Hierarchy often breaks down in the neutral zone, and mixed groupings, such as task forces and project teams, are often very effective. People may have to be given temporary titles or made “acting” managers.
It’s not a bad idea to let people take away something from this celebration too, a memento of the transition process that is now behind them. The idea is not unlike giving people a piece of the past, as mentioned in Chapter 3. In this case it may be a T-shirt with “I Survived the Merger” across the front or a certificate of thanks for their participation in the Transition Monitoring Team. Serious or humorous, the memento further acknowledges and winds up a difficult time in the organization’s history and the person’s career.
The single biggest reason organizational changes fail is because no one has thought about endings or planned to manage their impact on people. Naturally concerned about the future, planners and implementers all too often forget that people have to let go of the present first. They forget that while the first task of change management is to understand the desired outcome and how to get there, the first task of transition management is to convince people to leave home. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief if you remember that.
Before 1066 and the advent of the Normans, Wales had been the domain of some of the earliest settlers of the British Isles – the Britons or Celts – who are generally thought to have migrated from Continental Europe some three centuries before the birth of Christ. Anglo-Saxon conquerors had pushed these communities westwards out of England from the fifth century AD onwards, and they became known as the ‘Wallenses’ (literally the ‘borderers’). Early medieval Wales consisted of a complex patchwork of determinedly independent, rival provinces and realms, with three major principalities – Gwynedd, Powys and Deheubarth – coming to prominence.
The task before you is therefore twofold: first, to get your people through this phase of transition in one piece; and second, to capitalize on all the confusion by encouraging them to be innovative.
People can deal with a lot of change if it is coherent and part of a larger whole. But adding unrelated and unexpected changes, even small ones, can push people to the breaking point.
“As humans, we are very good at reading cues; we are incredibly attentive to interpersonal phenomena,” says Amy Edmondson, who studies psychological safety at Harvard. “We have a place in our brain that’s always worried about what people think of us, especially higher-ups. As far as our brain is concerned, if our social system rejects us, we could die. Given that our sense of danger is so natural and automatic, organizations have to do some pretty special things to overcome that natural trigger.” The key to creating psychological safety, as Pentland and Edmondson emphasize, is to recognize how deeply obsessed our unconscious brains are with it. A mere hint of belonging is not enough; one or two signals are not enough. We are built to require lots of signaling, over and over. This is why a sense of belonging is easy to destroy and hard to build. The dynamic evokes the words of Texas politician Sam Rayburn: “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”
There is always something provisional about a decision to stop doing something until you have actually replaced it with something else. A new beginning “ratifies” the ending.
In the cultures I visited, I didn’t see many feedback sandwiches. Instead, I saw them separate the two into different processes. They handled negatives through dialogue, first by asking if a person wants feedback, then having a learning-focused two-way conversation about the needed growth. They handled positives through ultraclear bursts of recognition and praise. The leaders I spent time with shared a capacity for radiating delight when they spotted behavior worth praising. These moments of warm, authentic happiness functioned as magnetic north, creating clarity, boosting belonging, and orienting future action.
When another company acquires yours, clarify your team’s purpose and improve its functioning to maximize the chances that when the dust clears, it will be viewed as essential to the success of the acquiring company.
arriving in the Promised Land. Just as you marked the endings at the start of transition, you need to mark the beginning at the finish of transition. The timing may seem a little arbitrary because there are always loose ends to be tied up. But when you feel that the majority of your people are emerging from the wilderness and that a new purpose, a new system, and a new sense of identity have been established, you’ll do well to take time to celebrate that the transition is over.
Ensure Quick Successes The neutral zone takes a heavy toll on most people’s self-confidence because it is a period of lowered productivity and diminished feelings of competence. It may also, if it resonates with past difficulties in a person’s life, activate serious problems of low self-esteem. For that reason people are likely to need some fairly quick successes if they are to return to their former effectiveness.
Misplaced faith in the picture’s power to make a transition happen is encouraged by a misunderstanding that is common among people who design change projects. Such people typically go through their transitions before they launch the changes, while they’re still struggling with the problems and searching for solutions. By the time they are ready to announce the change, they have long since put their endings and their neutral zone behind them, and now they’re ready for a new beginning. But they forget that middle management is probably just entering the neutral zone and that most workers have not even made their endings yet.
To make a new beginning, in other words, people need the Four P’s: the purpose, a picture, the plan, and a part to play. For any particular individual, one or sometimes two of these P’s will predominate. Your own path into the future probably emphasizes one of these Four P’s—and minimizes or even omits others. As a result, you will tend to stress your own preference(s) when you communicate with others. You may naturally assume that others approach beginnings the way you do, but that isn’t necessarily so. People are really different—they aren’t just “defective” versions of yourself. So it is important to remember to cover all four of these bases—purpose, picture, plan, and part—when you talk about the new beginning you’re trying to help people make.
You may discover that people have trouble understanding the purpose because they do not have a realistic idea of where the organization really stands and what its problems are. In that case, you need to “sell the problems” before you try to sell a solution to those problems. If that wasn’t done during the ending phase—when it should have been done—now is the time to provide answers to these questions: What is the problem? What is the situation that requires this change to solve it? Who says so, and on what evidence? What would occur if no one acted to solve this problem? And what would happen to us if that occurred?
As scientists have pointed out, the Allen Curve follows evolutionary logic. For the vast majority of human history, sustained proximity has been an indicator of belonging—after all, we don’t get consistently close to someone unless it’s mutually safe. Studies show that digital communications also obey the Allen Curve; we’re far more likely to text, email, and interact virtually with people who are physically close. (One study found that workers who shared a location emailed one another four times as often as workers who did not, and as a result they completed their projects 32 percent faster.)
