We just read “Organizational Change: 8 Reasons Why People Resist Change,” an article that Robert Tanner posted on his Management is a Journey™ blog. There is a lot of wisdom in his article, and we recommend that you give it a thorough read.

Although Mr. Tanner’s post is not about training per se, its insights have a lot to do with it. After all, the purpose of training is to get people to change and if they resist doing that, your training will be both more difficult and less effective.

Robert Tanner’s Reasons People Resist Change

He cites eight reasons. Here are three that we feel can be especially damaging to training success:

• A climate of mistrust. “Trust involves faith in the intentions and behavior of others,” Tanner writes. And he is right. If your employees distrust their managers, your top executives or each other, training can only accomplish limited objectives. How can you build a climate of trust in your organization? It is a complex process. We recommend the solutions that our CEO Evan Hackel describes in his book Ingaging Leadership, such as creating professional development plans for all employees and allowing them to take ownership of their work.
• Organizational politics. Sometimes people resist training to prove that the way things are done in their departments are already good enough – upper management should not get involved. Or they make sure training results fall short as a way of sabotaging a boss. If attitudes like those have taken hold, turning the situation around is a major challenge.
• Peer pressure. Your employees, like all people, are social creatures. If they are telling each other to resist training and the changes it will bring, that represents a very real obstacle to training success. If only one employee is spreading the word that training will increase work, add to frustrations, or fail to produce results, you have a “rotten apple” who is sabotaging you. One way to prevent this issue is to get employees involved in planning their own training programs, based on their real-world needs. When people identify problems that they would like training to address, they are more likely to buy into training and less likely to pay attention to people who sow doubt.