Resistance

First steps lead us nicely into the core element of Gleicher's formula: Resistance to change. Realizing that change nearly always has an element of resistance is vital to change planning and change management.

Resistance mapping can be done in many ways—from elaborate Stakeholder Mapping exercises with location mapping and intensity mapping—to informal watercooler discussions and corporate chatter. I wouldn't even try to recommend a best practice for picking up on resistance, except if there has been a recognizable failed attempt to change in the past. If there has been a failed change project in the area you are planning a change, you may be lucky and find a post mortem analysis for the project. However, few organizations are good at documenting their failures, so you may have to do a kind of after-the-fact analysis by tracking down the people involved in the project, i.e. the ones who tried to implement the failed change—and interview them. Try to find out which Resistance eventually stopped the change, whether the resistance was known before the project started and which steps were taken to deal with the resistance.

So how about our project Deal Performance then? You already know that there has been a failed change project (your predecessor’s attempt to have main redlines and executed documents uploaded to a Sharepoint—that the team is not using). So first red light: you have to assume some hardened resistance. For simplicity, let’s assume there are no post mortem analysis or past project members, so you have to gather the resistance info informally. Recently, you have brought the past project and the poor Sharepoint adoption up as a topic when talking to team members and other stakeholders. You take down the following key observations:

• Most deal supporting lawyers do not see the value in using the Sharepoint, because they are on top of the deals they are working on and can always find the executed documents from their local hard drives whenever anyone asks for them.

• All deal supporting lawyers claim they work as hard and fast as they can and blame slow negotiations on customer or internal business clients for slow closing deals.

• Some deal supporting lawyers share that they are uncomfortable with having management reading their redlined documents.

• Most deal supporting lawyers explain that they are usually deeply engaged in the next deal by the time the first deal closes, so uploading executed documents to the Sharepoint is considered an unnecessary administrative burden.

• Most deal supporting lawyers express some “big brother” concerns that man­agement will use workflow data points to monitor their performance in a simplified way that does not recognize the uniqueness/complexity of each negotiation.

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