Washington Women Leaders Association Chapter Meeting: Dealing with Resistance

Our next speaker is Patricia Cole on dealing with resistance. Get your team to accept and invest in change. Excuse me. She is a global head DGF same day and temperature management solutions at DHL. She has over 30 years experience in multimodal logistics and transportation. Patricia Cole wears multiple hats within the DGF organization. However, no matter what hat she is wearing, her goal is simple. To empower her leaders to differentiate themselves and drive measurable results. Patricia Thank you uh for inviting me here today. It's a pleasure to be here. Um and it was also very insightful to hear the stories from Hannah and Laura and Zia. I think they all are very intrinsically woven to my topic of change. When you talk about pain and connections, compassion, that's all part of change, right? Um one other thank you. I'd like to thank my husband for being my driver today. Our commute was two plus hours this morning, so it allowed me time to prepare in the car while we're here. Um, I know I am the only thing between you and the next coffee break. So, I'll try to make this as tightly focused and brisk as possible. So, I'd like to start uh by exploring four key ideas about change that have helped me in the past 30 plus years of my career. Um and especially in the past seven years as a global DHL, every day I deal with change. Um my teams are in touch globally with our largest clients all over the world that have a lot of demands. One of my teams is the most expedited form of transportation that there is available. So as you can imagine, ad hoc right now, I need it. whether that be vaccines, clinical trial therapies for patients to electric vehicles. I had a call from Tesla at 8:00 last night. So that was that was interesting. Um it's a farm machine and it varies globally in terms of of what's needed. Unfortunately, our vendors and our clients requirements are not static. So those things change all the time, right? as well as customized tariffs will change, geopolitical events will have effects on things and then disasters strike. So in the face of constant change, you have to remain motivated and positive and you have to portray that to your team and you have to inspire them to do the same. Um, so how do you instill those things? Right? I have those four ideas about change that I've realized over the years and it's it's been a trial and error thing. Change makes us heal things, emotions, right? Change is a growth process and as the ladies before me spoke about each of their topics, there's change related there. And then change is uncomfortable. It is for most of us at certain points in our lives. But it's inevitable. It can happen. things are not going to remain the same. So, we talk about the emotion of change. Um, we all live with it constantly. We're humans as ladies. You know, your bodies change over the years. That's always a lovely thing, right? Um, your environments and your relationships change and hopefully feel better. It's absolutely normal to question our own capacity to adapt to change. This creates in all of us some feelings of potentially inadequacy, doubt, vulnerability, or sometimes even fear. Change makes us feel things. When you think about that, it's really no surprise that at some point in someone's lives, they have a hard time accepting change. It is a growth process. Second thing I've discovered about change is part of growing. And we all need to change to grow. So do your organizations. If you take for example any successful organization in an effort to succeed, those companies need to keep up with the recent industry trends, latest technologies, current events, potential investments are also another thing that we have to look at. And these things will result in change to our organizations. Whether that be to our processes, to our products, to our services, and in sometimes to our structures. Some changes will creep in gradually and then there will be other changes that will charge at us like a corporate restructuring. Platform modernization is a huge topic, a new product line or dare I say even a pandemic. Change in the workplace is as natural as change in our own lives. habit, and perhaps some of you are, when I get home from work, when I'm not traveling, I like to make dinner, have a glass of wine or two, have a conversation with my husband, sit in my favorite spot, and either reflect on the day's work, which means with my laptop or my iPad, depending on how the day went. So, it's comfortable to know exactly what you're going to do, who you're going to be with, and where you're going. If you take one of those things away, my husband, my wine, or my iPad, not necessarily in that order, might be a little uncomfortable for me. It's exactly time or exactly at the same time change at work is very uncomfortable. The idea of having to learn new processes, be around new people, maybe in a new environment, it creates uncertainty for everyone. For some perhaps least engaged members of our team, this is a disruptor, meaning that they no longer only have to do the minimum to define. It's another perspective of change. It's inevitable that there will be resistance to change at work. In extreme cases, change can even cause anxiety or physically fear related ailments. But it is inevitable. Beyond feeling uncomfortable, your team members will probably have many different reasons for resisting change. I can think of several, including loss of status, job security, poorly aligned rewards, fear pressure, fear of the unknown, that's probably the largest one, mistrust, organizational politics, and fear of failure. I'm sure at some point all of you have felt this during a specific change, or at least the thought has crossed your mind. However, resisting is futile because the change is inevitable. So, I'd like to share with you my approach in dealing with resistant team members during change. We're actually going through a platform transformation right now. Um, during one of my teams and so this is a very recent topic. Um, it's not new to me, but this is something that I've been dealing with over the past 12 months. So, I look at it at three distinct changes. Communication, connecting, and balancing. But here's the good news. I have found that if people find that there's some benefit to that change, they're not as fiercely averse to it. So communication of the strategy inclusive of change needs to be repetitive almost like a broken record. We talk about it all the time. We are changing the platform. There's no choice. We have to it's outdated period. Right? Communication must be at all levels of the organization from your most senior members down to the lowest staff level. And the more transparency you can deliver the better. Repetitive and transparent communication enables your team members to digest what's happening and they realize that the change is inevitable during the communication of the strategy. And when it's in smaller groups, it's vital to connect the changes to the functions and to the team members. And this does two important things. It enables your team members to process what their future will look like. And it gives you the opportunity to explain the benefits of the changes to your team. What's in it for them? How can this change improve their lives? There are really important questions you need to answer. And it's for you to connect those changes to their benefits. That's part of the transparency. During these conversations and throughout the implementation of the change, you need to keep several things in balance. You need to keep your team motivated. That's key. You need to also continue to push forward with the change because you will have some that are going to think that you can retract back and maybe that won't mean as big of a change. It needs to happen. You need to balance these things through things. Always need to recognize the accomplishments no matter how small that gives them the motivation to keep going. By maintaining the close communication and progress during the change, your team members will feel a little more invested in the organization and they'll also want to succeed as a group. So by now you're probably starting to feel as if the change management job is done. Please be conscious that by accepting change and investing change are two completely different things. There are different phases throughout the change man management process. Accepting change only means that the team recognizes that it's coming. There will still be individuals that will not perceive the change as being positive or that it will be successful and there are others that will be frightened of the change. So what's required beyond recognizing and accepting the change? What's needed? Your team's investment in change. Investing in change means that the team is positive about the change, about the direction, and they're embracing the opportunities for both self-development and successful organization. There's more than acceptance. It's fostering the ability to proceed with the change, right? Once members of your team can accept the change, this often creates excitement and that is spread to other members of the team. And then you'll see the team members begin to Embrace the opportunities of change. So, as I mentioned in the beginning of the presentation, um I deal with constant change every day. Hour by hour. Example for you. I was supposed to come here. I was supposed to be home for the whole week. I enjoyed the thought of spending the day with a group of ladies instead of sitting in the office all day. I now have to leave at my presentation to fly TCA to go to two stops that were not planned before last Friday. Um, so I want to take a little bit of time to share with you success stories about change because it's one thing for me to get up here and talk to you about a process that I found that's worked, but then to show you how that's been put into action. So the first one, um, we call all for one and one for all. Um, there is a a very young leader in my organization. He just became a leader like in the past two years came to my office earlier this year and um he I you know we have this service expectation so we set a service level every year and I always increase it beyond the year prior to give them something to strive for. The team doesn't think that we can make it and this service is based on a KPI for a bonus not only for him but for the rest of the team. And I said, 'Well, why why is it that you don't think that we can attain this? He said, 'Well, it's the other two shifts. This is the first shift supervisor. He said, ' They're they're bringing it down. I said, really? And he said, "Well, can we just measure by shift?" I said, "No." Said, "First of all, as a client, they don't care if you're on the first shift or the third shift. The service is a whole. Most shipments do take within a day, sometimes two, depending on where they're going to complete." I said, "So, that wouldn't make sense. how we're not going to measure that and then you're going to polarize. We're three shifts and you're supposed to work together as one team. You know, you do realize that this is targeted towards part of your annual bonus, part of their annual bonus. And we added an extra incentive this year to said if you can maintain this for three months, this level, we'll let you work from home one day because after the pandemic, they all want to work from home every day, right? Oh. can you get together with your other colleagues in the other two shifts and see if you can get this communication out so that we can be successful. So this was probably May or June September as of the end of September we worked two straight months running at the service target. So it took some doing. It took some convincing but if you have that communication and you explain the benefits of it I do truly believe that works. And then the last um story for a little too much heavier coffee break is called turning out from focusing. So about four years ago I was asked to take over another division in in coordination with the one that I've been running for the past seven years. And this was a very small team, very tight-knit group. Their leader was being let go. And the reason their leader was being let go is because they were so far in the red. This is more of a service in a group and they're not a profit center but the expectation of our board members is we should be close. So I came in um it was a lot of time that I spent down in Florida with this team trying to explain to them what the expectation of the organization was trying to refocus their strengths in the product that they were offering and how they could bring additional benefits to the team and then explaining what a P&L was because they hadn't know they had no idea that they were so far in the red. Obviously the other leader didn't want to share this information. Again these a lot of these people have been together for 15 years. Um in the first 9 to 12 months we had a lot of natural attrition which is is quite normal and then we had some forced attrition too. There were weeks I would go there feeling like a hatchet woman because you have to let someone else go because the performance just wasn't it needed to be. um after sitting down with them at least once a month if not every other week and explaining where we were, where we needed to be and how we needed to get there and that we needed their help to do that. I am happy to say for the past two years we have been at a break even from a P&L perspective team has stabilized. I just got here doing a play opinion survey every year. I just got the results this week and they're way up from last year. things are on the but it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of communication. Thank you ladies for your time this morning. Question you may touch on this but what would you do or what would your strategies be if there was absolutely seemingly no benefit to the team? So just in my case I work for a law firm did not anyone except for the partners. So you can see my boss didn't really know how to approach it. So how would you go about the situation like that? It's funny you should say that we have similar like that happen. Um there is always going to be a connection and benefit whether it be to my board your partners in terms of the organizational success. You have to delicately put little spins on that, right? In terms of the incentives for the employees, no matter how minor they are, because to your point, if it seems like it's only going to partners and it seems very unsighted, if you will, that's when you're going to get the most resistance. And and yes, I understand exactly. But there's always something that you can glean from those situations that you can apply back to to everyone's project. I hope that answered your question. I know it's very vague, but without details. Thank you again. I need to