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Thanks for listening and see you next time. Welcome to Coaches. You need a podcast short designed to be demystified coaching and help you our audience understand what coaching is and how it can help you. I'm your host, Jamie, and today I'm delighted to be here with coach Renee to discuss responding to organizational change, which is a segment from her new book, Crush It Conquer Workplace Challenges. Thank you so much, Renee for being with us here today.
Thank you for having me. Coach Renee has been coaching for three years, but she has a long career in asset management and particularly managing very large teams, including a transformational team, and find finding the best ways to invest in growing those teams with the right coaching and the right training. Her clients are
young profitionals and middle management, so welcome again. Thank you. I would like to open today's podcast with the quote that you that you shared at the beginning of this chapter on organizational change and handling organizational change, because I think it summarizes really well what we're going to talk about very briefly here today, and that quote is a quote by Socrates. It's the secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building
the new, which is beautiful. So why don't we go ahead and get started and just talk a little bit, and why don't we define and you know, what is it? How do we think about what is organizational change and why is it important for organizations? Okay, yeah, so organizational change it happens all the time in the workplace, right, and it it is necessary because we could be operating inefficiently, right, and so management has to
look out and see how can we create efficiencies with what we're doing. It may be manual processes that we need to automate or potentially move processes to another team. And so it does happen a lot. People don't love it when it happens. And you know, in asset management in the industry, over the past five years, there's been what they call a transformational change, and
so there is a lot of change and it happens frequently. So you need to think about how can you like change, right, because it's going to happen a lot. So instead of being fearful, think about how you can adapt to change in your organization. Yeah, I feel like I personally realized very late in life there was a lot of things that just in general, let's take it outside of the organization, just in general, I think as we as human beings, it's sometimes it's the fact that there's change itself that
we don't like. It's not really what the change is, and in fact, we don't actually dissect and think about it. It's just like, oh, but this is different, yes, And I feel like I myself as you know my you know, I've gone, I got married, I had kids, you know, went through all these life changes, right, and didn't embrace it in the way that I should have. So, you know, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how someone should approach embracing change and
adapting to change, particularly in an organizational context. Okay, So I think the first thing is getting comfortable with change, right, And I've heard a lot about this, and some of the things you can try to do is make change in your everyday life. Right, Like maybe you take the same route to work every day. I'm pretty much a creature of how it, so I may walk to work the same way every day, right, and
so we do these same things every day. Change it because then once you do that, you start to become comfortable with change, right, And I think it's the same thing in the workplace, Like we get so comfortable we go to work every day and it's like, Okay, I know I have to do these things. I know I have to report to this person or these people report to me. But try to think about that differently and does
it make sense? Right? I always try to go into work now thinking about what is working, what is not, and what can we do to make it better. So if you're always thinking that way, then change becomes easier. I think it becomes something more that you can embrace if you look at it with a lens of progress exactly. Yes, you can look back and say, well, look at all that we've been through, you know.
And I always like to look at it as a journey, right, Okay, I started here and things were okay, but then we made this change, and now look where we've come to. We're at such a much better place, and we can always think about how we can make things better. So that's how I try to look at it now. Instead of a few years ago, I would say about four years ago, which I talk about in the book, I had a change happened to me and I didn't
like it. Right. I didn't handle it well. I wasn't comfortable with it, and I think back to Okay, but what did I learn from that? And now I'm a very different person because I went through that change. Are you comfortable speaking on a little more detail about that change and sort of what stages you went through to get to this place where you're at? Okay? Okay. So I was asked a few years ago in the workplace. I was managing a large team and I was called into my boss's office
and he said, Renee, we're making a change. I was heading up a client service team, and he said, we are bringing someone in new who's going to be taking over the management of the team, and we want to move you into a transformation role, so you won't be managing anyone. You're going to be digitizing client service processes. So I said, okay, well I like technology, and he said, yeah, you talked about how you like technology, so we thought you would be great at this role.
And I thought, but I manage a client service team, right, And I liked the team that I was managing. I had already taken them through a lot of change, and so it was really upsetting to me. I actually left the office that day to deal with my emotions. I didn't want to deal with them in the in the office. And it's funny. I talked to my at the time twenty two year old daughter and you know, said, oh my god, I can't believe this is happening to me.
And it was funny. She said something to me like, well, mom, it's not what happens to you, it's how you react to it. Your twenty two year old sila, Yes, this is yeah then twenty two, and I thought, wow, that makes a lot of sense. But I didn't really listen at the time. I still went home. I was very upset. I you know, I called HR. I did all like, how could they do this to me? I'm managing this team and you
know, how could they do this? I don't understand. And then I had to work for someone who at the time was my peer colleague, who was then becoming my manager. So I liked her very much, but I was uncomfortable that I had to now report to her, and so it took me a long time. I did a lot of soul searching, you know, I did what I had to do. I came in, it was announced to the team that I was moving on, and I was very you know, transparent with them. I said, look, this is a change,
but I'm embracing it and I'm going to do these things. I'm still going to work with everyone. And but I went home and I was very upset. I was very depressed at the time, and I started looking for books that could help me deal with this, like how am I going to deal with this big change in my career? And I read something by Marie Fourlio if I don't know if she's another kind of life coach, and she
has a book called Everything Is figure Outable. So I read this book and I just kind of immersed myself into it and it was very good because she talks about doing things that make you happy and you're really passionate about and so at the time I thought, well, I'm very passionate about helping others be successful, which is why I became a manager in the first place. Right, So this is when I thought, if I can't be a manager, I want to be a coach. And so I did end up going to
a program to learn to become a coach. I became certified professional coach, and that kind of helped me deal with what I was missing in the workplace, right. And so now I look back and I think I could have handled it differently. Right. I could have said, Okay, it's a change, this might be exciting for me to do something differently, and really just talk to my manager and say, okay, well, what is your vision of what I'm going to be doing, right and what can I do
to help you help the team? Because we were all going through this massive restructuring, right, and there were a lot of people who didn't deal well with it either, and they because basically what they felt was, this is my job. I've been doing it. Some people had been doing it for fifteen years without any change. So some people did not make it. They didn't they resisted it, they left the firm. And you know, I continue to stay and I look back and think about, wow, all the
things that I learn from this change. I never knew anything about transformation and doing a lot of initiatives that I may not have been involved in as the manager of the client service team. So that's where I looked at it, like, Okay, I learned something. And now we had another recent change and I was moving off of the transformation role and I was okay with it because I said, Okay, now I want to look at this change and how we can help the change, the team learn and you know, make
us a better team. Right. So I had a different attitude this time around. Well, it's really having almost like you have. You've had a mindset shift around what change really means exactly, And I think it's a reframing around change is not something to resist, but change is opportunity exactly, learn and growth exactly opportunity. And that's what happened exactly. And so what are
the steps that you would recommend to anyone facing an organizational change? What would you sort of if we were to sort of narrow it down in a sort of very simple like how to guide What are these steps that you would lay out for somebody? I would say the most important thing is listen when you're being told that there's going to be a change, right first, listen to that. Don't react, right. I know it's hard, and I think sometimes we just have to take it in and say, Okay, let me
process this. You know, maybe it's a day you sit and process it. Then follow up with your manager, ask about the vision for the team and your role, you know, what is what is my role going to be? How can I help? How can I learn how to do this role? And then it's just take it day by day right and learn. But the big thing is to do it with a positive mindset, right, rather than reacting negatively to it. Right. That's our kind of first reaction is why are you doing this to me? So I think it's if you
ask you management, why what is the change for? Right? What is my role in it? And how can I be a change agent to help the team around me, you know, really embrace the change. Well, thank you so much, coach, thank you for having me today, and to our audience, thank you for listening. If you would like to work with Coach Renee or one of our other qualified coaches, please visit us at theidemics dot com. Thanks for listening, Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave
us a review. Find your ideal coach at www dot viidems dot com. Special thanks to our producer Martin Maluski and singer songwriter Doug Allen.