Change

Once a month, I have breakfast with a small group of employees.  This "Breakfast with the Boss" is intended to break down barriers in communication and help us build a stronger organization.

We found ourselves this morning talking about change in several different ways.

A new employee talked about the challenge of having so much to learn about both the organization and his position and the challenges associated with following a well-loved employee into the role.  We talked about the challenges of new people joining a team and how the dynamics shift, especially when people have been covering the work in an interim period and now need to transfer it to the new person.  We talked about the challenges of being promoted and letting go of your old role to let the new person take it over.  And we talked about the fears of being an experienced employee about to have a new manager hired in to supervise the team.

All are challenges!  The only words of advice I could offer were along the lines of "the only constant in the world is change!"  I also talked about my belief that we build a stronger organization by bringing in new people that are not clones of their predecessors, but who bring new skills and outlooks to the position and to the organization.

What I forgot to tell them is that I feel their pain.  For while I am viewed as a change agent in the workplace, outside of work, believe it or not, I hate it when things change!