Keeping teams steady through LGR
Resistance, communication and leading through adversity.
Two and a half hours on keeping teams steady through reorganisation: resistance, ambivalence and loss, communicating change through the middle, leading others through adversity and building adaptability.
- Level
- Focus
- Learning time
- 2 hours 30 minutes
- Where
- Serving the public
- Price
- £69
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Team leaders and middle managers in councils and public bodies going through reorganisation
Overview
During reorganisation, staff look to their managers for meaning and steadiness long before the new structure arrives. From Building the new council, this course begins with the human side of change: Ford, Ford and D'Amelio, Piderit on ambivalence, Rock's SCARF model and Rousseau's psychological contract, with the NHS National Programme for IT as a warning. It explores sensemaking through Weick, Denning's springboard stories, the Heath brothers' Switch and Welsh Government communication during Covid-19. It then covers Heifetz's holding environment and Google's Project Aristotle, closing with adaptability as a learnable skill, Natalie Fratto's adaptability quotient and the Adobe Creative Cloud case.
Aims
The purpose is to help managers keep their people whole through uncertainty: hearing what resistance is saying, translating change honestly for their teams, setting the conditions for psychological safety and recovery, and building the everyday adaptability that lets a team keep delivering while the structure around it changes.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Explain how resistance can carry accurate information, and how leaders' own actions contribute to it, using Piderit and the psychological contract.
- Plan change communication that treats middle managers as translators, and handle a reversal in a way that protects trust.
- Identify the four behaviours of the adaptability quotient, and use Heifetz's holding environment to judge when to raise or lower the heat.
What you'll develop
Through this Focus course, you will build the ability to:
- Explain how resistance can carry accurate information and how leaders' own actions contribute to it.
- Explain how people make sense of change sideways, and why middle managers act as translators rather than relay stations.
- Explain Edmondson's definition of psychological safety and describe how a leader's response to the first piece of bad news builds or destroys it.
- Distinguish adaptability from resilience and explain why neither can substitute for the other.
- Place resistance on a line from disposition to agent behaviour, using Piderit, Oreg, SCARF and the psychological contract.
- Plan change communication using the sensemaking loop, springboard stories and the four moves from Switch.
- Use Heifetz's holding environment to judge when to turn the heat up or down during adaptive change.
- Identify the four observable behaviours of the adaptability quotient and plan one practical step for each in your own work.
Built from 2 parts.
2 hours 30 minutes of learning.
- 01The human side of changeResistance to change and communicating changeBitesize · Leading through Change and Conflict2 modules
- 02Holding others through hard timesLeading teams through adversity and changeBitesize · Resilience, Wellbeing and Adaptability2 modules