I'm on Day 2 of 12-hour training days, so this is a quick post before I have to embark on a 2.5 hour drive to Paterson, NJ. It's also somewhat incoherent, as it's 5 a.m.

I'm doing training on career assessments and how to use them effectively with people and I must tell you that it's a continual eye-opener. I'm working with government staff who help unemployed people develop career plans and (supposedly) prepare them for the workplace. The training I'm doing is on "best practices," the kind of training that I both love and hate because often the work processes staff are using do not match best practices. Not surprisingly, they feel that I'm training them in things that will not necessarily co-exist very well with workplace expectations. They're right and it's frustrating. Nevertheless, what they're learning can still be adapted for their work environments if they make some different personal choices about their own professional practice. 

One of the chief complaints these staff have is that their clients resist change and have a million excuses for why they can't implement their plans. Yet throughout the training yesterday, for every suggestion I'd make, the group would throw up another reason why they couldn't implement it. They'd give me a barrier, I'd tell them how they could get around it, there would be a short silence, and then someone else would raise their hand to give me another reason why they couldn't make any changes in how they do things, often citing "policy and procedures" or "management" as their reasons for not being able to make the changes.

Of course, when these staff want to, they have no problems resisting policies and procedures. There are a million work-arounds and they regularly engage in them. Even more to the point, many of the "policies" they were citing weren't really policies. More often they were assumptions or unstated expectations that, if staff chose to, could be ignored with impunity.

After a few rounds of "Yes, but. . . " I called the group on their resistance and asked them to consider how they were exhibiting the very behaviors they complained about in their clients. Some faces closed up immediately--I wasn't going to get through to them. But most people laughed sheepishly, recognizing what they were doing. It was a good moment where you could see some light coming into the room. 

One of my most consistent experiences in working with staff is dealing with this resistance to change, which they readily see in other people, but not in themselves. In their minds, change is something that happens outside of themselves--it's changes in management, in policies, etc., rather than changes in individual professional practice that could take place. My challenge, always, is to get them to see the places where they can do things differently on their own, regardless of what other people are doing. I have to help them see that it's the accumulation of their individual practices that creates change, regardless of what's happening around them. They can wait for the "system" to change (and there are plenty of things in the system to change), but they have to realize that they are part of the system. Even if everything else operated differently, if they don't start making some different choices about their individual behavior, the system isn't moving anywhere.

Now I'm off to get another group to think differently about how they do their jobs.