Leadership Wisdom of the Week #19

“Change sticks when it becomes ‘the way we do things around here’.”

– Kotter, 1995

This week’s quote comes from an article on change management published in Harvard Business Review more than 30 years ago. While I do not think linear, top-down approaches to change management are as relevant today as they may have been 30 years ago, I still think this particular piece of wisdom stands strong.

How many changes are started with good intentions, only to end up dying before they truly change the everyday ways of operating? When results are not visible early enough, organisations often start a new change initiative instead of reinforcing the existing one through involvement, follow-up and truly anchoring the change in the organisation’s ways of working and culture.

So how do we do this in practice?

This naturally depends on the nature of the change. If you are leading a top-down change, one of the most important things is to consider what needs to be done at each level of the organisation. Too often, we think that we as leaders need to design everything in order to make the change clear.

In today’s fast-changing and complex world, however, there are not many changes that can — or should — be fully planned by small leadership groups. Instead, some of the best top-down changes are initiated through a clear target statement: this is what we want to achieve and why. Typically, some shared guardrails or guiding principles are also put in place to ensure that people build their own roads in the same general direction, based on a shared foundation.

But after that, it should be up to the organisation, and the people at different levels, to decide how the targets of the change are going to be achieved. That way, the change is grounded in the actual ways of doing things across the organisation. By being involved in the change planning, people make sense of the change and its purpose, while also bringing their best understanding of the everyday ways of operating into the change process.

Another way of looking at organisational renewal is to invest in and encourage continuous, emergent change. This means encouraging people to pay ongoing attention to how things are done, and how they could be enhanced or developed to better meet the changing operating environment.

It is important to notice that this does not happen automatically. It requires organisations to provide both the right culture and the right structures for people to take ownership of renewal and feel encouraged to openly discuss what should be changed — both as individuals and in teams.

How much time do you dedicate in your organisation to discussing not only what should change, but how the change could become part of “the way we do things around here”?