TEACHING RESISTIVE OLD DOGS NEW TRICKS

TEACHING RESISTIVE OLD DOGS NEW TRICKS
By
William Cottringer, Ph.D.

“The best way to teach something is to share a story of your own failure, tell what happened to help you get past it, and offer some helpful hints to succeed.” ~The author.

A common problem in management and training is in knowing about a good and important change that will help your organization move forward, but running into a roadblock in trying to sell and implement the change. You encounter old dogs who are overly resistive to learning new tricks.

I started out my professional career 40 years ago as a caseworker in a maximum security prison and then moved into a job as a psychologist at a mental health clinic. To say I learned how to be effective doing this teaching new tricks to old dogs with the extreme end of the population the hard way, is an understatement. In looking back upon these experiences, I probably learned more in my first 5 years of doing this, than I did in decades of other more responsible management jobs. Inmates and mental patients were real challenges to “rehabilitate” and “cure,” believe me. Success did not come easy or quickly. Many important lessons were learned through painful bruises and broken bones.

Let’s face it, most of us resist what we perceive to be unfamiliar, uncomfortable and unnecessary change. We are creatures of habit and like to be safe in a familiar, comfortable work or home environment full of routines and certainties. But something is happening today that will kill us all if we don’t open up and learn how to change at the speed of lightening in this Information Age. We are part of a different world today with mountains of overload and difficult problems that don’t have known solutions. Something has to give and like it or not it will have to be us rather than the realities unfolding before us.

There are important changes ahead that have to be made because of the current menu of undesirables—budget cutbacks, the drying up of funding sources, and a looming recession economy… all leading to staff downsizing, the elimination of middle managers, the increased need for cross-training, the demand for a better competitive advantage, difficult recruiting against an employees’ market, and inflated expectations about performance by stakeholders. We currently don’t have many of the answers. This is because “what got us here won’t get us there.” So, the change to learn new tricks, that we all have to make, is what brings us together as a team to get more accomplished that we can each do alone.

I think we all have something in common—we are all old dogs resistive of learning new tricks to one degree or the other. If we can agree upon the common enemy—ourselves and what our own resistance to doing something new and different is all about—we can stop dividing people into impossible-to-deal-with, artificially extreme categories of positive, open-minded change-embracers vs. the negative, close-minded, change-resisters. The old good vs. bad dilemma. In reality we are all somewhere in between these extremes, making progress on this continuum at our own pace.

It is important to understand our own change-resistance if we are to become effective teachers of new tricks to old dogs, including ourselves. Here is the typical resistance I learned from inmates and mental patients that definitely transfers to employees of a company expected to embrace and buy into a significant change:

1. Why should I give up something that works okay for me for something untried or unproven, or more to your benefit than mine? (What’s really in it for me?)

2. What am I going to have to give up, and do I have a say in any of this?

3. How will I know if I am doing this right and where can I go for help if I am doing it wrong?

4. Do you care about my fears and worries?

5. How do you really know for sure this is going to work to get good results?

It is very helpful to think about giving the best answers to these very normal questions. I have also come to learn that the main thing you have to do to be successful in closing any gap between what people are currently doing and what you want them to do is to learn the answers to the above 5 questions and also think about these additional 5 questions:

• Just how wide is this gap between where we are and where we need to be and what are the most important obstacles or people in our way of being successful? (How bad are things?)

• How much time and energy do I want to put into the effort that is required to close this gap? (What is the likelihood of success?)

• What are some fair exchanges in taking something off the plates of these employees to get them to accept the new changes easier? (What needs to occur first?)

• What are the resisters really afraid of? What false beliefs are getting in the way? (This is especially important to find out about).

• What are the most important things I have learned from my past successes and failures that will be helpful in the present situation?

Just delving into a few of these questions (don’t need to do the entire ten) will help prepare you better for the huge task of being more successful in teaching old dogs new tricks. It can be done but it is not as easy as it sounds. Asking some hard questions, thinking about things and practicing good communication will go a long way towards a happy ending.