. And he talks about three different categories of resistance. You have the intellectual, you have the emotional, and then you have the personal. So with the intellectual, resistance usually falls under this bracket of I don't understand it. And typically we address that with communications. So you don't understand what the concept is of what the change is. Great, we can work it out. The second one is emotional. I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't know. That doesn't sit well with me or whatever. Oftentimes what we have to do is create space for people to process and be comfortable with what's said and what's not being said and the tension that could exist. And then the personal, I don't trust you or I don't trust the company. That one is the hardest one to overcome. Because if there's broken trust within leadership, what we have to do is rely on the help of other leaders to bring the organization along and for the leader that is mistrusted to take ownership of their behavior and repair those relationships. So I thought that was a beautiful way as we think of resistance, kind of at that level of intellectual, emotional and personal, just to categorize what we see in the workplace and to help leaders understand what tactics do I use based on the type of behavior I'm observing.

This is great.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And in your experience working with companies and of course, confidentiality in mind, what was the biggest challenge for you persuasively?

Oh, what a great question. I have worked with some incredibly smart organizations, really gifted people, truly gifted, who are doing incredible work. And the biggest challenge with organizations that I have faced is this need for every voice to be heard and every opinion to matter and every decision to be socialized at every level. And that's challenging because it's difficult to move a large initiative and engage every single person. And so one thing that I recommend to leaders is let's think of ways that we can create engagement throughout the duration of the project without giving away necessarily the decision making rights. Cause that's important to leaders to own those. But we do want to be able to tap into the individuals throughout the duration of the work so that we don't surprise them and then they don't feel like this happened to them. This is what we want to avoid change happening to people. We want them to feel like they made change happen. And so when we think of control, what's internally, what we can internalize in terms of what is within my control, we want to put people in that position of feeling like they're in control of their destiny, of their work as much as we can, and help them see themselves as part of that solution.

This is great.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And with the time remaining, because I know you have a hard stop, I want to move on to the third point, which is behavior change. And we, again, this is great because we've been touching on this a little bit, but what are the differences now when we're talking about behavior change on the micro and macro level?

Yeah, great question. So we can talk about what leaders can do. So as leaders, what's within our control and what we can do as we look at different changes happening in the organization, we need to be mindful of change saturation. And change saturation happens when we do too much change. I don't advocate for that. I think it's dangerous. But I do see a lot of ambitious leaders who want to bring on a lot of change at the same time. So what we, as leaders can do is stage the change as much as possible so that our people are not bombarded with too much change, because at some point they will shut down. So that, to me, is a very important leadership skill that we can do. The second thing that we can do is engage people. So rather than just pushing out communications or creating beautiful PowerPoint decks, talk to people, have a conversation with people. Because I think this is where the true rich dialogue happens. When people converse. Oftentimes people think that they communicate via email, and it's so effective. But the reality is email is probably the least effective communication channel that we can leverage, and it's very popular, but it should never be the only thing that we do. So if you want to change behavior for ourselves and our people, make sure that you're engaging people through various different formats of communicating. And then the last one would be around resistance. So being able to recognize what does resistance look like within my organization, how do I mitigate around it? How do I address it when it comes? So how can I proactively prepare for resistance and anticipate it? Because I guarantee you, it will come. It is there. There is no change that goes 100% as planned. It just doesn't exist. So I think that's another mindset that we, as leaders can embrace. I will face resistance, and it will probably look like this. And this is my plan to mitigate it. All of These things are important. And then on the macro level, as we think about the organizations, when we have strict rules about everything, and this is more around the culture of the organization, we demonstrate lack of trust. So if there's strict rules about everything, people are sensing that you don't trust them. That's why you've put all of these rules in place. If you have unnecessary bureaucracy in your organization, that will lead to increased politics. If you have burdensome processes that are heavy, that will lead to slower speed. If we pull ourselves out and say, as leaders, what is my role? Certainly on the macro level, we can talk to people, we can mitigate risk, we can help manage the change. But on the macro level, if we can help the organization to allow people to flourish in their gifting in the right place so that they're thriving, that has significantly more impact long term for the organization. I think this is where leaders truly get to add value to the people that they serve.

Makes a lot of sense. And I really like that point about where there are too many rules, that signifies a lack of trust. And the people who find themselves under that regime with all of those rules, they don't feel empowered. And the people who are placing these rules in place, they clearly don't have a lot of trust or faith in the people's ability to operate without strict controls. And so let's say, hypothetically, I don't think there are any of these in my audience, of course, but hypothetically, if there is a leader who likes to have those strict controls, and they may have gotten some feedback in the past about the tight reins that they have on people, what are some things that they can do internally? I'm talking psychologically, emotionally, to help them feel more comfortable releasing a little bit of that power to their people.

Yeah, that's such a great question. So I would say the first thing would be awareness. Oftentimes leaders are just not aware that they're doing certain things that are holding back their people. And so how do we get awareness? Certainly through feedback from other people, but also through reflection on ourselves as leaders. Have we been guilty of micromanaging people? And also when we think of control, how much control do we exert on people's work or how they do the work, or what it looks like, or if we're giving directions but vague, and then we expect certain things to look a certain way? All of that is really important as we reflect on our own behaviors and then we gather feedback from our people so that we can actually resolve ourselves, release ourselves really from certain behaviors. That are not helpful for the individual.

That's great.

And circling back to the concept of change saturation, I think that that's the first time I've heard those two words put together like that. And it makes a lot of sense, because if you overwhelm somebody with too much change at one time, you're going to have a point of diminishing returns. And what's interesting is all of this is that there's clearly science behind everything, but there's a lot of art and a lot of finesse around it. You have to blend the art and the science, and it's going to be a lot of feel. And so sometimes you might have an ambitious plan, but let's say you are aware of the concept of change saturation, and you say to yourself, I don't want to push too far, but this should be just right, just in that Goldilocks zone. But then after three months, four months, five months, you realize people aren't handling this very well. Now, how, as a leader, do you adjust your strategy while still saving face?

Yeah, so empathy has a lot to do with how leaders respond, because leaders who are empathetic and listen to their team members, and especially right now, in the midst of COVID 19 and everything that we're facing, the layers of complexity and the layers of change for individuals are enormous at home. Parents who are homeschooling their kids all of a sudden not being able to connect with their teams in person. And all of the remote work that's happening and just how our world has shifted has added a level of just mental capacity that people are hitting. And so what's important. And my advice to leaders would be have those honest conversations with your team and just ask, how are you doing? Where are you at? How are you balancing your response responsibilities and the demands that we've put on you, and where you can help them address any levers or anything that would be holding them back from performing to their best level. Certainly around workload, if you can, or performance, or if there's any help that you can get for individuals, I think that will be really helpful. But empathy is truly the key to demonstrate that you as a leader, care about your people, you care about where they're at, and you want to meet them where they're at. And it's very likely, and this is very important. Leaders are people first, they're employees first. And so leaders also go through that process. And what we see is this rush. Like, we just want to rush people through the emotional piece, and we forget that Leaders are people and at the end of the day, they have their own change curve that they have to overcome. They have their own burdens that are heavy on them that they need to address. And they need the space and the proper way to address the mental heaviness that's on them as well.

Yeah, makes sense. And you know what? After hearing you talk on this specific issue, I feel as though you should write a book.

Book number two. Absolutely. I just want to. I really want to help leaders overcome the fear of change. And I want to help them see that it is within their power and within their ability to lead organizations successfully through transformations and through change. And with the proper process, they can do that and the proper tools in place, they can success and they can alleviate some of that resistance or the pain that people could feel if the change is not done well.

Right? Yeah.

This is great.

So listeners out there, if this is something that you are struggling with right now or you're just curious. I'm genuinely curious about this topic. This is great. So check out the book, Pam, again. Let them know about the book, what it's called, where they can get it, and so on.

Absolutely. The book is called no one's listening and it's your fault. Here's a copy of it. You can find it on Amazon and also you can reach out to me through LinkedIn or marmonconsulting.com Fantastic.

Pam, thank you again for coming on the show. We appreciate it.

Thank you, Kwame. Thanks for having me. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

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