chapter 14

Chapter 14: The Business of Change and Conflict



Significant organizational change occurs, for example, when an organization changes its overall strategy for success, adds or removes a major section or practice, and/or wants to change the very nature by which it operates. It also occurs when an organization evolves through various life cycles, just like people must successfully evolve through life cycles. For organizations to develop, they often must undergo significant change at various points in their development. That's why the topic of organizational change and development has become widespread in communications about business, organizations, leadership and management.
Leaders and managers continually make efforts to accomplish successful and significant change. Some are very good at this effort (probably more than we realize), while others continually struggle and fail. That's often the difference between people who thrive in their roles and those that get shuttled around from job to job, ultimately settling into a role where they're frustrated and ineffective.

When people are confronted with the need or opportunity to change, especially when it's 'enforced', as they see it, by the organization, they can become emotional. So can the managers who try to manage the change. Diffusing the emotional feelings, taking a step back, encouraging objectivity, are important to enabling sensible and constructive dialogue. To this end, managers and trainers can find it helpful to use analogies to assist themselves and other staff to look at change in a more detached way. Strong resistance to change is often rooted in deeply conditioned or historically reinforced feelings. Patience and tolerance are required to help people in these situations to see things differently.

There are several types of conflicts: data conflicts, relationship conflicts, conflicts over values, conflicts regarding resources, conflicts about past history, conflicts about structure, and psychological conflicts. A preliminary step in resolving conflict is to understand what the conflict is actually about. Having a clear picture of what the issues are reduces the chance of a mismatch between the problem and the solution.