Empathy Expansion Kit: Resistance to Empathetic Change

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show. This episode is part of our empathy expansion kit series. I'm Stephen Sakach here once again with Tullio Siragusa.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:25)
Hey everybody.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:27)
One of our main goals of our podcast is to help you build a more authentic business or work life. One of the best ways to do that is to build it with empathy, putting love and empathy into what you're doing. In this series, we are going to dive into some bite size topics on building empathy into your work life. Today, we dive into how to deal with resistance to change.
If you're working toward a more empathetic workplace, you might be integrating some new systems and there may likely be resistance, depending on where you're at and where you want to go.
So you've got to get buy in. Tullio, you're pretty good at building buy in. Surprisingly, where can be the biggest resistance for buy in?

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:13)
Surprisingly, the biggest resistance is usually at the top.
There's fear of change, of losing control, depending how someone got up the ranks in their career. Maybe they bought into this idea that you go up the ladder and your goal is to be at the top of the ladder. And some of this stuff requires you welcoming everyone else the ladder with you, instead of being at the top of the ladder. So that may be psychologically and emotionally hard for some executives to want to accept creating a more empathetic environment where they essentially create more of a shared authority in the organization.
The challenge with that is that unless you do it, the newer generations are not gonna wanna work there. So what's happening now is for a long time, you can get away with that and be like, yeah, that's okay. Even though the data suggests that it's better for the business, a lot of people resisted it. But now that resistance is a risk to the business and it's a real risk. So, but it's not impossible. So you can do it in bite-sized chunks, right? That's one of the reason I've also adopted force field analysis, a great way to get everyone to look at the resistance, the hindering forces and what's working. And then you put names associated with these forces. So it's not necessarily calling someone out, but as a group, you start to identify where the issues are. And sometimes the issue comes up that there's too much control or what have you.
But the one thing that's important to highlight is any organization that needs to go through this kind of transformation will require coaching. It's not going to happen just by adopting a bunch of tools and methodology, especially if it's a traditional, hierarchical command and control work environment. They will not achieve this without some coaches. They're going to help the leadership team work through the changes, the consciousness changes, and support also the teams to feel like they can contribute and their voice can be heard, right? Because some organization, people are afraid to speak up. It's like, is this a trick?
So there's all these things that are real things. And we talked about in the last episode, only about 10% of businesses operate this way. So 90% are going to have to transform over the next few years and no one's going to work for them. So it's a big challenge, but not an impossible task with some coaching and some good methodologies and practices in place.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:46)
So the coaching, this is really, it's kind of just leadership for the leaders, right?

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:50)
Yes.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:51)
And you've got to bring in some other voice, independent. There's no sort of resentment or anything brought in there.
And you can kind of help them through that process. Like, so what are you doing in that process?

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:04)
Well, in that process, one of the key things is to have an open, raw conversation about what's working in the business and what's not working.
And just talk about and identify all those areas that there's opportunity.
And then look, okay, how do we tackle these areas where there are forces working against the business? You know, think of like, running a business is like moving a boulder up a hill, right? You got a bunch of people pushing this boulder forward. That's the stuff that's working for the business. And then you got all these other things pushing the boulder down the hill. You've got competitors, you've got market condition, you might have some inefficiencies in the organization. You might have some leadership that's not up to par where they need to be. These are hindering forces that are gonna hold you back from pushing this boulder forward, right? So looking at those very honestly, very openly and identifying them and then coming up with a plan, quarter by quarter on how to overcome all these hindering forces is part of this transformation. And it could take years. It's not something that happens overnight. And within that, you could then identify what are the things that people need, right? So there's the leadership training or coaching. And then what are the things the organization needs? And then there's the processes changes. If you do this all once, it's too disruptive. I mean, you'll implode, right? So you have to do it in a step-by-step process. It's kind of like healing.