Some change isn’t instigated by the organization at all, but by the organizational member who decides to change careers, an increasingly common phenomenon. In listing 21st-century human-resources trends, nonprofit CEO John McMorrow predicted that career change would become the rule rather than the exception, in part because of the “erosion of the implied good-faith contract between employer and employee.” Career-changers, too, should be prepared to tell deft stories of why they made the change and how they’ve adapted, as in the example in the extended entry:

You can find some additional career-change stories at the Web site of DBM, a global human-capital management-services firm (While the purpose of the stories is to promote DBM’s services, the storytelling in them provides some good models).

Telling compelling stories as you transition from one role to the next, one organization to the next, helps the listener feel invested in your success, a scenario that bodes well when the storyteller is a job-seeker, and the listener is an employer, contend Harvard Business Review writers Ibarra and Lineback. The authors describe a worker who developed and told change stories about a bankruptcy, a turnaround, and a rapid reorganization, eventually garnering referrals to employers and job interviews. In another example, a worker learned more about her career passions and became more committed to a planned career change each time she told her story by writing a cover letter, participating in a job interview, or networking with friends.

Change skills should be a major focus of the stories you tell as you progress from one organization to the next. This table summarizes how scholars and experts characterize these skills.

In my senior campaign-management job, I was the pinnacle person for a diverse group of project managers. I had many representatives from all the product bases constantly coming to me to develop databases of customers they could sell to. They wanted to know who they could market to. I would collaborate with them, asking questions like, what’s the budget, how many pieces do you want to direct mail? Or do you want to call these people? What media will you use? I worked to ensure each group got all the demographics it wanted. I’d pull the requirements into the data. And I’d be darned if the group didn’t change its mind and ask for a different demographic. Or something unpredictable like a hurricane would mean the group couldn’t mail to a certain region. So, I’d have to throw all the data back in to the pond and re-fish. And the changes wouldn’t happen with just one group; they would happen with all of them at one time. I dreaded my pager going off at 7 a.m. because a project manager had a thought while sleeping last night: “Ooh, I would love to see how many prospective customers wear toenail polish.” But whatever their requirement was, I said, “I’m on top of it.” I enjoyed the analytic aspects and the busyness and the constant go, go, go. Change drives me. It’s something I enjoy because it’s an extra challenge.

The bank in which I worked instituted a policy that centralized the lending process. An application was to be taken from the client and sent off to be approved or declined, processed, prepared, and returned to the branch to be signed by the client. While the process was streamlined, it also took away valuable face-to-face knowledge about the client and the loan. If the employee did not have any prior lending experience, he or she couldn’t answer simple loan questions from the client. While I appreciated the newly created time in my schedule, I felt that the clients were being slighted. I proposed to my boss a small adjustment that would permit brief face time with the client. My boss implemented my idea, and now we have the best of both worlds, face-to-face time with clients without taking significant time away from the streamlined process.

In my current job, I am working on a project to increase efficiencies in the customer-service area, one component of which is to better control the way customer service handles the mail. I questioned the administrative clerk, who’s responsible for receiving and distributing the mail, about how she does her job. She gathers mail from the P.O. box, reads the recipient, and passes mail around to be handled. I asked her what would happen if mail is lost. How would we track it? If someone doesn’t handle the sender’s inquiry in a timely manner, how can we know? I presented with her many questions of real and hypothetical situations where the ball was dropped somewhere, so I could find out from her if she had a plan in place to deal with those situations. The clerk at first, felt confident in her work, took great pride in being industrious, and didn’t feel passing mail around was a broken process, but after our conversation, she began to see the situation from my point of view and became receptive to new ideas and change. I needed and attained her buy-in so that I could create change and add value to her job. Together, we’ve developed a process to ensure that customer inquiries don’t slip through the cracks.

The strategic repositioning and closing of the training center where I am director of organizational development has been a significant change. A major contributor to the stress has been the high level of ambiguity during the past year and the fact that people are at different places in the grief and transition process at the same time. My style in times of stress and ambiguity is to try and find something productive I can do both personally and for the larger community. So, I have chosen to deal with this change by being proactive and leading an effort to offer career-enrichment programs at our sister training center. I’ve also collaborated with outside vendors to design a development program to support supervisors and staff through this transition, provided one-on-one coaching for the center’s leadership, and provided individual sessions for teams. These sessions have been well attended, and I’ve received very positive and appreciative comments from staff members who attended them.

I was a consultant, for a company that had been under the umbrella of a large government contractor that decided to sell off its commercial division to focus on its military applications. A venture-capital group came along and bought the company, which then lost its controller to the original owner, the government contractor. The newly purchased company had tried to replace the controller, but the new hires just didn’t stick. It was a very challenging environment. I was there for six months and got them through their first year-end close and their first audit as the new company. I stayed with them long enough to where they got their new controller on board, and I got him settled in for a couple of months and fully trained. As a consultant you have to be smart and fast because the client wants to see results quickly. You’ve got to be able to very quickly absorb the basic organizational structure and learn the key players. Then you have to quickly learn their software and processes - and look for ways to improve them.

Storytelling provides an innovative way for you to enter organizations and to thrive within ever-changing organizations, and change supplies an advantageous backdrop for storytelling. You can distinguish yourself from the competition by, for example, telling stories in resumes and cover letters as well as during job interviews of how you have embraced change as an opportunity instead of an obstacle, as in these next examples, which may provide inspiration for your job search or quest for promotion. To garner more ideas for the kinds of skills and aptitudes around which you can tell change stories, see Carol Goman’s Change-Adept Questionnaire.

More examples appear in Chapters 3 through 8.

Change is without doubt disruptive and traumatic, and when it affects you, your natural inclination might be to flee that employer, resist the transformation, cope with it - or you can capitalize on it. You can grab the opportunity that change presents to develop new self-concepts, specific skills, and mental attitudes for handling, leading, communicating, and taking advantage of organizational change. Those skills will make you more marketable when you decide to leave your employer.

Change is thus inevitable and constant in organizations, and the ability of organizations and their members to respond successfully to change is viewed as an imperative for future organizational and career survival. In an environment in which two of three transformation initiatives fail, scholars predict that the most successful organizations of the future will be those that respond effectively to change, while those that fail to mount a timely response to change won’t last. In a 2004 Conference Board report on CEO challenges, 88 percent of the 539 European, Asian, and North American CEOs surveyed ranked organizational flexibility and adaptability to change among their greatest leadership concerns and the number one issue for 42 percent of the executives. Carl Steffen, a vice president at PeopleSoft, which co-sponsored the study, noted that “developing an agile, adaptable workforce that embraces change and aligns itself quickly will be tomorrow’s competitive differentiator.”