Friday, December 15, 2006

Still Awake - Thinking




My guardian angel dropped me a line and as always, made me think differently about the anger I was feeling. Interestingly enough, I know about this and from my Consulting days - especially when undertaking major cultural change or business change, staff can go through one or all of these stages.

It is based on the Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle albeit that no one actually dies. It Has a series of stages:
  • Shock
  • Denial
  • Anger
  • Bargaining
  • Depression
  • Testing
  • Acceptance
It is actually quite a complex subject and no one size fits all. Some people get stuck in the stages, some get the stages out of order and flit backwards and forwards between them, some miss out stages altogether. It was (and indeed still is) my job to ensure that staff going through a change at work were mentored through the change and that things like the shock itself was softened, that there was good communication that we could use the bargaining time to get acceptance and buy in and by minimising any time in the depression phase we could make the cycle as short as possible. The reason we were trained in this technique was that some people got to the depression or anger state and just got deeper into them without coming through the cycle. We also had to make the cycle as fast as possible and as manageable as possible as we would inevitably lose production. In the early 90s we were going through massive changes and huge losses of jobs and so we had to be careful about how we communicated, managed and delivered the changes.

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