What’s Killing Your Change Initiatives?

Pat Zigarmi and Judd Hoekstra - 6/27/11

Learning leaders can help root out the usual suspects by involving employees in change before, during and after the process.

Cooking Up Change at Barilla America

Change efforts often fail because sponsors don’t pay ongoing attention to the change initiatives they launch.

Change is often introduced with varying degrees of reception. It begins with a slow but sure integration into an organization’s fabric and then, without warning, it’s found dead, quite often with no apparent injury. In fact, most change initiatives end up dead. The perpetrator is rarely identified.

Without creating alignment among the usual suspects who typically kill change, organizations cannot hope to generate the long-term commitment needed to sustain it. Yet, if these suspects are reformed and held accountable for contributing their time and talent to the investment, organizations and the learning leaders who support them can create the momentum and peer advocacy necessary for change to succeed.

“In any major business change project, everyone needs to be a change agent — the usual suspects, culture, leadership, urgency, vision — but too often, we point to one executive to be the person “in charge of change,” said Bob Dean, director of North American business at Profiling Online.

However, it is nearly impossible for one person to sustain change alone.

“Faced with the complexity of most change efforts, organizations need to gain everyone’s buy-in,” said Garry Ridge, CEO of WD-40. “When peers become change agents together, they can become catalysts for the change process.”

One of the most likely suspects is an organization’s culture. According to Ridge the motive for the crime is usually fear of the unknown. He said leaders must remove the fear by including rather than excluding employees from decision-making processes related to the change. An inclusive, agile, high-involvement, transparent and trustworthy culture enables change, whereas a bureaucratic, secretive, low-trust culture can kill it. “The tone at the top sets the agenda for a trusted change effort and creates the culture where it can thrive,” Ridge said.

Commitment, another suspect in most change killings, describes a person’s level of confidence or motivation to engage in the new behaviors required. To build motivation and confidence, employees have to be able to influence what is happening to them.