Negotiating Through Resistance
Although resistance is typically seen as having a negative effect on change in organisations, there is another way of thinking about it. In fact, resistance can have an extremely positive impact on change projects as it provides powerful information on how change is resonating with those affected.
Throughout August, I have been exploring how resistance can be utilised effectively and, through negotiation, can be used to improve the outcome and success rate of your projects.
Exploring Needs
As discussed in my previous article, before you try to implement any change, you must identify a ‘need’ for change to happen. If there isn’t a need, or people do not see a need, they will resist it.
You might have a hypothesis that changes if needed, but you will have to go and talk to people to establish whether the need is really there. This process of exploring needs is critical as you determine the appetite for change and potentially uncover issues that you might not have been expecting. It’s at this early stage of exploration that you are first likely to meet resistance; this could come in the form of someone saying that they feel change isn’t needed or that the change needs to be different from your initial vision.
Understanding needs should be seen as an iterative process that will evolve and develop over time. It really is ‘an exploration’. It’s also likely to be a negotiation. It’s a spiral process of listening to issues and proposing solutions until those affected are fully brought into a new way of doing things. In each round of dialogue they may say “no” (an act of resistance) and bring up more problems, but each time you engage, plan and negotiate, you will get closer to a solution that will lead to the successful execution of a change project.
BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiation Agreement)
Sometimes you will just have to accept that the time is not right to try to push through the change as envisioned. Most likely that will be when an important stakeholder has the power to stop it from happening despite your best efforts to negotiate with them and meet their needs. If that’s the case, the question becomes what do you do instead? You need a BATNA; a Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement.
A BATNA might be finding a way to realise the benefits anticipated from the change in a different way. Or introducing a small element of the change to generate some support before moving to a next step. Or maybe there is a more radical BATNA: If the business needs the change to happen to achieve its goals, is a change in personnel needed before the change can be implemented?
Thinking through ATNAs and BATNAs as part of the change initiation process can be a powerful way of generating alternative solutions and having a plan for what you’ll do if the change can’t be made to happen.
Win-Win!
Most people think about negotiation as a win-lose situation, but this should not be the case. As a leader, you should instead work to achieve ‘win-win’ negotiations.
For example, if sales professionals consistently fail to use a CRM system in favour of their traditional way of keeping notes in their ‘black book’, you should work out how to meet the individual’s need to save time and the company’s need to have visibility of sales interactions. In this example the business could provide a smartphone app to allow salespeople to continue to take notes in their notepad and then scan it into the CRM system. As a basis of negotiation, this overcomes the resistance and results in a win-win situation.
