Coaching practices for How to Deal with Change Management
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Deal with Change Management, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I keep selling this change as a clear win and can’t understand why people are dragging their feet
- When I push my team on the hard stuff they either shut down and start blaming each other or just nod and carry on as before
- We keep rolling out new processes and reorgs to fix this thing and nothing moves the needle
- I keep throwing action plans and systems at this change and getting nowhere, and I’m starting to suspect I jumped straight to "do it" when I haven’t even really decided yet
- I keep dropping problems on my boss’s desk and waiting for them to tell me what to do, and I can feel it reads as me not owning my work
Practices that may help
- Name the loss the adaptive challenge requires
Explicitly acknowledge what people must give up — not just what they will gain.
Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical - Regulate the level of distress in the system
Keep productive pressure high enough to motivate change but low enough to prevent shutdown.
Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical - Diagnose the challenge before choosing the response
Ask whether the problem requires new expertise (technical) or new values and behavior (adaptive).
Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical - Identify your current stage before choosing a strategy
Diagnose where you actually are in the change cycle before deciding what to do.
The Transtheoretical Model of Change, Made Practical - Bring a proposed solution when you bring a problem
Describe the problem and your recommended path before asking for a decision.
Managing Up: Practical Skills for Working with Your Boss - Match your intervention type to the COM-B gap
Use the Behavior Change Wheel to select the intervention approach that fits the diagnosed gap — not your default.
The COM-B Model and Behavior Change Wheel - Managing Up: Practical Skills for Working with Your Boss
Managing up means proactively understanding your manager’s priorities, communication style, and constraints — then adapting how you work and communicate to make the partnership effective. Done well it is collaborative rather than manipulative: it reduces friction, builds trust, and creates space for greater autonomy. The evidence base is primarily organizational behavior research on leader-member exchange and practitioner consensus. - Apply the experiential processes early, behavioral ones later
Use consciousness-raising and emotional arousal early; counter-conditioning and stimulus control after you commit.
The Transtheoretical Model of Change, Made Practical - Give the work back without abandoning people
Resist taking ownership of problems that belong to the people facing the adaptive challenge.
Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical - Inform stakeholders before they ask, not after they complain
I’s are one-way — they receive information; the cost of surprising them is always higher than the cost of telling them.
The RACI Matrix, Made Practical
Related concerns
- How To Handle Change At Work
Explicitly acknowledge what people must give up — not just what they will gain.
Name the loss the adaptive challenge requires
- How To Cope With Change In The Workplace
Explicitly acknowledge what people must give up — not just what they will gain.
- Adapting To Change
Adaptive leadership, developed by Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky at Harvard, distinguishes between technical problems (solvable with existing expertise) and adaptive challenges (requiring people to change their values, beliefs, or habits). The core skill is resisting the pull to apply technical fixes to adaptive problems — and instead helping people do the hard work of change themselves.
- Adaptive Leadership During A Big Change
Adaptive leadership, developed by Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky at Harvard, distinguishes between technical problems (solvable with existing expertise) and adaptive challenges (requiring people to change their values, beliefs, or habits). The core skill is resisting the pull to apply technical fixes to adaptive problems — and instead helping people do the hard work of change themselves.
- Change Management Framework
A RACI built at kickoff and never updated is out of date the moment the first change happens.
Review the RACI when scope or team changes
- How To Cope With Change At Work
Explicitly acknowledge what people must give up — not just what they will gain.
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