A client of mine once told me, “We can’t refer to our work as a transformation—everyone will tune out.” This wasn’t the first time I had heard this reservation, and it still persists today.
Transformation, it seems, is the new four-letter word in organizations. It has become code for the long, frustrating, and unpredictable road employees will travel as a company makes changes.
If you work in corporate America, you’re probably already familiar with “transformation,” or you may be in the middle of one right now. These days, organizations must scramble to keep their business ahead of—or at least in line with—customer demand and our rapidly evolving digital world. Therefore, projects are spun up, consultants are hired, and at a certain point, everyone acknowledges that there are several large-scale process, technology, and culturally driven changes happening at once, and they’re all lumped together as a “transformation.”
Then we start to hear familiar language:
Leaders: “We will get through this together, this is a journey.”
Managers: “Once this is over, things will settle down.”
Individual contributors: “I can’t wait for this to be over.”
Statements like these all imply an eventual end date. But long timelines, broad objectives, and rarely fully-measured results contribute to these feelings of anxiety and frustration. Employees are asked to accept ambiguity and adapt to constantly changing environments, but it’s human nature to want stability.
Since so much of human nature points back to our childhood, I often reflect on my undergrad courses in early childhood development when helping organizations mitigate this anxiety and frustration. The way our basic needs are met as infants can lead to different types of parental bonds, and subsequently, different types of behavior. For example, when a parent is sometimes nurturing, but at other times dismissive of basic needs, this inconsistency leads to what's called insecure ambivalent attachment. The child then tries to cope with unpredictability through anxious, angry behavior.
The relationship between an organization and an employee is not the same as a parent and child, but we do expect organizations to make good decisions and meet certain needs. Employees can start to show those same primal behaviors of anxiety and anger when they’re unsure about what will happen next, something especially common in times of big change.
But transformations, as well as uncertainty and anxious employees, are not going anywhere soon. So what are we to do? Faced with this puzzle, I remembered the popular phrase “happiness is not a destination.” This scientifically backed idea asserts that happiness doesn't come with more achievements, but rather through a state of mind. It starts with looking inward, being present, and taking ownership of your own circumstances. Yet, when we walk into the office this approach often goes out the window. People are quick to look up the hierarchy and across to other teams to successfully “get through” a transformation...when everything will be happy and normal again.
So what if we approached transformations like happiness? What if we stopped emphasizing big timelines and outcomes and started teaching ways to develop a transformative state of mind? It sounds idealistic, but what would you do differently as a leader? As an employee?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Georgia May is a Pioneer Connection Director at Pioneer Management Consulting, a business strategy, business operations, data analytics and organizational effectiveness management firm based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
