www.leaderthink.comNew BeginningsWe are in the midst of a new beginning. Whatever the other side of this looks like, I don’t expect us to return to the old version of normal. I think we will arrive to a new version of normal. New beginnings are new opportunities. Many of my clients have told me how much smaller their workforces are, having to let people go, or just the struggles that come with working in an essential industry. There is an opportunity there, an opportunity to work on improving your culture, an opportunity to grow yourself, or rise in the ranks of your employer. Change and new beginnings are always new opportunities. Unfortunately, the brain doesn’t always immediately embrace change. In fact, the brain usually interprets change as sadness and loss. We have all been presented with a new changing environment, like it or not. That is our circumstance, the unchangeable in our world. It is what it is. But this change is also opportunity. We will be forced to adapt to a new way of doing work but at the same time we have the opportunity to improve ourselves, our culture and those around us at the same time. I have discussed before how most change efforts fail or struggle when we fail to address the emotional component. Today I want to talk about the emotions that come with change and how we can engage them for a greater potential to succeed as we adapt to this new version of normal.Change is MelancholyLet’s face it. Change is hard. Change is painful. Change is melancholy. Change is typically associated with loss in the minds of your employees and your loved ones. Sure, some people who really have a handle on choosing their own thoughts can see the optimism and the opportunity that exists here. But most people interpret change as loss. They are giving something up. They are giving up an old way of life. The new way of life will most likely have a new set of rules that comes along with it. Rules we can get our hand slapped for not following either purposefully because of some political beliefs or just simply forgetting to follow the new rules.Those of you who study human performance, remember the blue line? We are living in the blue line right now. As a refresher, whenever the work changes, a new system is implemented or we are placed in a new, changing environment, humans are more likely to make mistakes…..or errors…or violate rules. People are more likely to get hurt when the blue line takes a turn. Remember the blue line. The blue line tells us that not following a rule is more predictable to occur in these scenarios and very unlikely to be a true culpable behavior that deserves discipline. If ever there was a time to cut our people some slack for struggling to follow all the new rules that come with these changing times, the time is now. We have to sympathize with the loss people are feeling and show a little tolerance for the increase in human error that will occur in these changing times.But these rules must be followed to protect our people, right? Right…..but people aren’t robots right? Behavior is just a symptom of thought and emotion and the current circumstance, right?Regardless of any rational-technical reason you give someone for the need for a change, their brain is still processing it as a loss. They are giving something up at the same time that they are saying “yes” to your new change. If we are not sympathetic to that emotion going on in the minds of the worker, or our neighbor for that matter, then we are ignoring a driving force behind the behaviors of the people we influence. We have to give attention, and sympathy, to that emotion. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. But engaging with that feeling of loss can improve the life experience of the worker and lessen the organizational struggles that come with that loss.When you implement a change in your organization, such as wearing more PPE, many of your employees are thinking this new system is going to make their job harder for the same amount of pay. Are we sympathizing with that feeling of loss that they are going through? Or do we just expect all the science behind respirators to be good enough factual data to enforce the change? Humans are deeper than science. Humans think about change, feel change and then behave based on how they think and feel.But they have to wear a respirator, right? I can’t just look the other way when they forget to wear their respirator, right? Right…..in the simplest of the shallow layer of our limbic brain, that is true. But in the deeper layers of who we are, there are two things going on here, one: a sympathy for the loss our people are going through; two: a new set of rules that you want people to follow.So first we show sympathy to the loss to let them know we give a crap about them. That is always step one of influence, to show people you actually care and feel for your people. You feel the loss with them. That caring, if it is truly genuine, opens the door for getting people to adapt to a new set of safety rules.After we sympathize with the loss, we sell the new set of rules to the employee by focusing on the benefits to them, not the organization. What’s in it for them? That should be our focus, not what’s in it for the company. There are so many unknowns here but as a simplistic example, “the respirator is to help protect your grandma you may see next weekend”, not “we are going to get OSHA fines or get in trouble with the GC”.When selling these new requirements, these changes that make the workers job harder for the same amount of pay, these changes that are interpreted as loss in their minds, always focus on the benefits to them, not the company.We must also not just tolerate failure, but embrace failure as our teacher. Change is never smooth. It’s messy and painful, but every failure you experience is teaching you something valuable. We must view failure as our teacher instead of some nasty thing to avoid.  We are living in the blue line; errors will occur frequently during this cultural shift we are going through. But each error, each little failure is teaching you something on how to prevent a future occurrence. Maybe it’s teaching you something simple like how you distribute respirators to the worker. Maybe it’s teaching you something about the type of respirators you give to your people.  The blue line is always teaching you something. You can choose to see the shallow layer of a human making a mistake, or you can look deeper into the teachable moment that failure is gifting you with. From there, you can look at the systems you have in place and potentially modify them to help the worker with these new changes they are navigating.  The blue line is not just the worker behavior, it is also the systems we implement to comply with these new requirements. It would be foolish to believe that our first attempts at complying with these new rules would be a perfect, gold star worthy, performance. Not only is the worker going to experience little failures in these changing times, management will also experience little failures with the polices we put out. To adapt and excel in these changing times we have to embrace the failures that come with them. Our policies on paper will not be perfect, they will need to be tweaked as we move along. We will continually learn how to best manage these changes if we keep a growt...

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