Are You Ready To Be A Change Agent?

Recently, CyberMedia India organized a workshop on time and change management
for some of its employees. The objective was to help people in the
mid-management level to deal with the burgeoning issue of multi-tasking without
affecting output.

Yours truly was also a part of the audience. And it occurred to me why should
I not share some of my learnings from this workshop with my readers. So here
goes.

Talking about time management, the first thing we were told to do was
identify those activities which take up most of our time and club then under
four different categories-important and urgent, important and not urgent,
unimportant and urgent and finally unimportant and not urgent.

You can use these as your benchmarks for prioritizing your activities.
Meeting the deadline for client delivery would fall under the first category,

while responding to a vendor's mail about some offsite meeting might come under
the second. Dealing with some altercation between your receptionist and another
employee could come under the third, while replying to a mail from some
long-forgotten acquaintance would be the last.

While doing this is something that comes only after conscious implementation,
and is not very crucial for the functioning of a professional, what was more
interesting about the workshop was about managing change. This could be change
in your personal or professional life, brought about by internal or external
causes.

The first reaction to most change is shock, then denial, then anger, then
resistance, then grudgingly learning to live with it, then understanding, then
accepting it and finally working with it. Sounds easy, but in reality it is not
as simple.

Imagine there is a change in your management: You might go through all the
emotions mentioned above. But does the fact that this is normal human tendency
make it easier for you to live with it? The answer in all likelihood is no.

But what I felt at the workshop was one simple thing. Figure out how the
change will directly or indirectly affect you in a tangible fashion. If it does
not, then it makes more sense to work your way around it and even ignore it. And
if it does affect you directly, then you have to ask yourself whether you see
yourself becoming comfortable with this change in the long term and if yes, then
how best you can live with it.

To be able to answer the above question, it is important that you leave
behind what is called 'historical baggage'. This is past incidents, which might
have tempered your perception about the change. In the above instance about
change in management, it could be incidents you heard about the new person
in-charge, or your past dealings with that person.

Try moving away from it, because just like you are grappling with the change,
maybe the other person is doing the same. Once you leave this historical baggage
aside and look at things from a fresh perspective, the situation might not seem
as bleak as you might have earlier made it out to be.

I don't know how I will be able to emulate this change management in my own
life. But I do know, that this approach is a whole lot better than just plain
cribbing about the state of affairs. Therefore, I will try and give it a shot.

Maybe you should do the same.

Think about it.

vinita bhatia

vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in