Change happens; sustaining change happens less often.
Many well-intended change efforts do not last.
· 97 percent of dieters regain everything they lost and then some within three years.
· In the U.S., 50 to 70 percent of freed inmates will be arrested again within five years.
· 70 percent of organization change programs fail.
· And so forth.
As individuals, leaders, and organizations face unprecedented challenges—global pandemic, emotional endemic, recession cycle, and technology disruptions—declarations of a new normal, seismic shifts, and the greatest revolution in how work is done often fade. With good intentions, many individuals, leaders, and organizations explore new ways to set goals, accomplish tasks, engage employees, reinvent organizations, and care for themselves and others. But too many of these aspirations recede as old patterns re-emerge.
Sustaining desired changes is not a new challenge, but ever more important in a rapidly changing world. Knowing what to do or experimenting with how to do it (e.g., during pandemic) is not enough; we must fully embed change, which requires applying disciplines of sustainability.
In our work (see Leadership Sustainability), we distilled ideas, research, and actions into seven change disciplines that individuals, leaders, and organizations can apply to change efforts to embed them deeply and make them into habits. This essay updates these disciplines with specific current actions to make change sustainable.
1. Simplicity
Simplicity is the principle of prioritizing key actions and choosing the few that will make the most difference to outcomes that matter. Grandiose declarations (public statements or initiatives often beginning with the word “great”) often become fads: short-term, quick-fix, shiny objects. Change sustainability requires prioritizing actions most because doing so creates value that matters. In recent years, as the analytics movement evolved from benchmarking to best practice to predictive analytics to guidance, leaders have greater tools in prioritizing which actions create stakeholder value by using a guidance system to test impact of initiatives. Sustainability comes from simplicity by prioritizing what matters most.
2. Time
Where people spend time working has changed. With social isolation from the pandemic and connection through technology, remote and now hybrid work has become a new standard for many (not all). Sustaining this change is less about where and how people work (home vs. office; in-person vs. digital), and more about why people work and what they work on. When employees see why their work enables their values—creating meaning (believe), growth (become), and connections (belong)—they are more likely to sustain new work practices that enable them to spend time on those things that matter most. When leaders ensure that what employees work on creates value in the marketplace, new ways of working persist.
3. Accountability
Employees today with more choices also need greater accountability for their choices. Navigating the accountability paradox means that employees have agency or autonomy to make choices about where, how, why, and what they work on and at the same time be accountable for how those choices impact others. When personal and organizational choices impact customers (“Will these actions increase customer share?”), investors (“Will our market value go up by doing these actions?”), or communities (“Will our social citizenship reputation improve?”), then changes in those work practices will likely be sustained.
4. Resources
Individual or isolated changes become institutionalized when they are part of a system. Providing resources sustains change by institutionalizing change efforts into human capability a systemic way to deliver value through talent, leadership, and organization. The right talent means that employees have the competence and commitment to meet business requirements. The right organization comes from creating a value inside the organization that reflects the promises made to customers. Leadership sustains change when leader competencies reflect the firm brand in the marketplace. Human capability (talent, leadership, and organization) sustains change through HR functional excellence, which includes innovative HR practices (around people, performance, information, and work) and competent HR professionals. Change initiatives without these dedicated resources are less likely to be sustainable.
5. Tracking
The maxims are true: you get what you inspect and not what you expect; you do what you are rewarded for (and so does everyone else); and you shouldn’t reward one thing while hoping for something different. Unless desired work changes translate into specific, quantified, and tracked actions, they are nice to contemplate but not likely to get done. The advancement in analytics about work sustains change because work goals are transparent, easy to measure, timely, and tied to consequences. Change sustainability can be woven into existing scorecards and even becomes its own scorecard to monitor any change effort.
6. Melioration
Melioration (a Latin word meaning to improve or be resilient) includes a whole complex of actions and attitudes designed to make things better. Leaders meliorate when they improve by learning from mistakes and failures and demonstrate resilience. Change is not linear. Most of the time, change includes try, fail (or succeed), try again, fail again, and so forth. When we learn from each attempt, the outcomes we intend will eventually come to pass. Change sustainability requires that leaders master the principles of learning: to experiment frequently, to adjust incrementally, to reflect always, to become resilient, to face failure, to not be calloused to success, and to improvise continually.
7. Emotion
Sustainable change requires both an intellectual agenda of what should be done, but also an emotional passion of how it feels to do the work. In the last few years, leaders have been encouraged to attend to mental health issues (depression about the past, anxiety about the future, and loneliness and burnout in the present). Leaders sustain change when they exhibit emotion by sharing their feelings, empathy by being open to feelings of others, and energy by staying enthused about the future. Action without passion will not long endure, nor will passion without action.
Conclusion
In a world where change needs to not only occur but be sustained, these seven disciplines spell the mnemonic START ME, which is apt because change sustainability starts with me.These seven disciplines turn hope into reality. When mastered, these seven disciplines will help employees turn their personal aspirations into daily actions; leaders lead with confidence in the future; and organizations continually reinvent to meet market demands.
To begin, select a change required, hoped for, or expected for yourself or within your organization. Now, ask seven change discipline questions to diagnose and improve your ability to sustain the change.
Figure 1:
Sustainable Change Application Tool
Dave Ulrich is the Rensis Likert Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and a Partner at The RBL Group. Ranked as the #1 management guru by Business Week, profiled by Fast Company as one of the world’s top 10 creative people in business, a top 5 coach in Forbes, and recognized on Thinkers50 as one of the world’s leading business thinkers, Dave Ulrich has a passion for ideas with impact. In his writing, teaching, and consulting, he continually seeks new ideas that tackle some of the world’s thorniest and longest standing challenges. His bestselling books and popular speeches shape the corporate agenda. Dave has written 30 books and over 200 articles that have shaped three fields:
He has influenced thinking about organizations by defining organizations as bundles of capabilities (Organization Capability) and worked to delineate capabilities of learning
(Learning Organization Capability), collaboration (Boundaryless Organization), talent management (Why of Work), and culture change (GE Workout).
He has articulated the basics of effective leadership (Leadership Code), connected leadership with customers (Leadership Brand), and synthesized ways to ensure that leadership aspirations turn into actions (Leadership Sustainability). Dave’s current work on Leadership Capital Index (published by Berrett Koehler in September 2015) creates a “Moody’s index” for leadership. This work examines leadership through the eyes of investors and helps realize the market value of leadership, thus bringing the fields of firm valuation and leadership together.