Success in any type of transformation ultimately hinges on people working in new ways. New processes, operating models, org structures, new GTM strategies, and technology roll-outs ultimately fail or succeed based on how well people adapt. In fact, failure to effectively manage the people-side of transformation is cited as one of the primary reasons only 20% of companies achieve more than three-quarters of their anticipated revenue gains from digital transformations, and only 17% achieve their expected cost savings.
Change Is Hard
Even with the best-laid plans, strategies, and structure, change doesn’t come easily. That’s because your world is perfectly organized to create the behaviors you're currently experiencing. Let that sink in.
Leaders often approach change by sending a compelling directive and providing people with an engaging training module. Satisfied they’ve done enough to convince and enable their people, they sit back and wait for people to show up differently. And they wait, and they wait, but nothing changes. Why? Because they have failed to reorganize the world in a way that supports the new behaviors.
Pull the LEVERS of Change
Leaders can accelerate sustainable change by looking at their organizations through the lens of our LEVERS model. LEVERS is an acronym for Leadership, Ecosystem, Values, Enablement, Rewards, and Structure. The model ensures that all the forces that shape behavior—including personal, social and structural forces—are considered and actively managed to reorganize the world to support the new ways of working.
- Leadership - To effectively implement change, leaders need to reset priorities, approve budgets, remove barriers, and model desired behaviors. Actions they take, or lack thereof, send a strong message about whether or not the new initiative is a priority and should be taken seriously.
- Ecosystem - We are social creatures, and what others are doing around us matters. Smart leaders avoid the mistake of pushing forward without all stakeholders identified and on board. Instead, they identify and focus their efforts on getting opinion leaders aligned, and in doing so they get quick and powerful traction across the entire organization. Stakeholder management, change networks, and other social tactics ensure adoption occurs across the social landscape.
- Values - Demands and directives create resistance. Connecting the changes to what people already value is the most effective way to motivate others. Leaders can demonstrate how the change fits with people's sense of mission and purpose through storytelling and creating direct and meaningful experiences with the new conditions.
- Enablement - People can't do what they don't know how to do. Ensure that people have the knowledge and skills they need to get in line. This is where clear communication strategies and practice-focused training come in.
- Rewards - Everyone knows rewards have an enormous influence on people's behavior. Some changes are impossible to execute because of legacy incentive systems that entice people to behave in exactly the wrong way. Leaders should look for and change misaligned incentives that cement the status quo.
- Structure - Environmental factors can have a huge impact on the way people behave. Consider ways to create tools, technology, processes, reminders, and spaces to make new ways of working easier and old behaviors more difficult.
When you pull these LEVERS in a coordinated effort, meaning you employ strategies in each of these domains and deploy them in unison, they reorganize the organizational landscape in a way where change becomes inevitable. In fact, research shows by pulling all the LEVERS at the same time organizations improve their likelihood to change by 10 times.
In Real Life:
We sat with leaders from a large financial institution to review their carefully crafted change strategy for a large technology roll-out. Upon using the LEVERS model to categorize each of the tactics in their plan—complete with leadership videos, memos, newsletters, demos, training programs, and the like—we realized that the only LEVERS they were pulling were the Leadership, Values, and Enablement. They were missing out on the social motivation that tactics in the Ecosystem can bring, the extrinsic incentives Rewards provide, and the environmental support of the Structure Lever.
After some quick brainstorming with those additional LEVERS in mind, we decided to pull the Ecosystem Lever by standing up a change network composed of opinion leaders to cascade information, collect feedback, and share stories to build positive sentiment. We leveraged the Rewards Lever by realigning the performance management process to include adoption of the new ways of working. And finally we included the use of an in-person demo space and an online feedback mechanism so users could help direct future interactions of the technology.
Quickly assessing their plan through the lens of LEVERS took their change strategy from good to great and their transformation benefited enormously as they rolled out their new system with high rates of adoption.
Take Action:
Your transformation success depends on how well you manage change. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that a few training sessions or a well-crafted memo will be enough. Instead, use the LEVERS model to ensure you’re addressing every aspect of what drives human behavior.
Reassess your current change strategies and ask yourself: Are you pulling all the LEVERS necessary to make change inevitable? The difference between a good strategy and a great one could be as simple as ensuring that Leadership, Ecosystem, Values, Enablement, Rewards, and Structure are all working together to support your goals.