When you start to implement the SRE practice of automation to eliminate toil, some individuals will probably begin to resist. It's important to acknowledge that people react to a push for automation in different ways, and that some may resist it more than others. Individuals may feel as though their jobs are in jeopardy, or they may disagree that certain tasks are toil, and don't need to be automated. Because of this, it's important to understand how to address resistance to change in your organization. But first, let's start with the psychology of change, change elicits emotions, there are hundreds of different types of reactions and emotions. You should always expect to get positive and negative reactions, even if the change is for the good. Broadly, people and their emotions fall into four categories, let's talk about each group and how you can support them. Navigators, these are the people who will make teams and businesses successful, as leaders, spot them and celebrate their behaviors, use them as champions for the change. Critics, these are the second type of individuals that you should care about, they have passion and energy, critics care, and they have valid fears, so it's important not to ignore them. Spend time with them, because they will be very powerful advocates if you can persuade them. Victims, often this type of individual just needs to get their emotions out, victims tend to take organizational change very personally. Your role as a leader is to listen to them and empathize, once they feel heard, then they can start to listen. By standards, these people are tricky because you never know what they are thinking. Often, bystanders have no idea what's going on, and they will just continue as if nothing or no change is happening, you should try to communicate with them, to ascertain their feelings. Sometimes one person can fall into several categories, remember that it's likely you've experienced all these phases of change at some point in your career. As a leader, the way you navigate your own emotions to change will highly impact the teams you lead, teams look to their leaders to get signals on how to react to change. Brains are hard wired to reflect emotions, people experience reactions to change not because they're trying to be difficult, but because it's natural. Take a look at how the brain responds to change biologically. When you experience the feeling of being excluded from something, it triggers response in the anterior cingulate, which is the same part of the brain that deals with physical pain. When you realize that something you were told in the past is unrealistic or untrue, the prefrontal cortex switches to high alert, looks for other signs of deception, and triggers feelings of heightened anxiety. When you solve your own problems, you get a rush of adrenaline. The prefrontal cortex can only deal with a few concepts at a time, when you are overwhelmed by unfamiliar concepts, your amygdala is triggered, making you feel anxious, afraid, depressed, tired, or angry. When you pay a greater amount of attention to something, you find it easier to adapt, habitual tasks feel easy and comfortable, because they are hardwired and require little conscious thought. So how can you address these responses? Google has some recommended ways to manage and account for people's reactions to change in the teams you lead, exclusion is painful, involve people in the change. Deception anxiety, set realistic expectations. Self-solve adrenaline, identify opportunities for co creation and provide coaching rather than solutions. Amygdala hijack, simplify messaging, and focus on key concepts per user group. Attention density, ensure that communications are engaging and training is interactive. Unconscious habit, allow people time to build new habits, keeping the neuroscience of change in mind, let's discuss the stages of transition the individuals experience when going through change. There are different versions of the change curve, but this is the way we'll look at it today. As you can see, there is a beginning, middle and an end, yet it is completely normal for people to move backward and forward, at different times. It's important to understand how to support your teams in each stage, remember to present change as an opportunity, not a threat to your teams. To do this, you'll want to connect with individuals on three levels. Head, which is rational heart, which is emotional, and feet, which is behavioral. For the head, talk about why the change is happening and the strategic mission, vision and rationale behind it. For the heart talks about why people should care, remember that people can be egotistical and self motivated, address how the change will affect them personally in their day to day role, and how it will impact them positively. Find a way to make them feel like they are part of the change, people often just want to feel like they are part of something. And lastly, for the feet, talk about the knowledge, skills and resources you will provide to make sure they're successful in this change. Teams need support to make sure they are and feel competent when asked to change what they know. Now that you've learned some ways to address change in your organization, let's look at how to handle a resistance to change. Research has shown that resistance is the primary reason changes fail in businesses. Resistance to change is usually fear of loss, specifically, people fear losing security or control, competence, relationships or sense of direction. Human reaction to loss is much stronger than human reaction to gain, so how can you handle resistance to change? Keep this checklist in mind as you navigate your business's adoption of SRE practices, are all your leaders and managers role modeling the new processes and behaviors? Do people understand the reason for the change? Do people care about the change being successful? Do people have the knowledge and ability to be successful in your new world? Are the right reinforcement and recognition programs in place? If the answers to any of these are no, we recommend that your leadership teams brainstorm how to address them, because all of these pieces need to happen for any successful organizational changes. Let's look at how one of our customers experience resistance to change. One of the leading commercial banks in Spain identified a number of processes that they wanted to automate. Their VP of engineering, and the executive sponsor of SRE implementation, was eager to showcase the benefits of the project to the business by investing in automation. The teams on the ground were very reluctant and skeptical about automating the earlier identified processes. It turned out that they had perceived automation as a direct threat to their jobs. Because they hadn't been supported during the SRE implementation with a proper explanation of what the changes entailed and the impact changes would have on their projects, their resistance was prominent. Now that we've covered the SRE concepts that help organizations make their tomorrow better than today, the next module will cover the last step of the SRE journey, regulating workload.
