Change and stability don’t need to be mutually exclusive concepts. With a thoughtful approach, HR practitioners can help organisations innovate without sacrificing the stability that employees need to thrive.

Change tends to be celebrated as a necessary catalyst for progress – but is constant disruption always the best path forward?

In the latest episode of AHRI’s podcast, Let’s Take This Offline, host Tani Jacobi CPHR speaks with author and leadership expert Ashley Goodall on how HR can help employees navigate a sea of change at work. 

Goodall, a seasoned leader with experience heading people and learning functions at global organisations like Deloitte and Cisco, delves into some of the insights in his latest book, The Problem With Change, which challenges the assumption that constant transformation is inherently good for businesses.

Listeners will gain a fresh perspective on how organisations can balance the need for growth with the imperative to foster a stable, supportive work environment, as well as actionable strategies for rethinking your approach to change.

Below is a snippet of their conversation, edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode here:

The problem with change 

Tani Jacobi CPHR: The book you’ve written recently is titled The Problem With Change, which is quite provocative and thought-provoking in and of itself. Can you talk to us more about what you mean by the problem with change?

Ashley Goodall: There are a few different facets. Firstly, if you look at the experience of people in large organisations confronted by endless change, they’re not having a good time. It’s not helping them do their jobs, and worse than that, it’s inhibiting them from doing their jobs. 

But at the same time, most organisational leaders would say, ‘My job is to create change, and the more the better.’ So the first part of the problem is that the culture tells us or reinforces for us that change is the point and that it’s a good thing, but the experience of it inside an organisation seems to be a miserable thing. 

Those two don’t line up. So that’s a problem. The other part of the problem is when we ask, ‘Why is it that change is hard on humans?’ And that forces you to understand some of the findings of psychology going back years and years.

We don’t like uncertainty. We don’t like it when you remove our agency. We don’t like it when you disrupt our sense of belonging. We don’t like being displaced and we don’t like it when nothing makes sense. So the problem with change is not just that leaders think it’s good when it isn’t, but that it creates a psychological environment that is very hard on people.

“Stability is not stasis. It’s not staying still, it’s a way of moving through the world without zigzagging left and right the whole time.” – Ashley Goodall, author and leadership expert

Keeping up with the pace of change

Tani Jacobi CPHR: How can we keep up with the world and make sure that our businesses continue to be sustainable and thriving and create the conditions for our people to thrive as well?

Ashley Goodall: I interviewed a lot of people around the world for the book, which was colossal fun, and demonstrated to me that this isn’t an American thing or an Australian thing or an English thing. It’s a global thing. I was talking to the head of HR at a pharmaceutical company and she said to me, “What we forget is that by the time someone arrives at the office on a Monday morning, they are already living in a massively changing world that week.”

[As an employer], do you want to add to that or take away from that? If you’re a company, do you want to pile on or do you want to help? If you decide that the smart play or the humane play is that you want to help, then you get smart about where stability comes from. I think it’s always really important to say upfront that stability is not stasis. It’s not staying still, it’s a way of moving through the world without zigzagging left and right the whole time. 

Building team cohesion for greater stability

Tani Jacobi CPHR: Do you have any advice or recommendations for HR practitioners who are listening to this saying, ‘Yes, I relate to this’? How do we start to turn the dial in that direction? 

Ashley Goodall: If you can understand that for a human at work, in a parallel way to a human not at work, the social group is the glue, the foundation and the source of all sorts of psychological support, then you’re already halfway there to understanding where stability comes from. 

Now, of course, the first thing to do is to stop shuffling the teams. Leave them alone. Because, here’s what’s happening – and I’m not talking about trust falls and all the silly things that we do at off-sites – I’m talking about, if I ask you to work with a group of people on a task that everyone understands, sooner or later, you begin to figure out what the other people are good at that you’re not good at. And they figure out what they’re not good at that you’re good at. 

There’s a little exchange that happens. You begin to arrange the work so that everybody gets to do what they’re better at. This gives you empowerment, it gives you a sense of agency, and it gives you a sense of stability because you are more reliant on your own skills. Keep the group together a little bit longer and a sense of belonging emerges, and rituals emerge.

This is an edited excerpt from an episode of Let’s Take This Offline. Listen to the full episode here and subscribe to ensure you never miss a future episode.