I have been responsible for change in my current role. My current
role involves providing well-being resources and support to legal and
professional staff at a global law firm. In this role, I have been
working to convince people who are trained be naturally skeptical to
embrace things like mindfulness and a reduction in billable hours.
This has been a challenge because the worth of the attorney is
measured in how many hours they bill. (Billable hours means the
amount of time they spend working on legal activities for their
clients that requires compensation.) Our firm chair has announced
the initiative firmwide but trying to mitigate this on a global level has
also been hard with myself and the director being US-based.
Understanding change management through this course will better
help in my understanding of how we can implement these well-being
initiatives across the firm. Even with the leadership buy-in, there has
been some resistance to some of our grounded programming. For
instance, we launched a firmwide meditation series and we had
critics and those who believe that mindfulness is only for those who
shop at Lulu lemon and burn incense. What we are now trying to do
is present the science behind how and why mindfulness can help.
This course helped me to identify that even the skeptics are
stakeholders, and I need to move forward with finding ways to help
them be less resistant to the change.
One change management skill I have applied in my personal life is to
find way to mitigate anything that can become a roadblock as I move
towards success. An example, my family and I are trying to lead a
healthier lifestyle in terms of our relationships with food, but we also
have to reframe what our kids believe to be "healthy". We always
had typical children's snacks: chips, cookies, ice cream, cake. We
tried to drastic change, and our kids were miserable. So instead, we
went back and slowly made incremental changes. Oven-baked chips,
granola, fresh fruit to still have something sweet. Doing it gradually
overtime proved to be less of a shock, and it seems like we are going
to be able to sustain the change!
