Chapter 11: How do you make change last?

How Do You Make Change Last?

I’m going to tell you a sad story. Most change efforts fail. In fact, in spite of our best efforts to create a shared need, shape a compelling vision, counter resistance and mobilize the right levels of commitment, many change efforts fail after they’ve been implemented.

That last statement might raise some questions. How can a project fail if it has been implemented? Isn’t that the end goal of an initiative, to implement some kind of change?

Well, no. A change initiative – like any project – is only successful if it lasts. You wouldn’t say you were successful at building a house if it fell down the first time you opened the front door. You wouldn’t say you were successful at learning to speak Portuguese if everything you’d learned left your head when class was over. And you can’t call a change effort successful if things go back to the way they were 30, 60 or 90 days later.

In the hurried and harried world of corporate business and busyness, the two categories of behavior that are most often rewarded are strategy (essentially, having good ideas) and execution (essentially, acting on those ideas). And while those two categories are really important, rewarding only those can lead to a world where we feel we should always be coming up with new ideas and acting on them – a world where change for change’s sake becomes the order of the day, destabilizing the organization and making everything feel uncertain.

The fact of the matter is that constant change isn’t really change at all. It’s chaos. It isn’t really change unless it sticks, unless it is institutionalized, unless it simply becomes the way people work. The most effective leaders of change know that every initiative competes for mental energy, time and money, and that the real skill lies in acquiring the necessary resources (of all sorts) to embed new behaviors in the organization and ensure that they don’t slip back into old habits.

To make change last, you must make sure that the change is reinforced– consistently, tangibly and with great visibility. Influential voices in your organization need to reiterate that the world is different now and that new behaviors are expected. You must make sure that attention is paid to making your change the new status quo.

Of course, there’s more to making change last than simply lip service. The systems you use, the design of your organization, your rewards and compensation, the way you measure performance and many other factors need to be aligned in a way that supports, embeds and ingrains the change into the way people work. We’ll dig into all of that next time we meet.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant