"Once More, With Feeling" :

Raise your hand if your organization has put forward a bold plan for “corporate transformation” this year. ✋

Now keep those hands up if you actually believe that plan is going to materialize in any meaningful way, shape, or form. ?

… Nobody? ?

Welcome to the Island of Misfit Strategies

No, it’s not just you: a lot of us have worked in organizations where, no matter how much will there is to change the way things are done, nothing seems to stick. With every holiday season comes a familiar cycle:

• As the end of Q4 approaches, leadership clues into the fact that everybody is feeling exhausted and beaten down by longstanding organizational problems.
• They meet to discuss strategic goals, and emerge with an exciting set of objectives & initiatives for the New Year.
• They announce to the rest of the team that a New Strategy is coming soon, and close out the year on the promise of change.
• Early in Q1, there’s some unexpected fire that needs putting out.
• A fair bit into Q1, we finally manage to get everyone together for the leadership team to unveil the new objectives and initiatives. The meeting ends on a high note, with people hopeful and energized that things will improve.

And then… radio silence. At best, some feeble attempts throughout the rest of Q1 to put The Plan into action, before Business As Usual devours the change initiative whole (usually early in Q2).

Inevitably, that shiny new strategy gets shelved, exiled to an eternity of collecting dust instead of ever being properly implemented.

How did we get here?

Why have so many of us gone through some version of this? Why are so many well-intentioned strategy initiatives seemingly doomed from the jump?

In a word (or two): manufactured urgency. Everybody everywhere has got the memo that if you want to prompt action, you’d better make that action sound really important and meaningful.

What’s wrong with this picture? We’re putting the emphasis in the wrong place: “sounds really important and meaningful” vs. “sounds really important and meaningful.”

That’s not fair, actually—the reality is that what can feel very important and meaningful depends on where you’re sitting, and often the people at the top of the corporate food chain have very little contact with folks at the front line. This makes it harder for them to formulate things that are important and meaningful to rank-and-file staff, as well as to communicate that effectively.

Because of this, many corporate change initiatives are structured in ways that don’t make sense for frontline staff, and framed in ways that don’t land with them.

And thus begins a vicious cycle. When one corporate transformation fails to take hold, we double down and try another. Then another. Then nobody can keep track of which iteration we’re on and it’s just a blur. White noise and static. ?

That part of the conversation unlocked another really interesting insight—for understanding dynamics in my own market, but more importantly for anybody running a business:

The boy who cried transformation

After enough iterations of this cycle, people just tune out all talk of change. “Change” becomes one of those things that comes around, predictably around the same time each year. And just like that gym membership and the commitment to lose weight, people learn the game: they see it coming a mile away, they nod along politely at the right moments, and they wait for normalcy to return, completely undisturbed. This deadens the language, we lose our ability to signal that “this time, we mean it.”

Put another way: a history of failed strategic initiatives undermines the potential of leadership to enact change. If most of our calls to action haven’t historically led to actual action, we shouldn’t be surprised when they start falling on deaf ears.

Psychologists have a term for this phenomenon: habituation. Generally speaking, when we’re exposed to some kind of stimulus—for instance, the roguish shepherd boy yelling from over yonder that a wolf is attacking his flock—it sets off neural activity in our brains. (Go figure.) But over time, repeated exposure to the same things leads to a diminishing neural response: those neurons fire less and less. The boy crying wolf is going to find it harder and harder to summon his fellow villagers; some kind of aphoristic tragedy is sure to follow.

Winning back trust in strategy

What can leaders do to regain that potential after it’s been diminished? If you’re going to cut through the noise and actually get through to people, there are a few things that need to happen.

1. Be honest about where you’re at

Do you feel people have tuned you out? Do you know that your messages aren’t landing? Let people know that.

That doesn’t mean blaming or accusing your team of dropping the ball. Far from it: it means taking ownership of the situation moving forward.

If you’re an organizational leader, then the reality is that you likely ended up here because you (and other leaders) missed some previous opportunities to do this better than you did. But that’s water under the bridge, and now we need to work together to fix it. (Sure, your team probably bears some responsibility too. As with all communication breakdowns it takes two to tango. But now isn’t the time for blame.)

What matters right now is acknowledging where we are, and where we want to go. And make it clear that you intend to change your approach—it starts with you.

Why it works

Straight talk is key to restoring your credibility. In most organizations, it’s an open secret that “transformations” are little more than corporate theatre. People may not say it within earshot of their boss, but rest assured staff are talking about it at the coffee machine and on Slack.

As a leader yourself, indicating that you’re aware of this instantly creates a connection with your team. You’re not fooled by it either; in fact,  you’re just as frustrated, and you’re willing to speak the uncomfortable truth because ultimately you care about what you’re trying to achieve.

This kind of honesty can be challenging, but it’s well worth it. Research shows that authenticity in leadership is one of the strongest predictors of employee satisfaction, organizational commitment, and overall happiness at work.

2. Come clean about your objectives

Let people know how you intend to do things differently this time. You have certain priorities that you want to see advanced, and you know that the best way to make that happen is to ensure that everyone is getting what they need as well. The same is true of others in the organization—employees wanting a raise have a vested interest in the company’s improving financial performance, for example. We’ll hang together or we’ll hang separately, and you’re opting for the former.

Why it works

Engaging people in the process of designing the change gives them a feeling of ownership. You aren’t asking them to implement your initiative; instead, you are all working together to build something that’s jointly owned, for jointly improved outcomes, and for which you all have responsibilities to see that it comes to fruition. This capitalizes on a psychological bias known as the endowment effect: people tend to feel more positively about (and be more invested in) things over which they feel a sense of ownership.

3. Lay out a quick roadmap & next steps

In order to figure out how we all win together, you need to understand people’s needs. What I mean by that is: you need a better understanding of what others in the organization need in order to do their jobs better and achieve their priorities too. Accordingly, you need people to tell you what they need.

You don’t want people bombarding your email willy-nilly, of course. There needs to be a process set up to collect and integrate that input.

Ideally, this is the kind of thing for which you’d want to bring in a good Strategy Partner ? Engaging your team for feedback can really benefit from an external perspective—somebody who doesn’t have the same attachments and biases that internal folks may have, and who can offer a fresh pair of eyes.

But if you’re going the DIY route, then just make sure you’re giving your team:

• clear, actionable steps,
• hyperlinks to where they need to do it (if applicable),
• clarity about what you need and by when
• And when they’ll hear back from you next

You can also call out that past efforts haven’t included this, that it limited the impact of previous attempts, and you feel it's a key reason that we’ll see better results this time.

Why it works

Now that you’ve started ginning up some extra motivation within your team, you need to give them clear conduits to channel that energy—opportunities to act. That’s why actionable steps are so important: there’s nothing more frustrating than a ripened desire to act with no call to action to direct that energy. With luck, you’ll get a (brief) shining moment where people feel “psyched” to act. That’s a valuable resource that needs to be built up and spent wisely. If you plant your wheat too early and you’re not ready to harvest it, you’ll have rotten wheat just at the moment you want to start making bread.

And once they have acted—then it’s time for you to deliver and keep building on that foundation, keeping the “psych” levels up.

4. Break out the pep talk

Some people in your staff might feel discouraged. They may be worrying that their organization has entirely lost the capacity to evolve (if it ever really had it in the first place).

Just let them know that you believe in them, and why. Make it genuine, and try to latch onto something that staff themselves will identify with. For instance: “I’ve seen this team deliver amazing projects for clients under intense time pressure, so I know that we can deliver just as well for ourselves once we commit to it.”

Why it works

Never underestimate the value of just being a decent human. ?

Closing thoughts

A final question I’ll leave you to ponder: are you really ready for transformation?

Let me be very clear: organizational change is hard work. It takes time, dedication, and the willingness to engage in holistic, multifaceted problem-solving. It is something that should only be undertaken if you have a clear end goal in mind.

Put more simply: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Don’t do strategy work unless you have a problem you’re trying to solve. As we’ve seen, hollow gestures at “corporate transformation” aren’t just a waste of everybody’s time and resources; they also undermine your credibility as a leader, making it a heck of a lot harder to grab people’s attention when you actually need it.