Karen: 0:09

Welcome to Employee Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Paul: 0:16

I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:17

And I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:19

Each episode, we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Is this change done?"

Karen: 0:29

So this is one of these places where we could talk about any kind of change. Whether it's the change from one Zoom meeting to the next, or a change of bringing a whole new team together to do a job, or a change of moving into community together. So from very small changes to very large changes. What we've been talking about – Paul and I, before we hit record on this – is the tendency to focus on the logistics, the tangible parts of change, and think that because we've made that change, we are done changing and have arrived in the new place and are functioning in the new way. When in fact, it turns out that having the tangible stuff done doesn't actually finish it. And just as a quick example, here, the simplest one is what's happened to us all when we've gone to Zoom meetings instead of in person meetings. And this piece about I can, in two seconds, go from talking to Paul in a conversational podcast kind of way to being a consultant with a group full of clients needing an entirely different kind of energy. And it is literally seconds in between, so I don't get to change the part of myself I'm engaging, the part of my intelligence I'm engaging, the persona that I'm showing up as – all that stuff that we adjust when we shift from one environment to another. I don't have the walk down the hall or the drive to the office or whatever to make that shift. And so what we're noticing is, tangibly, yep, I change the zoom screen, I'm in the new call, I'm seeing the new faces. But mentally, emotionally, I'm not yet in the new place. And what we're suggesting here is that this happens with all kinds of changes.

Paul: 2:27

It absolutely does. And I think that's been a lot of people's experience. We often don't have the language to think about it, to talk about it that way to differentiate between the sort of situational, environmental, tangible part of it, and that personal, psychological mindset, how I think about it, how I experienced this, how I experience that new reality that I now find myself in and come to adjust and adapt to it. I often fall back on the work of William Bridges, who studied this sort of thing for a long time. And he differentiated between what he called the change, which is that tangible peace, and then the transition, which is that process that we go through, when we go from one meeting to another, when we're shifting what role we're in, when we start a new job. Day one, the tangible change has happened. We get an email address. We're on the payroll. We go through all that stuff, the logistics of day one. Now I am an employee of this company and I have this new title. And I don't necessarily think of myself that way. This happens with funny little things, too. I bought a new car a number of years ago, and I went from driving a Honda Fit, which is a small hatchback, where I used to look for the smallest parking space in the parking lot I could find. Because it was like I had my name on it. There'd be the two trucks parked on either side, and I'd be like doot-doot-doot find myself in. And I chose to make a change. I wanted to have more cargo space. I wanted to be able to take more people to things. And so I bought a minivan and it took me a good four to five months to – one – look for my car in the parking lot, and – two – to figure out how to operate it to figure out how to drive it, to figure out how to park it. I had to realize those weren't my parking spaces anymore. And so the tangible thing happened. One day, I was driving this one car to work. The next day I was driving a different one. I sold the other car. I didn't own it anymore. But the transition of me going from I drive this kind of car to drive this kind of car and that's how I how I approached the problems that need to solve. Like, it's a super simple example, but that happens with individuals all the time. With any type of change that we make. And where it gets even more complicated is when we're in groups, because we're all going to transition around the same change in different ways and at different speeds. And that's the thing that shows up in the space between.

Karen: 5:14

Yeah, and that space between gets really interesting when you're in different places. I think I was going straight to groups too, because of course, that's the work that we do. And thinking about, you know, the groups I work with are often moving together to be in community together. So that's the big transition. And they work for it for years anticipating it and being excited about it. But there is this piece of "Okay, now we're all living together, but we aren't yet in community mindset the way that we want to be. We don't yet have flows and systems and emotional comfort." And some of us will ease into that quickly, especially those who've made this sort of transition before. If somebody's lived in a more communal environment before or lived in a more communal space before they're going to have an easier time with it than someone who's never done that. So how big the changes is different for different people. But I think the place we want to try to focus here in the rest of this episode is, "How do we support each other?" So I know I'm not fully transitioned just because a change has happened. And and that affects everybody around me, that I'm not fully transitioned. And that I can assume that the people around me are in different stages of transition. At least that's a good place to start and get curious about. But I might guess that they are until I'm proven that they're not. As opposed to what we typically do, which is to say, "Okay, everybody's got their emails and their logins and their new desk and their pencil, and we're all set, so the change is done. Go! Ee're back to regular function." That tends to be the default, and I think what we're saying today is that the better, wiser default is everybody's in some stage of transition. They're not all in the same place, and we probably want to get thoughtful about how we support the full arrival into the place where we're headed.

Paul: 7:11

Because going back to our question around, "Is this change done?" it's not done until everybody in the group is really done with it. But where we run into trouble is where "I feel like I'm done with the change, and therefore you should be too. And I don't know why you're still acting as though we're still in this old environment." And that's where that irritation and frustration can come through. So I think part of the way we support that change is recognizing that – one – that this happens, that we're likely to be in different spots around and by making people aware of that, and normalizing the frustration that comes from the fact that people are in different spots, and helping people to see that that's just an artifact of the process. You and I are going to move through a transition around the exact same change at different rates and that has nothing to do with the fact that one of us is a bad person. It's just about who we are and what that particular change speaks to in our experience, in our lives, in our values and things like that. We're just going to experience it differently. The fact that I might go through that and be done with the change faster doesn't mean I'm better. It just means I'm different. There is no right speed or wrong speed. There's saying that I've heard before, which is that change is like driving on a on a one-lane road. If someone is going slower than you they're a moron and if they're going faster than you, they're crazy. What we really would love as if everyone moved at the same rate that we did, that we felt comfortable. And it doesn't happen. So I think the first step to supporting groups in that is just recognizing that we're not going to move at the same speed and that that's actually okay. It's going to lead to tension. But that tension is normal and we have important roles to play in supporting each other in order to help us all eventually move through it more effectively.

Karen: 9:20

I think one of those roles that is also way at the beginning in all this is paying attention to the fact that change when it's happening and transition when it's happening are costly. They reduce our capacity. They reduce our efficiency. They reduce our creativity and our intelligence and our cognitive abilities. All of that gets taken up. I think we see it tangibly in the change side. "Okay, people don't have time to do their regular tasks because they're putting books in boxes and moving someplace." Or we don't expect somebody to get a lot of their regular job done on their first day because we know they're going to be down in HR setting up their email accounts. Those things we see and recognize, but the emotional and and psychological space of transition is at least as taxing. So I think one thing is to expect that when we're in a transition space, we're not going to perform as well. We're not going to perform as well relationally. So that's the tension you're talking about. We're likely to be more testy with each other. We're likely to have more frustration. And we're not going to perform as well with whatever it is we're trying to do. We might be more successful with tangible, "move this thing to that place," or some of those kinds of things, maybe. But as soon as we're cognitively or emotionally engaged, or if we're gonna get people to prioritize, even to prioritize tasks, for example, that's a really complex thinking thing. And we're just not going to have the same energy, the same capacity around it. Because transition itself takes up a lot. Integrating new ways of being, integrating – I mean even remembering this is the car I'm in when I used to be in that one. And while you're trying to remember, which kind of parking space you needed, we're also having to remember where the blinker is now. As you're gonna move into it, and how this brake feels compared to that brake. A lot of things that just were automatic and didn't take any energy are now taking a ton of energy, not to mention the emotional... whatever grief there is around giving up what we were doing, whatever fear and anxiety there is about taking on a new thing. All of that is in the mix, and it takes resources.

Paul: 11:48

I want to point to two things that you mentioned in there in particular. One is the cognitive piece is really about the fact that our brands handle so much for us at an unconscious level. When we get familiar with things, there's just stuff that we we don't have to consciously think about. And when any of those things change, we now do have to consciously think about them. And that's where our cognitive capacity gets reduced. We're having to pay attention and think about things we didn't have to before. And so absolutely, that happens. And then the second thing you said, in there, it's really around the letting go. One of the things that happens in change is that there's three things that need to happen. We have to let go of what was. Even if we didn't like it, there is some degree of... we have to cognitively let it go. So we have to stop acting as though that is the case. But there's also often a degree of grief and mourning that we need to go through around a particular thing. When I left a job a while back, I chose to do that. I decided that this was not the place for me to be anymore. I found a new job that I was really excited about and I was very excited to be moving into that new role. And also, I had worked with some of those people for six, seven years, and worked very closely with them. There were a couple of people who I'd shared an office with for four years. And I missed that I had to let go of that so that I could make space for the new relationships that I needed to build with my new co-workers. And so I needed to not keep thinking about how my new co-workers weren't my old ones. I didn't need to completely forgot about them, but there was a part of it that I needed to let go of. So one of the things that's important is we need to figure out – and one of the ways that we can help people move through transitions is by helping them to let go of the things that they need or want to let go of. The other things that need to happen are we need to figure out how to work in this in this unknown new space, and then latch on to what the new status quo becomes. Because there's that gap between the way things were and the way things will be. There's that sort of where everyone's still figuring things out in the middle. And those transitions are kind of all overlapping at the same time. And so it's it's useful to start to think about what are the things that we can do to help a group and help people in the group move through those to experience the transition sort of more fully.

Karen: 14:29

One of those is to normalize the experience. To talk about it and to talk about the thing. Yeah, like, "Man, I turned left instead of right five times today." Those kinds of things, but to really normalize we're not going to be as productive as we normally would be, or as we're going to be a month, three months, six months from now. Things are going to be messy. And so it's both – certainly from leadership but really amongst each other – setting the expectation that things are going to be slower and messier and different and uncomfortable. And that's okay. And making space to talk about that. So that it's not just,"Oh, yeah, the leadership said it was okay to produce less. But actually, yeah. Used to be in a workday, I could get done five tasks. And today, I felt like I was struggling to do three." And just sharing – and this is the vulnerability piece of this, which comes up in every episode; there's always one. We often don't want to admit that we're not bulletproof. But we didn't get through this change with absolutely everything intact the way it was, just as productive as I ever was... we don't usually want to admit that. And what we want is to figure out how to create workspaces that are safe enough. And of course, the best thing we can do to make it safe for somebody else to talk about the struggle they're having is to talk about the struggle I'm having. And have that be just a really good shared space, both in the sort of casual water cooler, we're gonna laugh about it kind of conversations, but also, probably in some thoughtful designed, "How's the transition going for you?"

Paul: 16:16

One of the things you're pointing to there is something we come back to a lot is this idea of modeling useful behaviors. And so if you are in a space where it feels safe enough to you to be able to say,"Here are the struggles that I'm having," particularly if you're someone who isn't in any sort of position of authority in a group– one, it is safer for you to do it, and two, it's more meaningful for you to do it. Because you have, in some ways, less need to be vulnerable. But by you doing it, it demonstrates that it's useful. And then the other thing that is useful there is to model asking for help. And saying, "I'm struggling with this thing. I'm wondering, does anybody else have any ideas about what I might do with this thing?" Or if you have a specific ask, "I know it would make it easier for me – I know I would be able to make this transition a little more effectively, if someone could... Would anyone be willing to..." If you can actually formulate an ask around that. Because those are useful things that are good for people to be doing in that transition. To be doing the the self reflection of, "Where am I in this process? What am I struggling with? And then what would be useful for me?" Because since we each experience change differently, what is going to be helpful to each of us is going to be different. And we're the only ones who really have insight into that. And I think that's the problem – because I work a lot in organizations that are trying to mandate change, and they're trying to drive change and roll change out. And sometimes they think about,"What does our communication plan need to be? How do we help people move through this transition?" But what they really do is they decide, these are the things we're going to do. And anybody for whom that is not sufficient, those people are resistors. They're resisting this change. And so they're not engaging their curiosity. And so that's the other part. If you are trying to help a change happen, be vulnerable, ask for help. But also, if you can be genuinely curious about what other people would find useful, that helps the group move forward as well.

Karen: 18:33

And I think with that, you're alluding to communications and I do think that's another piece. As change is happening, the more that we can let people know what to expect. "On moving day, the lights in the bathroom aren't working. We're putting a few lanterns in there. Ee expect that it's going to get repaired two weeks from now." Whatever is the knowledge around what's coming. Or moving into a new community, "We expect that some of your units will have construction flaws. This will be the process we follow. This is roughly the timeline we'd expect for that." Whatever the things are, that the more we can communicate the things we do know, that really helps reduce the anxiety and that reduces some of that cost of transition that we're talking about.

Paul: 19:24

And the other thing that you said in there that is really

important: 19:27

You talked about we provide this information. But we also said and here's what you can do about it. Here's how you can report the problem. What we're doing there is we're giving people a structure to engage with the change, which gives them a feeling of autonomy and of control. Because that's the other thing that really happens in change is we can often feel change is happening to us. And so by giving people – one – even just a sense of how to engage, that can rebuild that sense of "Okay, I actually have some agency," and – two – it can actually help the change to steer more effectively. Change is happening all these places, throughout your company, throughout your organization, throughout your community, throughout your team, you really want people to be sensing how it's going and providing that information back so that you know what additional things you need to be dealing with. So you need to engage people in the process. And so it actually helps them to have less anxiety about what's going on, because they have information and agency. And it helps the change to go more effectively, because the people who are helping to guide the change have more information about what's actually going on and they're empowering people to do something about it. So it's not just those three people trying to steer everything.

Karen: 20:43

And the caveat I would give to that is that sometimes you actually can't give autonomy and you can't give agency and being explicit about that makes it way more tolerable. "We imagine you would like this, and this and this, and it's gonna be two weeks before we can make that happen." That clarity about and the context around it, a little bit of why, that kind of thing. As opposed to everybody gets there everyday thinking,"Okay, this is gonna be the day it's fixed," and it's still not, and they don't care about us, and they're not listening to us. Uncertainty is not our friend. Uncertainty is the thing we're experiencing in change. That's what it's all about. And we don't like it. It messes with our nervous system. It messes with our sense of safety. It messes with our relationships. So if we can reduce the uncertainty that helps a lot.

Paul: 21:35

Yeah, the one of things I say often is we can't be certain of what's going to happen, but we can be clear about what we're doing. And that's, I think, what you're really pointing to is providing information. And sometimes it's just clear constraints. It's like, this is what it is. Because the degree to which we're able to reduce the ambiguity in that stuff, that means our capacity is freed up to deal with all of the other ambiguity that we need to deal with. Let's not make everything unclear. We know there are going to be some things that can't be clear. So let's be as clear as we can about the other things, because that helps us process that and work through. Those three things – information; a sense of structure, of clarity of how we're gonna go through this; and then the other thing that we've talked about before, which is really empathy – those are the things that I find really useful when I'm when I'm working with groups and working with people that are going through any sort of change or transition to help them to move forward. It gets to some fundamental human needs that we have that when we're going through transition. Any guidelines that I tend to give people about what to do to help people to process a change, to go through transition, usually comes down to those three things: information, structure, and empathy.

Karen: 23:00

Makes a lot of sense. And just tracking where we started which is recognize that change – the tangible change – and the emotional, psychological transition are not the same thing. They travel together, but not at the same pace. So you'll if you have one, you'll need the other, but they're not going to happen at the same pace. And they're also not going to happen at the same pace for each individual in the system. So there's the work each of us can do individually to be aware of that and and then what we can do systemically. And what we're saying we can do for each other and in the space between each other – and certainly with leadership and folks in leadership roles guiding the way– one thing is to expect difference. Expect to lower productivity in most ways for a while and expect that that's going to last longer for some people than for others. Normalize that. Normalize the struggle, the uncertainty, the frustration that comes with that. And normalize it partly by sharing your own experiences of it so that people get the idea that this is a safe place to share that stuff. And then think about ways that we can decrease the stress and strain that's going on. And that's that last piece you were giving us about give people information, give people structure and give people empathy, so that they can make it through the transition and not just the change. And then the change can be done.

Paul: 24:29

Well, that's gonna do it for us for today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 24:34

And I'm Karen Gimnig. And this has been Employing Differences.