1/7/2024 0 Comments Reason comHelping people overcome their limitations to become more successful at work is at the very heart of effective management. After all, helping people overcome their limitations to become more successful at work is at the very heart of effective management. But in a sense, managers are psychologists. ![]() As you support your employees in unearthing and challenging their innermost assumptions, you may at times feel you’re playing the role of a psychologist. The goal of this exploration is solely to help them become more effective, not to find flaws in their work or character. If your employees are to engage in honest introspection and candid disclosure, they must understand that their revelations won’t be used against them. Indeed, some people will opt not to disrupt their immunity to change, choosing instead to continue their fruitless struggle against their competing commitments.Īs a manager, you must guide people through this exercise with understanding and sensitivity. And it requires people to admit to painful, even embarrassing, feelings that they would not ordinarily disclose to others or even to themselves. It asks people to call into question beliefs they’ve long held close, perhaps since childhood. On the contrary, it challenges the very psychological foundations upon which people function. The process may sound straightforward, but it is by no means quick or easy. In these pages, we’ll look at competing commitments in detail and take you through a process to help your employees overcome their immunity to change. Or you find that the person who won’t collaborate despite a passionate and sincere commitment to teamwork is equally dedicated to avoiding the conflict that naturally attends any ambitious team activity. You find out that the project leader who’s dragging his feet has an unrecognized competing commitment to avoid the even tougher assignment-one he fears he can’t handle-that might come his way next if he delivers too successfully on the task at hand. When you, as a manager, uncover an employee’s competing commitment, behavior that has seemed irrational and ineffective suddenly becomes stunningly sensible and masterful-but unfortunately, on behalf of a goal that conflicts with what you and even the employee are trying to achieve. The resulting dynamic equilibrium stalls the effort in what looks like resistance but is in fact a kind of personal immunity to change. ![]() Instead, even as they hold a sincere commitment to change, many people are unwittingly applying productive energy toward a hidden competing commitment. Resistance to change does not reflect opposition, nor is it merely a result of inertia. ![]() What’s going on? As organizational psychologists, we have seen this dynamic literally hundreds of times, and our research and analysis have recently led us to a surprising yet deceptively simple conclusion. ![]() An employee has the skills and smarts to make a change with ease, has shown a deep commitment to the company, genuinely supports the change-and yet, inexplicably, does nothing. In other cases, such resistance is far more puzzling. Sometimes it’s easy to see why-the employee fears a shift in power, the need to learn new skills, the stress of having to join a new team. Every manager is familiar with the employee who just won’t change.
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