If you have ever walked into an office and thought to yourself, “this feels really different,” you are familiar with the diversity of corporate cultures. Dr. Fons Trompenaars brought us a great model for quickly describing and categorizing these differences in his “Four Types of Corporate Culture” model. 

I recently sat down on a Saturday evening with a stack of packing materials – boxes, shrink wrap, newsprint and tape—ready to conquer the job of packing up the house for an impending move.  I sat on the floor with all of the tools needed to do the job neatly laid around me.  I had a plan in my head: start with all of the photos on the walls and then move room-by-room until I reached the biggest challenge of them all, the kitchen.

There is a statement that we regularly hear about the role that change managers play in projects.  It usually starts off something like this:

As change agents we often find ourselves in leadership positions on projects where we do not have direct management over people.

I was recently listening in on a post-mortem review of a change initiative that occurred at a medium sized, remote site.  It was a simple change to the IT infrastructure that should have been a low risk, low impact change that swapped out several pieces of hardware throughout the site.

Project management and change management are two disciplines that should go hand-in-hand through any new project implementation.  The practice of project management looks at the technical side of how we put a new system in place.  Change management looks at the same system implementation and helps us get the most out of the change from a people perspective. 

The term “Emotional Intelligence” came into the limelight in 1990 when two researchers, Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer published their research on the topic.  Salovey and Mayer identified four factors that comprise emotional intelligence:

1. Identifying Emotions – The first factor towards understanding emotions is to be able to recognize them as they occur in others.  This includes verbal cues (e.g. intonation) and non-verbal cues (e.g. body language, proxemics, etc.).

“Have you eaten?”

“How are the kids?”

Depending on your cultural background one of the statements above is considered friendly conversation during the business day and the other is considered awkward.

Any tech-savvy communicator with a penchant for instant messaging will have at one point in time misread the emotional responses of someone at the other end of a text message.  Only 160 characters to say what you want, a puny mobile keyboard and no ability to express non-verbal cues is a recipe for interpersonal communication disaster.

Demonstrating leadership competency across cultural boundaries is no easy task.  Hundreds and often times thousands of years of cultural nuances have impacted the way each civilization operates.  Nuggets of wisdom, passed from generation-to-generation come together to form the slowly evolving backbone of a society. 

The question, “why is change so hard” is a difficult but important one to answer.  The change management industry wrestles with developing a concise model because the question of “why” grows in complexity as we try and apply it to ways people react to change.