Reorganisations often follow these phases: smell, gossip, announcement and implementation. The period between announcement and implementation is when most emotions are cooked. It’s also often one of unnecessary prolonged agony.
Management of change(s) may be hard enough as to add unnecessary anxiety. But this is what we have many times: a prolonged period of uncertainty when everything slows down and batteries are just about functioning.
If anybody could calculate the monetary cost of the prolonged agony period, the perpetrators of the gap announcement-implementation would be horrified.
But there is perhaps something powerful about announcing and opening the doors of collective anxiety. And power is addictive.
Prolonged agony is simply bad management. Full stop. Reasonable periods of unsettlement and reasonable doses of uncertainty have nothing to do with that, toxic, unnecessary prolonged agony of months if not years. And asking the organization not to drop performance, and stay ‘focused’, at the same time, is madness.
Unnecessary, prolonged agony in reorganizations is unacceptable. A terribly bad deal for owners, stake and shareholders, let alone for employees.
And then, we say ‘people are resistant to change’.