What new roles, reporting relationships, or configurations of the teams do you need to develop to get through this time in the wilderness?
William Bridges, Susan Bridges in Managing Transitions
Managing Transitions
Highlight from ‘Managing Transitions’ by William Bridges, Susan Bridges
GRASS: Guilt, Resentment, Anxiety, Self-absorption, and Stress. These are the five real and measurable costs of not managing transition effectively. Remember them the next time people tell you there isn’t time to worry about the reactions of your employees to the latest plan for change. And help such people to see that not managing transition is really a shortcut that costs much more than it saves. For it leaves behind an exhausted and demoralized workforce at the very time when everyone agrees that the only way to be successful is to get more effort and more creativity out of the organization’s employees.
William Bridges, Susan Bridges in Managing Transitions
Highlight from ‘Managing Transitions’ by William Bridges, Susan Bridges
The task before you is therefore twofold: first, to get your people through this phase of transition in one piece; and second, to capitalize on all the confusion by encouraging them to be innovative.
William Bridges, Susan Bridges in Managing Transitions
Highlight from ‘Managing Transitions’ by William Bridges, Susan Bridges
The single biggest reason organizational changes fail is because no one has thought about endings or planned to manage their impact on people. Naturally concerned about the future, planners and implementers all too often forget that people have to let go of the present first. They forget that while the first task of change management is to understand the desired outcome and how to get there, the first task of transition management is to convince people to leave home. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief if you remember that.
William Bridges, Susan Bridges in Managing Transitions
Highlight from ‘Managing Transitions’ by William Bridges, Susan Bridges
It’s not a bad idea to let people take away something from this celebration too, a memento of the transition process that is now behind them. The idea is not unlike giving people a piece of the past, as mentioned in Chapter 3. In this case it may be a T-shirt with “I Survived the Merger” across the front or a certificate of thanks for their participation in the Transition Monitoring Team. Serious or humorous, the memento further acknowledges and winds up a difficult time in the organization’s history and the person’s career.
William Bridges, Susan Bridges in Managing Transitions
Highlight from ‘Managing Transitions’ by William Bridges, Susan Bridges
the gap between the old and the new is the time when innovation is most possible and when the organization can most easily be revitalized.
William Bridges, Susan Bridges in Managing Transitions