Change: Threat or Opportunity

There is a great blog post on Harvard Business by Rosabeth Moss Kanter about change. She starts with "One of my favorite truisms is that change is always a threat when done to me, but it is an opportunity when done by me."

I will never forget when the 360's came around (you know, the reviews) and an employee of mine began his review with, "I am not comfortable with change..." I was shocked because the second I stepped foot in that company, I was all about change. The department wasn't performing so I came in and revamped everything. As a result, we exceeded our financial goal for the first time ever.

Once we hit that mark, the stakes were raised and we had to push even harder. I began to push this employee harder as well. I knew his strength was in relationship management, not sales. So we tried to get him to upgrade his clients, but it didn't work. He needed to get more companies in the pipeline and close deals and he knew it. At that point, he basically shut down, went on a long vacation and submitted his resignation when he got back.

For several years it was OK for him to stay at a certain performance level until change came around. Sometimes responsibilities grow beyond the skill sets of people. In this case, he knew that he didn't want to change...it was a threat to him.