Kodak had the right data. She even had the right teams. What she didn’t have was listening. While digital photography emerges, management is reassured with linear projections, market analyzes, proven models. The presentations are linked, the Slides parade. But in offices, employees doubt. Weak signals are multiplying. Resistance settles.
Kodak missed its transition. Not for lack of information. By excess of rationality.
This case is not isolated. It illustrates a structural problem in change management: We try to defuse an emotion with a reasoning. And it never works.
The myth of resistance to change
The leaders often repeat the same formula: “People don’t like change. »» It’s inaccurate. Individuals are not afraid of change as such. They fear The loss of what still works for them. It is not the evolution that disturbs, it is the brutal rupture. It is not the newness that worries, it is the feeling of being relegated, destabilized, or rendered useless.
A reorganization, a new tool, a new strategy … Each initiative is analyzed in terms of its individual impact.
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- Is my function threatened?
- Does my expertise remain relevant?
- Will my trajectory be interrupted?
These questions are not expressed in the committees, but they deeply structure internal reactions.
The managerial reflex: the rational argument
Faced with concern, the leaders deploy structured presentations, impact studies, scenarios. The change is presented as logical, beneficial, necessary. Everything is justified. Except the essentials: Fear is not rational.
This is the most frequent error: send an emotion by a fact. We believe we are convincing by reassuring by figures, collective profits, long -term objectives. But What an employee experiences with a transformation is experienced is a personal, immediate and emotional disorder.
A growth curve does not reassure the one who fears to become useless.
A roadmap does not appear the one who thinks that it is dismissed without saying it.
An emotional resistance often misinterpreted
When an employee opposes a decision or manifests a disproportionate hostility to a minor instruction, it is almost never the real subject. You have to know how to hear what the surface masks. An empirical rule from the field summarizes it as follows:
“If the reaction exceeds 5 out of 10, this is not the real subject. »»
It is not the procedure that irritates. This is what it represents: a loss of autonomy, a questioning of the role, a tacit weakening.
The forgotten role of the leader: listen, without promising
It is not a question of giving up change. Nor to validate all concerns. But to recognize emotions which accompany the transition. What employees ask is not always to be right. It is to be heard. To feel that their voice counts, even if the decision remains unchanged.
Listening does not delay change. It secures the anchoring.
In companies that succeed in their transformation, leaders devote time – real, not simulated – to Understanding unplodded brakes. They know that a strategic project is played less on a slide than in an office, behind closed doors, when a manager takes an hour to welcome the fears of his team.
A sine qua non condition for any transformation
Change management is not based on better downward communication. It is based on recognition of invisible attachmentsof what may be lost or jostled.
If organizations want to change, they must stop treating emotion as a parasitic noise. Because as long as an employee does not feel seen, listened to and respected, He will not move. Or else, it will move on the front, but will resist in depth.
