We live in a moment where the only thing that is certain is change. The world we live in today is frequently referred to as the VUCA world, which stands for volatile, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous.
Unpredictable and rapid transformations are happening. Leaders are tasked with getting their teams and organizations ready for change, but no one can ever be truly prepared.
Many people aren’t mentally or emotionally prepared for change. They immediately plunge into a state of shock. For some, experiencing such a shock is so traumatic that they will always be changed by it. Many people, seemingly unconsciously, engage in habitual denial.
The truth is that nobody likes change, especially when they don’t know if it will be good or bad. Some people openly deny change, while others do it in a more subtle way. In any way, people, organizations, and societies often pay a price when they refuse to change. Those who are affected often end up at the bottom of the change curve. People find it hard to get out of it because they don’t want to accept that the ground has changed and they need to find a new way to live or do things. They could lose touch with their feelings and be lost for good.
High-Performing Companies Have Employees Who Are Ready for Change
Employees in high-performing companies can plan for, carry out, and sustain change. People aren’t hired ready for change. It’s not something that some people are born with and others aren’t. You have to coach people to get them ready for change. For this to happen, an organization needs to support a coaching culture.
All successful CEOs recognize coaching for the benefits it provides their companies. Your workforce will perform worse without regular training and guidance. Your company will function less efficiently. In order to maximize the effectiveness of skill development programs, one-on-one coaching is important. Productivity gains are one result.
Coaching with the Axes of Change Model
Coaching involves lots of things, one of the key things in coaching is change. Coaching for change is all about making change happen. It’s about taking talent, knowledge, and skills to a higher level of excellence. It’s about helping a well-functioning person grow to their fullest potential and allowing new changes to happen that give a person the power to go beyond his or her own hopes and dreams about what’s possible.
Coaching is a useful intervention that can assist in preparing managers and leaders for the challenges of change communication, enhancing team readiness, and expanding organizational capacity.
The Axes of Change is the first global model for generative change. It provides a framework for managing the transition to new ways of doing things.
The Axes of Change model looks at the main ways or the key variables that change happens. Among them are:
- The positive and negative emotions that make us move away from or toward something.
- The ability to think about what needs to change and decide or commit to making it happen.
- The positive steps of figuring out what needs to change and drawing up plans for making that happen, as well as doing initial tests of the action plan to determine if it actually works.
- What works well should be rewarded, and continuous testing, monitoring, and accountability should be in place to ensure that the change sticks.
Here are the 4 Ways to build a change-ready culture with the Axes of Change Model:
#1. MOTIVATION
Motivation is all about your vision. It’s thinking about what you want.
Questions to ask:
- What do you want? What do you really want? What is your highest and best dream?
- What will that give you? What values or experiences are you motivated toward?
- What have you had enough of? What’s not working? What do you not want?
- What are you motivated to move away from?
These questions create sufficient emotional energy, motivation, and creative tension to feel both the need and the desire for the change, and help you build a vision with a clear goal. This gives you a propulsion for change: away from the aversions and pains and toward the attractions and pleasures
(The Axes of Change: Axis I Motivation)
#2. DECISION
Decision between readiness and action aims to find or make the tipping point that prompts action through probing and provoking questions, for example:
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of making the change?
- Are you going to change?
- Are you bold enough? Man enough? Woman enough?
The decision stage creates sufficient understanding and knowledge about what to change, why it doesn’t work, and generating enough decision power to create a readiness for change. This gives you the prod to say no to the current way of thinking, feeling, and acting and yes to the possibilities of a generative change.
(The Axes of Change: Axis II Decision)
#3. CREATION
Creation is about developing the Inner Game, and then translate that to perform the Outer Game to enables you to close the Knowing-Doing Gap as you put into practice the know-how of the new game.
Questions to ask:
- What will you create? Do you have a plan or strategy for the change?
- What actions will come first? Second? When? Where? With whom?
This stage helps you create a specific action plan that describes the change, giving you a step-by-step plan that you can then begin acting on and experimenting with. This gives you the plan to implement and actualize in real life.
(The Axes of Change: Axis III Creation)
#4. INTEGRATION
Integration is to make sure the strategy sticks and becomes ingrained in your daily routine through:
- Providing reinforcements (rewards) to the actions through supporting, celebrating, nurturing, validating, cheer-leading, acknowledging, etc.
- Testing and give feedback on the changes and outcomes, assess what’s working and what could be improved, establish systems of responsibility, investigate issues, implement fixes, and then return to the stage of co-creating phase.
Integration stage creates specific rewards and support for the new actions, which we celebrate while testing, monitoring, and using feedback to make our new habit and way of responding richer, fuller, and more integrated. This gives us a way to keep solidifying the change so that it becomes part of who we are and so that it fits ecologically into our life style.
(The Axes of Change: Axis Iv Integration)
Summary
There is strong empirical support for the effectiveness of coaching-related activities in facilitating the change. Successful businesses include coaching into their everyday operations.
Organizations with high performance are twice as likely to have a coaching culture as companies with low performance. They have a better chance of achieving or exceeding project goals associated with transformations. There is now empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that a coaching culture is essential to effective change management.
The most effective forms of coaching are one-on-one sessions, small group sessions, and team coaching. They are useful in making progress toward the objectives of a change management effort. In general, managers feel confident in their abilities as coaches. However, many people could benefit from training to enhance their abilities as coaches and mentors.
Curated by Danielle Tan.
Reference:
- Coaching Change: The Axes of Change by L. Michael Hall Ph.D.
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2020/03/09/the-role-of-the-change-management-coach-in-a-continuously-changing-world/
- https://www.thecoachingroom.com.au/blog/the-axes-of-change-model
- https://tanveernaseer.com/coaching-change-in-workplace-daniel-lock/
