How to navigate emerging ESG realities in asset and wealth management

Author : Emily Marshall, Manager, People Advisory Services
Contributors:
Lindsay Falkov, Associate Partner, EY Canada
Andy Leung, Director, Workforce Advisory Services, EY Canada
Greg Hedgecoe, Associate Partner, People Advisory Services, Workforce Advisory, EY Canada
Alexandra Lee, Partner, People Advisory Services, EY Canada
Kat Lee, Partner, People Advisory Services, EY Canada
Andrea Wolfson, Partner, People Advisory Services, EY Canada
Sarah Smith, Partner, EY Canada Coaching Leader

Focusing on human factors and effective coaching helps organizations overcome change resistance, accelerating sustainable transformations.

In brief:

• Paying more attention to human factors helps organizations transform successfully.
• This must include helping leaders and high-performing teams overcome immunity to change.
• The right coaching strategy dismantles these barriers, helping entire organizations make greater transformational progress quickly and sustainably.

When does resistance to change become unwillingness to thrive?

Change is hard. At the organizational level, though, immunity to change can be downright paralyzing to future growth and sustainable success. That’s especially true in a market like ours, where disruption is continuous and the ability to remain agile and transform is intricately linked with business results. Coaching, at both the individual and team levels, can help organizations address barriers to change and model behaviours that are necessary for organizations to move forward.

Why are people immune to change?

People avoid change for all kinds of reasons. In the past, we may have written off a resistance to change as simply a lack of discipline or a lack of motivation to act. But research shows us that’s not actually the case.¹

As humans, we’re naturally inclined to avoid discomfort and tend to avoid change accordingly. Many of us maintain deep-rooted, subconscious assumptions that make it difficult to adapt behaviours. Systemically, that begins to create an immunity to change that’s not so much about stubbornness or flagging determination. Rather, it’s about core beliefs that lie at the heart of our own identities. These feelings lead us to think that change fundamentally threatens us, or is incongruous with what we believe.

This is true whether we’re trying to change small personal behaviours, such as those around eating habits, or big professional behaviours around ways of working. Sometimes the barriers are obvious, but often they are subtle and more complex.

For example, a leader may recognize the important goal of meeting regularly and frequently with her team, but often cancel and reschedule calls. Despite recognizing the need, and having the desire, to team effectively and collaboratively, that leader remains unable to change. That is until she recognizes her own subconscious belief that any scheduled disciplined time in her calendar is a threat to her creativity. This leader is committed to working well with her colleagues, but has an equally powerful competing commitment to keep her calendar clear for creative thought¹.

At EY, we see this through our workforce transformation projects time and time again. Everyone wants to transform, but no one wants to change.² This kind of immunity to change is deep rooted and requires self-awareness. It can’t be willed away by a desire to behave differently. Overcoming immunity to change sustainably requires each of us to address the core belief that is preventing us from achieving goals. Only then can people really change in ways that last — and support the organization’s broader need to operate, work and collaborate differently over the long term.