Organizational change is complex and painful process. Working as consultant in change management project, dealing with middle managers fears and resistance, we find some programmatic way to handle this problem and makes change process less difficulty and less painful.
Middle managers, when they reach organization hierarch of middle level, must have been spent many years work from bottom and then reach middle age. Therefore, their ability to learn and adjust to change is waken by what they have gained from organization: prestige, unique skill, career stability and well compensated salary. More importantly, middle managers represent empirical organization culture and norm, which strongly influence organization operation, and their attitude and emotion to change have to be taken into seriously consideration.
When get top manager sign-off on change management project, before really lunch project, some tacit and strategies must be designed. Talking with top managers in organization and fully understand change direction, studying middle managers’ files and archives, helps consultant to understand indirectly what people they will have to be changed and design detail plan of diagnose. Understand where dose fears and resistance come from is preconditions of strategy layout. Meetings and facilitation must be carefully design to deal directly with root cause of fear. For consultant in change management project, understand their role and duty is also important. Remember that consultant is consultant, not decision maker but proponent, whose duty includes suggestion and facilitating. Therefore, consultant cannot solve directly of all impediments merging from change process and some part of decision have to be turn over to top leaders. No matter what methodology used in change process, middle managers’ emotion toward change must be careful control and even manipulated. In some case, using appreciate acquire can reduce resistance and more easily involve middle managers reach consensus about change purposes and goals.
In change management program judging by nature and habit, middle managers hold with predisposition of resistance change process, if deal with correctly, consultant can even make change process smoothly and enhance organization’ productivity and efficiency.