THE BIG IDEA
Those following along at home will know that I’ve been deep in exploration of my Process Design battle scars this year
(as always, healthy reflection is time well-spent!)
and I particularly enjoyed teasing out the threads of resistance to process design that I’d experienced time and time again, and beginning to put a language frame around them – inspired, as always, by my formative learning from Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting (1981) – to enable “Naming The Resistance”.
To paraphrase Block:
Resistance is an emotion that has found no means of expression
Said differently, the resistance we meet is typically a reflection of an unexpressed fear and we can often find ourself firefighting symptoms (the FIGHT or FLIGHT) while missing the root cause (what’s scary and why).
It’s always worth the reminder that, in HR, resistance tries to slow things down, or even bring them to a complete halt (got to maintain the status quo!) and we can use Naming The Resistance as our early warning system.
For me, when resistance in HR breaks the surface, it boils down to 5 “food groups”:
- Change what’s changing
- Boil the ocean
- Defend the current state
- Over involvement
- Designing to protect
(there is a 6th, but it’s very specific to process design itself, so I’m omitting it here!)
And, for sure, like a good Venn diagram, all of these can find some level of overlap. Still, by considering each in isolation, we can hope to spot the tell-tale indicators of which resistance play is in action.
I go into each of these food groups in some detail in the book, but here we’ll look at some of the warning signs you’ll experience:
Change what’s changing
This looks like people assessing the appropriateness or content of any step based not on how it contributes to the process, but on how difficult it will be to get people to do it, or how painful it will be to get them to change their behavior. So, instead of designing the process well, we see a push to compromise the process up front. As an aside, historically, this is how so many HR processes end up Dead-On-Arrival out of the gate.
Boil the ocean
Oh, how HR just loves to play this game!
In Boiling The Ocean, the process slated for design/redesign is lined up, and everyone is in vociferous agreement that it’s a great piece of work to do. So good, in fact, that we should handle <insert ancillary process here> at the same time.
Before you know it, the single process design that was a) manageable; and b) cleared for take-off, is now bloated and bogged down in political infighting and quicksand.
Defend the current state
This resistance almost speaks for itself, and it’s rife in HR; welcome to the voice of the status quo!
The game here is for the resistor to avoid coming clean with a “but I don’t want things to change” admission; that would never do!
Instead, the tactic is to vigorously explain the rationale and design decisions that went into the prior process design(s). This may even include discussing who was involved; it’s always fun to hear people argue on behalf of people who have long since retired or left the company; it can sound like you’re daring to rip down an historic monument!
Over involvement
This resistance has very overt, visible actions in the form of stuffing the process design team with representatives for different factions.
“We need an HR Business Partner from each division on the team…”
“Is recruiting represented?”
“What about a front-line supervisor?”
“Make sure IT is in the room…”
Before you know it, the team is 4 or 5 times as big as it needs to be and all those extra members aren’t doing anything to design the process, but instead are slowing things down, and vociferously describing how the new process won’t work for their group(s). Quite often, they’ll be giving voice to the other resistances we’ve already covered.
Designing to protect
There’s nothing worse than a process that is sub-optimal simply because it’s been designed around a person, role or function. In essence, we’re back to a red flag I describe in the book: Are you involved because you’re justified… Or justified because you’re involved?
But there’s an added spin here, in that the process is actually assuming the involvement of a person, role or function in the future state.
Most often this happens because the process owner/deliverer is involved directly in design, and thus a subtle, unspoken “sacred cow” is brought into the room: avoidance of job loss.
TRY THIS
This is the part of the article where I reach into my upended top hat and, with a flourish, reveal a magic wand…
Sorry, ain’t happening!
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the fact that the world expects an easy solution to resistance is an almost greater problem than the resistance itself.
There are techniques, of course
(I already mentioned one: Naming The Resistance – and, once again, I highly recommend Block’s writing on this)
Beyond this, my primary strategy is one of healthy involvement of stakeholders as Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) – from both HR and the Business – in successive, iterative rounds of process refinement that build upon a clean-slate starting process design.
I categorize these SMEs into 3 families:
- Process SMEs – people who have expertise in the process itself
- Stakeholder SMEs – people that represent stakeholder factions, both directly and indirectly affected by the process
- Functional SMEs – people that represent functional intersections with the process
The beauty of such an involvement strategy, when done well, is that it plants the seeds of implementation long before a single change is made. Said differently, is your process implementation more or less likely to succeed if your HR colleagues already feel some level of ownership of the new process?
USE THIS
I cover involvement of SMEs in great detail in chapter 5 of the book: Refining The Process.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
The skill in dealing with resistance is to:
- Be able to identify when resistance is taking place
- View resistance as a natural process, and a sign that you are on target
- Support the client in expressing the resistance directly
- Not take the expression of the resistance personally or as an attack on you or your competence
~ Peter Block, Flawless Consulting (1981)
