Change programs rarely deliver as promised, at least in my experience. There are plenty of reasons for this, but a recent article in strategy+business by Elsbeth Johnson entitles ‘Lazy Leaders and Heroic Managers’ has captured the real essence for this (Click Here To Read).
The article is based on a four year study Johnson undertook on change initiatives, and she poke with both the leaders who conceived the change, and the managers who had to implement it. Her conclusion is that all too often the managers were heroic in their efforts, while the leaders were lazy. By lazy, she means the leaders were doing the easy things and not the right things.
Johnson bills the problem down to three ways that leaders tend to fail the change process:
- They weren’t clear enough about what they wanted.
Leaders, when conceiving a change program, need to be able to clearly specific the outcomes – not the activities – that are sought. Leave the decision on the activities to the managers, they are more attuned to what can make it work best.
- Leaders are not realistic about how long it would take and how much it would cost.
Leaders have a tendency to expect too much too soon, and as a result reward short term gains rather than longer term success.
- They weren’t consistent enough in the signals they sent about what was important.
Leaders too often stopped the messages after the first year, assuming everyone had got the message and were all on board, whereas managers were frequently left still wondering what the priorities of the leaders were.
Essentially, Johnson emphases that leaders, when thinking about launching a change program, need to invest their time into the difficult tasks of having a clear idea of what the program is to deliver (outcomes), allocating the resources to support this (resourcing), and then relentlessly sending consistent signals over the long term (signalling).
If you would like to give your next change initiative the best chance of success, ensure you read this article and integrate its ideas.