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The Building Blocks of Organizational Psychology, Part 1

Overcoming the fear of change

Kelly Graves
Thu, 03/26/2015 - 12:09
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As a consultant and trainer specializing in the field of organizational psychology, I’ve come to realize that certain psychological conditions that affect individuals also apply to companies as a whole. That makes sense because, after all, a company is nothing but a collection of people.

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In this series of articles, I’ll demonstrate how some of these common conditions manifest themselves in organizations, and how change agents can work in overcoming them to foster better communication and ensure higher levels of quality.

Overcoming resistance

To kick off this series, I’d like to focus on one of the primary emotional blocks that the change agent must confront: The deep-seated fear of and resistance to the very act of change itself. Although Darwin’s theory of natural selection played out over the course of hundreds of millions of years, the world of business evolves at a much quicker pace. Therefore, I think we need to augment Darwin’s theory to read as follows: Survival of the fittest in business comes to those who are able to adapt and change quickly and effectively in spite of psychological, business and/or environmental obstacles.

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Comments

Submitted by dvanputten on Thu, 03/26/2015 - 09:28

Overcome Vs Eliminate

I propose that a more optimal approach would be to eliminate fear instead of trying to get individuals to overcome fear. Why overcome something that is destructive? Why not get rid of the casue instead of overcoming the effect?

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Submitted by scott.printz@d… on Fri, 03/27/2015 - 09:13

In reply to Overcome Vs Eliminate by dvanputten

Overcome vs. Eliminate

Amen to that.

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Submitted by Kelly Graves on Sat, 03/28/2015 - 14:29

In reply to Overcome Vs Eliminate by dvanputten

Overcome fear VS Elimination

If I am understanding you correctly, you propose employees or, perhaps leaders, eliminate fear within themselves or others. While this is the ultimate goal we must remember that fear is a normal human emotion like “love.” One cannot simply “eliminate,” remove or legislate fear out of people. Fear “emerges” within a human being when faced with experiences that can harm emotionally, physically or monetarily. Therefore, the obvious choice is to do the opposite of what average human logic would suggest. One must turn and face the fear in order to overcome it.  For instance:

  1. When John VP of marketing is in executive meetings with Frank the CEO, John always hedges a bit and doesn’t provide all of his ideas because Frank has shot him down in the past. There may be many reasons for this but the only way for the duo to get the best ideas and the subsequent best marketing plans out to the potential customer base is for John to work through his fear with Frank. If they do not “work through this” most discussions will result in substandard plans and/or poor execution.

    1. I handled this situation with these two executives a few months back. I had the trust of both so the three of us sat in a room together with them sitting face to face. I had them discuss the dynamic between them and then in an attempt to “extinguish” this dynamic I told Frank the CEO to chew out John for five seconds. When Frank was finished I asked John to chew out Frank for five seconds. At first John could not but Frank and I encouraged John and he finally submitted against all of his inner fear of reprisals from this authority figure (which were totally in his head. Frank was a trustworthy CEO). John did it and there was silence then nervous laughter and then normal laughter. We did this a few more times with general chewing and/or cussing. This broke all the rules but that was the point, sometimes we must break old paradigms that do not work for us anymore. In the end, this was very powerful because the real problem was with John’s fear of authority, or rather, his need for approval from authority, which may have served him well when he was ten or in one of his old positions but not in this organization.  

    2. Next we discussed Frank’s style of dialogue and his need to argue ideas in an attempt to gain the best from his team. I had both of them "teach each other" about how they viewed “heated discussions” and I reframed this as "passion" not "anger." We made huge strides in helping John significantly reduce his fear of authority and John taught Frank how to fight fair as an authority figure.

I hope this response and my example helped clarify this a bit. Thank you again for the question.

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