Governing change

Over the course of our lives we encounter many situations that allow or require a change. At work, beyond the major milestones everyone shares, such as entering and leaving the workforce, we have to deal with a reality that requires us not only to accept a process of constant change but to manage it.

Every change we go through also alters the conditions in which we operate, and so affects our future possibilities for change. Passively submitting to change therefore has effects that are amplified by the narrowing of our future options. In his book “Liquid Modernity” (2000), the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman presents modernity as a process of liquefaction in which the constraints and rigidities that used to push life along predefined tracks grow steadily weaker. In this context it is very hard to keep a strategic view of one’s own career path; that does not mean, however, that we can simply play it by ear.

We therefore need to try to channel changes into a path of development and growth; otherwise we will not be able to reap their benefits.

Development implies incremental processes that, through the interactions between the person and the context, produce a succession of changes that are lasting and consistent with a defined path. To make use of changes by turning them into opportunities for development, we need to organize ourselves so that we sense future trends and changes ahead of time and can plan the appropriate actions (proactivity).

To govern change, we need to work on five fundamental aspects (to be addressed in this order):

1. SELF-ESTEEM – William James (1890) defines self-esteem as the ratio of the successes we achieve to our aspirations: in modern terms, between the perceived self and the ideal self. In practice, how far am I from what I would like to be? Self-esteem declines not so much because of the distance from the goal as because of how unattainable the goal is perceived to be.
2. SELF-EFFICACY (a concept introduced by Albert Bandura in 1977) – To what extent do we think we are able to do what is needed to achieve our aims? Self-efficacy is essential to undertaking any action and underlies all theories of motivation. It is not a measure of our self-confidence, but of our conviction that we can cope with the events, tests and tasks that will come our way. In the original paper (Bandura, 1977), expectations of personal efficacy derive from four principal sources of information, including direct experience and experience observed in others.
3. GOALS – These must be both possible and desirable (see A path to defining and reaching ambitious goals). On the link between goals and performance, the reference is goal-setting theory, for which Locke and Latham (2002) summarize thirty-five years of empirical research.
4. PLANNING – We then need to define a strategy that takes us in the direction of our goal.
5. MONITORING – The most delicate and most underrated aspect is the one that lets us take stock and keep correcting course without being distracted by other events. A meta-analysis of 138 experimental studies, with almost 20,000 participants (Harkin and colleagues, 2016), shows that interventions prompting people to monitor their progress increase the likelihood of attaining the goal.

Companies can help us only partly along this path. Goals are strictly personal, and so are the tools of motivation. People’s growth and development is less and less under the control of organizations, which struggle even more than individuals to accept and manage situations of uncertainty.

Alberto Viotto