The first phase of transition is intentional separation, helping people to let go of the old ways. As ironic as it sounds. If you want to speed change up in your organization, start stopping things. start helping people get clear about what they can't do any more. Help people take things off their plate that were really about the past. That's what intentional separation is all about.

It's about lightening the load. It's about creating space for the new change the new project plan, the New Product, Software, whatever it might be to really take place and be successful. When it comes to leading people through transition. And being much more intentional about this. There's two sides of this. One is a very practical pragmatic side that we can look at and be able to point to and touch and very easily put into action.

The Second side is a softer, more social emotional side. Let's look at each in turn. If you only want to do one thing about helping people through transition, simply clarify what must stop, spell out what remains constant, those two things will be incredibly helpful and very powerful messages to send to an organization. It's important to understand that the executives and the project teams have got to get clear about those two messages. Because what's over now and what's not over, are decisions that are fraught with power and authority issues. So if you leave this to all of the supervisors to make decisions upon, we're going to be in trouble.

So it's going to be the executives and the project teams that get clear about what's over now and what's not. And those details need to be embedded right into the project. Once we're clear about what's over on what's not, let's send very clear boundary messages. Remember one organization. In fact, it was that example that I told you earlier, when we were talking about different ways or different options that transition plays out. It was a delayed transition.

And the change was a global maintenance initiative that the local area manager had literally kept on the shelf for a year and a half, when he was finally convinced that he was going to have to make this major maintenance initiative work in his particular area. He came back from the meeting headquarters, and on Monday morning, he had all of his managers and all of the supervisors come together in a normal Monday morning meeting. And in front of the group, he rolled out a paper shredder and took his beloved old maintenance manual that he wrote as a young engineer when he came into the organization, some 20 Three or 24 years earlier, and literally ran it through the paper shredder. It was very clear to everyone at that meeting, that he either lost his mind completely, which of course wasn't the case. But there was something going on with our maintenance planning and our maintenance schedules and the way we approached maintenance all these years.

And as soon as that shredding had happened, and all of the old manual had been literally ended up on the floor in piles of shredded paper, he went to the shelf of the meeting room and pulled out a box that had been up there for about 18 months, and he dusted off the top. And of course, he handed out what were the new global maintenance manuals. And he admitted to the guys that I haven't read this yet, but it's become clear to me that we have to make global maintenance work here. So I'm going to look at this over the week I'd like you to as well and we will figure out what we need to do differently here? They haven't figured it all out yet. But they were very clear that they will no longer be going to be doing maintenance based on the old manual.

And the old approach, sending clear boundary messages about not was then and this is now the last thing on this pragmatic side is to stop rewarding the old ways of doing things. It's common in many organizations to tell people to do the new things yet continue to allow, or in some ways even continue to reward the old way of doing things. In one organization, they were going to a team based decision making process and a team based sewing floor. They were manufacturing outfit, and they continued to pay people on piecework. Well, there's a problem. If we're talking about teams and doing things in a much more team oriented perspective.

You can't be rewarding people solely on piecework because everybody then is looking at working as an individual contributor. So stop rewarding the old ways. The second side of separation has to do with the softer social more emotional side, it's really important to be aware of who thinks they have what to lose. So perceived losses. Do people think that with this new project, they're losing turf, or they're no longer going to be able to work the schedule that they used to, or they're going to have to move offices or they're going to lose their old team. So be aware of what people think they have to lose.

Often management or the project team is all about all of the good stuff, all the new things, and people really dislike that they have to let go of the simple fact that they could do that all procedure almost in their sleep, because they've been doing it for so long. So be aware of perceived losses. If it's helpful, encourage people to bring a piece of the past along with them. Sometimes These are just temporary things that we will bring along. Sometimes these are a part of those that things that remain constant. But these are, let's call them something to hang on to.

It's also very important for managers and supervisors and leaders not to denigrate the old way of doing things not to diminish the past. People are very proud of the past and to send messages consciously or unconsciously, about, you know, we were really wrong to have done this that way for so long. That's not a healthy idea. People will really get their back up around those things. So the past is the past, we were doing the best we could at the time, this is a different situation, we have to do something different. Wasn't that the past was wrong, it was the situation is different now.

And lastly, there may be some very common predictable emotions attached to a major loss. Now This emotional cycle, if you will, dealing with major loss is something we're all very familiar with, because we've gone through it many times in our life. This grief cycle of denial, shock, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It's not a straight line, really, it's a cycle and we will go through it several times. But what's important to realize that there will be some people in your organization who aren't in any way, shape or form losing something they're attached to their thinking this new change is a tremendous idea. So they won't have any emotions around major loss.

In fact, it will be halleluja Free at last, we get to do this new thing, it's going to be great. But for others, there will be this emotional field. So it's really helpful to ensure that managers and supervisors understand that this grief cycle or this cycle of dealing with loss is very normal and natural can find ways to support people through that. And a lot of it is just simply listening to people re explaining the details of the change, ensuring that folks have what they need, but more importantly, listening to them as they go through all of these phases and not taking a lot of the anger or the bargaining personally. It's just a normal natural response to major loss. So there's some thoughts on the first phase of intentional separation.