Keeping energy for change alive over time

Most change programmes start off well. An exciting announcement, a launch week, a story about where the organisation is heading. People are curious, the idea sounds sensible, and there is real enthusiasm to get going.

But starting is the easy part. Reality quickly arrives, and the to-do lists that were briefly parked to participate in the launch week catch up to everyone. Leadership starts steering on quarterly numbers again. The new way of working turns out to be harder in practice than it looked on the beautifully crafted slides presented during the announcement. And within months, the original ambition has become more of an afterthought.

It is a similar pattern that we see every year on January 1st. We collectively decide that this is the day to start improving our lives, and gyms fill in the first two months. But by March they become eerily empty again. Most resolutions are dropped within weeks, before the new behaviour has had any chance to become habitual. The same thing happens within many change trajectories in an organisational context.

Change needs quite some time to settle, and abandoning a change at week six means paying the cost of disruption without actually collecting any benefits. If you want energy for change to last, keep the following six things in mind.

1. Translate the message, do not just deliver it

The launch speech carries vision and values. What people need on Monday morning is more specific: how to balance the new priority against existing targets, what to do when it conflicts with a client demand, and where they take their questions. Energy drains quickly when people are willing to act and discover nobody has thought it through at their level.

This is the least glamorous work in a transformation and the most reliably skipped. The general story is written by people who understand the strategy. The translation has to be written by people who understand what Tuesday afternoon looks like in a regional sales team. If those two groups never meet, the change stays an idea.

2. Support each phase differently

You can implement many changes in a single weekend, but the actual psychological transition that people go through takes considerably longer. This transition moves through different phases that each need something different in terms of support.

In the opening phase of change, it is important to consider understanding and letting go: do people grasp what is being asked, what they are giving up, and are they willing? A strong launch works well here. Psychologists call this the fresh start effect: people are measurably more likely to pursue new ambitions immediately after a temporal landmark, which is precisely why January 1st and the first Monday of a quarter carry the weight they do (Dai, Milkman & Riis, 2014).

A second phase is more about doing, and needs a different type of support: practical training, fast answers to real dilemmas, leaders modelling the behaviour under pressure, and encouragement exactly when motivation dips. Expect performance to get temporarily worse here rather than better. This is also referred to as the implementation dip, where performance and confidence both fall as people meet something requiring skills they do not yet have (Fullan, 2001). Organisations that mistake the dip for evidence that the change is failing tend to abandon it just before it would have started working.

A third phase is about embedding, when the new way becomes normal and gets structurally written into performance conversations, onboarding and promotion decisions, to ensure that the processes and systems people work with are aligned with the change.

Most organisations design the first phase thoroughly, but give limited consideration to phase two and three.

3. Expect different speeds

Adoption follows a curve. Everett Rogers, whose diffusion of innovations model has held up across decades of research, found that new practices spread through a predictable sequence: a small group of innovators, then early adopters, then an early and late majority, and finally a group of laggards (Rogers, 2003). Some teams will move quickly, others will move slowly, and that is normal rather than a failure.

Additionally, reasons for staying behind may differ. A team stuck because it does not know what to do needs clarification. A team that knows exactly what to do but has no room beside its existing targets needs a decision about priorities.

Taken together, the phase of change and supporting needs should be tracked for various stakeholders, and tailored support should be provided in a timely manner.

4. Keep leaders visible beyond the launch

Leaders signal what matters. Almost all of them show up at the kick-off, but over the following months many drift back to old habits. Employees read behaviour rather than announcements, and they read it accurately. A leader who talks about collaboration in a town hall and rewards individual heroics in a performance review has communicated something clear, but it is not the intended message.

One sentence from a senior leader in a weekly note, repeated for a year, does more for momentum than a second launch event. Do note that leaders need support too, since they face the same dilemmas and motivational dips as everyone else.

5. Make room, do not just add

Change fatigue is a widely reported experience in large organisations, and it is largely self-inflicted: too many simultaneous initiatives, none of them properly resourced. Before launching anything, it is worth asking which existing demand is being removed, which target is being adjusted, and which meeting is being cancelled. If the honest answer is none, the change has only been announced rather than resourced, which is likely to lead to a strong loss in motivation over time.

6. A note of encouragement

Change does get easier. Behaviour that takes conscious effort in month one takes less in month six, and the effort curve is always steepest at the beginning.

Something that helps to carry people up that curve can be found in Teresa Amabile's research. Based on thousands of daily diary entries, she found a strong driver of day-to-day motivation at work to be the sense of making progress in meaningful work, even in small increments (Amabile & Kramer, 2011). This has a practical implication for anyone leading change: people need to see that it is working. Not a dashboard for the steering committee, but a visible, local, specific sign that something got better because of the effort they put in.

Which is, in the end, the real test of a change. Not how good the launch was, but whether anyone is still paying attention in month nine, and what there is to show for it by then.

References

Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The progress principle: Using small wins to ignite joy, engagement, and creativity at work. Harvard Business Review Press.

Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2014). The fresh start effect: Temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior. Management Science, 60(10), 2563 to 2582.

Fullan, M. (2001). Leading in a culture of change. Jossey-Bass.

Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). Free Press.

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