Change and adoption
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8 min read
Key findings
Four conditions recur where a programme stalls in the middle: unchanged targets, unchanged decision rights, no released time and no answers.
Researchers attribute resistance to change more often to the situation than to the person.
Participation accounted for 31 per cent of the variation in resistance to change in Lines's study.
Adoption shows in the count of decisions taken at manager level under the new arrangement.
Middle managers ask what will happen to them first, and they ask it for their teams as well as themselves.
Middle managers resist change when a programme adds work, leaves their targets unchanged and gives them no answers to pass on to their teams.
The resistance takes the form of slow decisions, postponed team briefings and questions sent upwards.
It is a reasonable response to those conditions.
Most explanations of a stalled programme blame the middle layer and repeat the message more loudly.
A diagnosis of the conditions is more useful, because the sponsor can change the conditions.
What Middle Manager Resistance Looks Like
Middle managers rarely oppose a change openly, because they are accountable for delivering it.
The resistance appears as a set of behaviours, and each one is easy to defend.
Team briefings are delayed, or delivered without the programme material
Decisions the programme needs are escalated instead of made
Existing targets are defended in reviews as if nothing had changed
Workshops are attended and nothing follows
Questions from teams are forwarded to HR without a view
A sponsor who sees these behaviours across a whole function is looking at a pattern in the conditions.
The individuals are seldom the cause.
Why The Label Misleads
Choi and Ruona review the research on resistance to change.
They report that researchers attribute it more often to the situation than to the person.
They cite Kotter's observation that employees often understand a new vision and want it to happen.
The obstacles sit in structures and systems such as performance evaluation, compensation and succession planning.
Those systems are not aligned with the new behaviour, and they make people choose between the vision and their own self-interest.
Choi and Ruona describe a second effect, which concerns the change agents.
When change agents expect resistance, they look for it and read ordinary behaviour as confirmation.
Change agents ask how the change will get accomplished.
Recipients ask what will happen to them.
Middle managers ask the second question first, and they ask it for their teams as well as themselves.
A programme that answers only the first question meets silence from the layer that has to act.
The Structural Squeeze
Four conditions recur where a programme stalls in the middle.
Each can be checked in documents and calendars.
Unchanged targets. The manager's objectives still reward last year's priorities, so every hour given to the programme is taken from the scorecard
Unchanged decision rights. The programme needs decisions at manager level, and the approval limits still send them upwards
No released time. The programme adds briefings, training and reporting, and no existing task has been stopped
No answers. Teams ask about roles, timing and workload, and the manager has nothing to add to the announcement
Middle managers absorb all four at once.
They sit between the executives who set the change and the teams who experience it.
Each condition belongs to the sponsor.
An HR business partner cannot change a target, an approval limit or a workload.
The useful contribution is to show the sponsor which condition is holding the change.
A Worked Example
Consider a hypothetical insurer that introduces a new claims system.
Team leaders are asked to move their teams onto it during one quarter.
The sponsor reports that training is complete and only a third of claims are handled on the new system.
HR reviews the four conditions with a dozen team leaders.
Their targets still include claims closed per week, with no adjustment for the slower handling in the first months on a new system.
The system requires a supervisor to approve any override.
Team leaders' authority stops below that level, so overrides queue for a senior manager.
Weekly reporting on the old system continues alongside the new reporting.
Teams ask whether their jobs change, and team leaders have been told to say only that the programme is going ahead.
A team leader can change none of the four conditions, and the sponsor holds three of them.
HR takes three requests to the sponsor.
The weekly closure target is suspended for migrating teams for two quarters.
The override limit is raised for team leaders.
The old report ends on a stated date.
The fourth condition goes to the HR director, who commits to a dated answer on roles.
Six weeks later HR counts claims handled on the new system each week, team by team.
The Squeeze Audit
The audit takes four checks, each against evidence that already exists.
Targets: read the objectives of ten managers in one function and count how many mention the change
Decision rights: list the five decisions the change depends on and check the delegation of authority for each
Time: add up the hours the programme asks of a manager in a typical week, and note which existing task was stopped
Answers: collect the last twenty questions teams asked and mark which ones the manager could answer
Report the result to the sponsor as four rows, with the number found in each row.
A count of ten objectives with none mentioning the change is harder to dispute than a description of morale.
Initiative In The Middle Layer
Ong and Ashford summarise research showing that middle managers do not usually wait for strategy to arrive from above.
Dutton and Ashford found that they often take the initiative to gain attention for issues they think matter.
They named the behaviour issue-selling.
Managers who sell issues upwards are capable of engaging with a change they think is worth the effort.
When the same managers go quiet on a programme, the silence says something about how it was set up.
Participation is the best documented remedy.
Lines measured five outcomes of participation in a strategic change.
Participation accounted for 31 per cent of the variation in resistance, the highest of the five.
The practical request is to seat three or four middle managers in the design of the rollout sequence.
They join before the sequence is fixed.
A count of ten objectives with none mentioning the change is harder to dispute than a description of morale.
Threat, Fairness And Certainty
Scarlett explains why losses on these conditions are felt strongly.
She writes that the threat response kicks in faster than the reward response.
It is much stronger and lasts longer.
A vague worry about status therefore outweighs a well-argued case for the new structure.
Fairness matters more during change.
Scarlett notes that sensitivity to fairness is heightened.
Feeling that others have an unfair advantage activates the brain's pain network.
Exceptions granted quietly to one unit tend to become the story of the whole programme.
The rules on exceptions are best published.
Uncertainty carries a cost of its own.
In the fMRI research she cites, more ambiguity in a decision means more activity in the amygdala.
A programme rarely knows its outcome.
It can still supply certainty about process with three commitments.
Name the date of the next decision, and make it on that date
List what will not change, which is usually more than anyone has written down
List what is still open, and name who decides it
The Conversation With The Sponsor
Sponsors usually respond to a stall by repeating the message and asking managers to find the time.
A more useful response is a request the sponsor can grant this month.
Bring four items, each with the executive who owns it.
One target suspended or reweighted for two quarters, with the person who can change the objectives
One decision moved down to manager level, with the delegation of authority amended
One recurring task stopped, with the date it stops
One question answered in writing, with the date the answer will be known
Sponsors often reply that managers should simply prioritise the programme.
The answer is in the objectives document.
Managers are assessed at the next review on last year's measures.
One sentence works in the meeting. The managers hold last year's targets plus a new programme, so which target comes down, and until when?
What Managers Need In Hand
Most programmes give managers a slide deck and a script.
Four other things cost less and help more.
Written answers to the six questions every team asks, on job changes, timing, extra work, what stops, who decides and where to ask
Permission to say that the answer is still unknown, with the date it will be known
A forum where managers get their own questions answered before their team asks them
One decision that the manager controls, so that there is something to offer the team
A manager with nothing to offer and no permission to admit ignorance will avoid the team.
The avoidance is then read as opposition.
Measuring The Stall
Change progress is usually reported as milestones completed, which says little about adoption.
Four indicators are cheap to collect and hard to dispute.
Questions arriving from managers, and the share answered within a week
Days from the executive briefing to the team briefing, by manager
Exceptions requested, and how many were granted
Decisions taken at manager level under the new arrangement
The last one measures adoption directly.
A change is adopted when people take decisions under the new arrangement without asking whether it applies.
Counting those decisions in three teams gives the sponsor a better picture than a readiness survey.
The same four indicators answer the question of momentum.
Momentum returns when the first requested condition is met and managers can see it.
The count of local decisions is the first number to move.
Limits Of The Diagnosis
The four conditions are a practitioner's checklist, drawn from the research above and not tested as a scale.
Some managers hold back for reasons the audit will not find, such as disagreement with the direction of the change.
The audit separates those cases from the ones the conditions explain.
It does so with evidence that a manager can see and contest.
Where the conditions come from formal rules, changing culture by changing rules sets out how to audit and change them.
Related Failure Patterns
A stalled rollout often has a second cause.
The pilot succeeded under conditions that the rollout does not have.
The pattern is set out in why pilots do not scale.
A restructure adds its own version of the squeeze, because managers hold the announcement without the answers.
The sequence is covered in how to announce a restructure.
Where the second condition is the binding one, decision rights inside a team covers how to settle who decides what.
Where The Tools Sit
Trusted Talent Advisor covers the adoption sequence and the conditions work in its change and adoption component.
The conversation that resets a sponsor's account of the problem is in its stakeholder conversation toolkit.
The template pack includes the adoption tracker and the conditions audit.
Sources
1. Scarlett, H. Neuroscience for Organizational Change: An Evidence-based Practical Guide to Managing Change. Kogan Page.
2. Choi, M. and Ruona, W. E. A. Individual Readiness for Organizational Change, in Leonard, H. S., Lewis, R., Freedman, A. M. and Passmore, J. (eds) The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of the Psychology of Leadership, Change, and Organizational Development. Wiley-Blackwell.
3. Lines, R. The Influence of Participation in Strategic Change: Resistance, Organizational Commitment and Change Goal Achievement. Journal of Change Management.
4. Ong, M. and Ashford, S. J. Issue-Selling: Proactive Efforts toward Organizational Change, in Parker, S. K. and Bindl, U. K. (eds) Proactivity at Work. Routledge.
5. Kotter, J. P. Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. Harvard Business Review.
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Questions this answers
Why do middle managers resist change?
They usually keep last year's targets, lack decision rights the change needs, receive no released time and have no answers for their teams. The resistance is a reasonable response to those conditions.
Why do change programmes stall?
Programmes stall when the sponsor leaves the four conditions in place: targets, approval limits, workload and unanswered team questions. Repeating the message addresses none of them.
What is the role of middle managers in change management?
They translate the change into their team's work, answer the team's questions and take the local decisions the change depends on. They can only do that with a changed scorecard, delegated decisions and released time.
How do you get middle managers on board with change?
Seat three or four of them in the rollout design before the sequence is fixed, and ask the sponsor to suspend one target, delegate one decision, stop one task and answer one question in writing.
Why does change fail in the middle of the organisation?
The middle layer sits between executives who set the change and teams who experience it, and absorbs the conflicts in targets, decision rights, time and answers all at once.
How do you sustain momentum in a change programme?
Track questions answered within a week, days from executive to team briefing, exceptions granted and decisions taken at manager level. Momentum returns when managers see the first requested condition met.
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