Immunity to Change

Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, Harvard Business Press, 2009

After more than 40 years in the HR business, I thought I knew most of it. This was my ‘big assumption’. Kegan and Lahey know a great deal more than me, I found out, and I thank them for sharing a generation of experience with me – and I hope, you too.

Immunity to Change

The authors seem to have found the answer to why people find it difficult to change – as you have doubtless found it difficult to change some of your staff. Their discovery is startlingly simple. Most people have an immunity to change. Their research over many years and thousands of people has drawn them to this conclusion, and in this gem of a book, they share their findings with us.

They show how this immunity comes about, how to identify what the immunity – or blockage – to change actually is, and most importantly, how to use their research findings in developmental  activity with your staff and even staff teams.

Did you know that when faced with the dire need to change – your life depends on a change of diet, stopping smoking, and so on – only one person in seven can actually follow the medical advice with the necessary behavior change? Now that’s scary. So is it any wonder that when you advise your staff, at appraisal or some other time, to delegate more, listen better, etc, etc, they don’t do it?

There are two keys to the problem, according to Kegan and Lahey. One is that we often don’t distinguish between a technical change and an adaptive change. A technical change can be effected by simply doing something different – adopting a new technique – and to most managers that’s the only type of change they know. (After all, they haven’t read this book yet!) So with the best will in the world, the appraising manager not only tells his/her direct report that s/he must delegate more, but actually, and helpfully, gives some techniques for the direct report to follow. “Do this and you will become a better delegator”. The direct report tries using the new technique, finds that it doesn’t work so reverts to the previous non-delegatory style. This may be noted by the appraising manager – but it often isn’t.  After all, the appraisal chore is over for another year, now we can get on with the job – it may well be written off as an indication that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

Wrong again! The authors make an impassioned case for the fact that adults can learn a lot if the learning is treated in the right way, which they propose is treating the non-delegation as an adaptive challenge, not a technical one. “There is no drive-through window for adult development”, they observe. This old dog certainly learned some new tricks from his reading this book, I assure you.

They share with the reader an approach called the ‘immunity map’, which you can use to help surface the reasons – and they may be perfectly valid reasons – why the person finds it nigh impossible to change. And incidentally why treating the problem as a  technical problem certainly won’t work.

This is not a book for the faint-heated – it is more  than 300 pages long for starters – but it repays the hard work of reading it. Fortunately the authors do not write like academics.

We shall investigate some of the concepts proposed in the book in future postings and also link the contents of this book with The Differentiated Workforce, which was last month’s Book of the Month.

Bob