One of the hardest facts to face when working with clients is that the people who hire you are often the root cause of their organisation’s change issues. According to Prosci research, the leader, or sponsor of change, is often unaware of their role in making the change successful. Here's how leaders sabotage their own efforts at organisational change. Table of Contents Why Business Leaders Need Help Understanding Change What Does Undermining Change Mean? Unwillingness to change themselves Lack of vision Treating change as a second Job Not understanding individual change Failure to support the change Delegating responsibility Analysis, analysis, analysis Centralising authority "Need to know" communications Knee-jerk reversion Business Leaders Need to Adapt to Change Why Business Leaders Need Help Understanding Change I have spent a fair amount of time with change leaders, and have even been one, so I can confirm that these statistics are true and perhaps even underestimate the challenge. When consulting with a leader, I often hear comments like: “If we don’t change, our business will continue to decline, but our people resist.” “We are facing a disruption, and we need to change, but our culture does not permit it.” “Our people are not inclined to change, so you will have to teach them that it is necessary.” These types of statements are fairly common in first interviews with potential clients. Usually, the leader is expressing frustration that they are trying hard to make change happen but have not succeeded because of the organisation. I am now quite wary of such statements because, more often than not, the truth is just the opposite. When I hear this from a leader, the question I pose is, “What are YOU prepared to do?” This will come as a shock to them because they believe they are change makers and, therefore, the most amenable to the change. They feel they have been doing all they can to drive change and are up against insurmountable odds. Why will they need to do more? But there are several ways that the leaders impede change and, dare I say it, cause it to fail. What Does Undermining Change Mean? In a common example, I was brought into a company where the leader stated from the outset that she believed their business model had about five years of lifespan remaining. The company’s position in the value chain was threatened by cost pressures and disruptive technology, and they needed to explore new territories, structures, and models to survive. The leader specifically wanted a new strategy and new direction. She warned me, though, that the employees were static, and unable or unwilling to operate outside their comfort zone. I was going to have to train them and drive them to change. This situation was very exciting to my naive self. I would have a chance to make a real difference—but now I see red flags in this initial conversation. If I had the same conversation today, I would spend many more meetings quizzing the CEO on her strengths and weaknesses, her capabilities as a leader, and her inclinations to effectively lead change. Over time, I discovered that the real problem in the organisation was the CEO herself. Her capability to make decisions or embrace those of her leadership, her ability to trust others to make decisions, and her fortitude to hold the course were all lacking. Given choices, she would consistently call for more analysis, pushing decisions out months if not years. Faced with the least amount of resistance, she would revert to what she felt had been successful in the past. Put into a situation of investing in the business or harvesting it through cost reduction and layoffs, she chose the latter. Moreover, the CEO was not willing to be the sponsor of change, often pushing that responsibility onto a junior member of the executive team, giving herself the opportunity to distance herself from the results. Most importantly, when she was challenged by the staff directly, she would often not only fail to support the change but, more often, undermine it. We were able to get to the point of driving some incremental changes after several years of trying, but we never achieved the level necessary to support the organisation and, worse, the culture that was left behind was more inclined to resist future change. The energy it took exhausted everyone involved, spoiled the working environment, and resulted in a huge turnover rate. Some might read this and question, “But as the change practitioner, wasn’t it your responsibility to coach the leader? Aren’t the leader’s failures yours as well?” To this I agree wholeheartedly. I learned as much from these early (pre-Prosci) experiences as from those that were much more successful. I believe it has made me a much better advisor and instructor because I have these battle scars. As a result, I better understand the behaviours of those who are prepared to lead change and those who may actually sabotage their own efforts. I no longer mince words or guard them from the truth of their own behaviour, and I insist on direct access and transparency. As the Prosci research says, the difference between success and failure almost always starts with the leadership/sponsorship, so recognizing the signs of poor change leadership is valuable. I thought I would share some the signs I have learned to test for in interviews or in the early stages of a program. Of course, these are not MECE (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive) examples. Many are interrelated and some may even be, seemingly, contradictory as they are drawn from multiple experiences. Prosci Change Triangle (PCT) Model 1. Unwillingness to change themselves In a Harvard Business Review Article (Oct 2016), Ron Carucci says: A leader’s ability to affect transformation across the organisation depends on their ability to affect transformation within themselves. Accepting this will fundamentally shift how one leads. Such introspection is an active process. This is absolutely the top criteria, as far as I am concerned. What has worked in the past may not necessarily work in the future. This is especially true if the organisation is experiencing high growth or disruption. The approach to leadership will require a change as well. If the leadership is not willing to look within themselves, if they fail to see that they need to change and be the champion of change, they are likely to create insurmountable barriers. 2. Lack of vision If the leader is unable to formulate and communicate a vision of the future state, how would they be able to make choices or expect anyone else to be on board with the change? It is the difference between setting a course to the New World and randomly navigating without a destination in mind. Many leaders are not visionaries and often simply react to other influences (competition, new technologies, shareholder demands, etc.). But change requires a vision of a better future to build momentum, gain support, and make good decisions. 3. Treating change as a second job When I facilitate change management workshops, I am often asked, “How can the leader be expected to do all of this and get their job done?” My response is, “What is their other job?” The leader’s role is to move the organisation into the future state. If someone feels that doing this is secondary to their “real role,” they need to wake up or abdicate. As a shareholder, employee or partner, I would be concerned if the organisation's leader is so unvolved in daily operations and firefighting that they don’t feel that driving change is their primary and, really, only role. 4. Not understanding individual change “They will do it because it is their job!” This is a common phrase from a leader with a command-and-control mentality. It is a lazy comment and shows a complete lack of understanding of why and how people and organisations change. Change happens at the individual level. The leader’s role is to get everyone pointed in the same direction. If leaders feel employees will change without understanding the “why?” of the situation or how they will benefit from the change, they have already created a wall that will be tough to get over. 5. Failure to support the change A death knell to any change is when the leader is faced with internal or external resistance and is unwilling to support the direction of the change. This is not to say that they should combat resistance on all levels. They need to get feedback and adapt. However, ultimately, the intention needs to be moving forward to the future state. If leaders give into resistance or undermine decisions once the destination is determined, they might as well end the effort right there. 6. Delegating responsibility Prosci research shows that the #1 success factor for successful change is active and visible sponsorship. Often, leaders delegate their responsibility to others. Perhaps they don’t feel the need to be out in front, or they are introverts and find it difficult to interact. Perhaps, more nefariously, they want to distance themselves in the case of failure. Whatever the reason, many leaders are happy just to set goals (often arbitrarily or unreasonably) and then expect results to happen. From this point, they push and push their teams, who fail to achieve the desired results, and then point to them as the cause. I have witnessed many a tirade at corporate meetings where the CEO is ranting about their team’s failure to execute without having any real involvement on their side. 7. Analysis, analysis, analysis Planning for change is necessary. Good planning can accelerate the process if it it includes the right steps. More often, however, planning is focused on finding the one answer, the "silver bullet." This will happen behind closed doors with a few people looking at charts and data and holding long meetings talking about running more models and analysing every aspect of the change. When this happens, it indicates that the leadership lacks a proper vision and may actually be looking for reasons not to change. 8. Centralising authority Driving change across an organisation requires all individuals to be able to effect change. Leaders with a strong command-and-control complex have a difficult time understanding this. They will feel it is the responsibility of the people and stakeholders to bow to their authority. But real change requires a coalition of sponsorship. Organisations are not machines where leaders simply change parts. They are made up of individuals with all of their complexities. This means that managers, supervisors and colleagues need to have the information, connectedness, and authority to help coach each other. 9. "Need to know" communications The earliest and most obvious red flag is a leader who feels that information is so precious that their people cannot be trusted with it. This is embodied by their reluctance to communicate openly, whether in group settings or face-to-face. They fear that if the people impacted by the change knew about the details, they would ask difficult questions, create barriers or resist. But what does this tell us? Either the leader does not trust their employees to do the right thing, or they expect resistance because the change is not going to benefit the employees being impacted by it. Either way, there is a problem here. 10. Knee-jerk reversion Related to all the above, but hardest to test, is a leader’s willingness to revert to past models and behaviours when faced with challenges internally or externally. This shows a lack of confidence in themselves, the organisation, and the change. Too many leaders fold at the first sign of trouble when, in fact, the rest of the organisation believes in the course. In my humble opinion, fortitude and courage go right along with empathy and flexibility for a good transformational leader. I know this list is a lot to consider when considering taking on a change program. I would argue that it is not even comprehensive. But as an advisor or change practitioner, you only to ask one question: “What are YOU prepared to do?” Your answer should include something akin to the following: Start with changing myself Have a strong vision to communicate Treat the transformation as my primary/only role Manage change at the individual level Support the change when faced with challenges Be visible and responsible for the change Take action without full information Distribute authority Be transparent and communicative Hold fast through challenges If your answer does not look like this, you are likely already in a difficult position and have serious work to do. Business Leaders Need to Adapt to Change Now more than ever, leaders are facing a huge amount of change. Your employees are looking for you to be a stable and confident centre-point—the one person that they can look to for guidance in a time of crisis. To that end, think of Prosci as a resource. We are happy to listen to your needs and point you in the right direction. You may also wish to consider our Sponsor Briefing workshop or perhaps attending an upcoming Prosci Change Management Certification Program. Learn to apply Prosci’s analytical tools and practical approaches, and elevate change success in your organisation.

Have you ever started a task at work that should be simple and quick then found it to be very difficult? If so, you may have experienced a business concept that has been becoming more important: organisational debt. I am starting to believe this is the number one reason for establishing capabilities in enterprise change management. Change Management and Organisational Debt Before I get into enterprise change management, let's look at an example of organisational debt based on personal experience. I was performing what I thought would be very simple project, consolidating proposals from different sources into a single MS Word document. I figured this would take me a few hours at the most. Unfortunately, it took me more than a day and a half because I copied content from existing templates that had clearly had gone through several iterations of the text, pictures, and formats being cut and pasted in to them. As a result, the document became painfully difficult to work with. I had to back up, remove all formats, and start clean. Setting aside for a moment my own administrative incompetency, this wasted time is the accumulated interest from organisational debt demonstrated on a small scale. On a larger scale, organisational debt can paralyse a company. You have to avoid debt because debt makes the system more fragile. —Naseem Nicholas Talib, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder What Is Organisational Debt? Let’s unpack organisational debt for a moment. Debt is a common concept. Anyone with a credit card or loan understands financial debt. One takes a loan for a short-term purpose to pay it off in the long term only with the additional cost of interest. Organisational debt works similarly. Organisations make decisions based on short-term requirements only to create barriers they will have to manage in the long term. The “interest” from organisational debt is the cost of untangling all those decisions when trying to make a change. Avoiding this interest becomes a key argument for robust and continuous change management approach. People who think about change, agility, and adaptiveness have understood this intuitively for a while, but to have it so aptly described by Steve Blank in his 2015 article, “Organisational Debt is Like Technical Debt but Worse,” has proven highly beneficial to recognising and solving the issue. In his post he says “Organisational debt is all the people/culture compromises made to ‘just get it done’ in the early stages of a startup.” More recently, organisational debt has been applied to organisations of all maturity levels, not just startups, to ascertain the accumulative and longitudinal effects of short-sighted decision-making on the organisation's ability to respond to change. ERP Systems Change and Organisational Debt An extreme example organisational debt and its impacts happened a few years ago with a client who was planning to install a new ERP system. Under the best of circumstances, this is a high-risk, complicated and expensive change. The client rightly recognised the need for help with the people side of the change to mitigate the risk and improve adoption of the system. To plan properly, we needed to collect diagnostic data and perform situational analysis. This proved quite frustrating as they were unable to answer the most basic of questions: How many processes will be impacted by the change? They had no idea. How many divisions are impacted by the change? They could only guess (incorrectly). How many people are in your company? They had to check (and still got it wrong). And it only got worse from there. The primary reason for this lack of clarity was that this company had failed to manage their organisational debt accumulated through 30 years of existence. They had started with a very simple retail product and built up to massive, individual, and highly customised projects. They were very successful, but their success was exactly what was hindering their future. They had never looked back at the decisions they made, the processes they put in place, or the products they had launched and rethought or re-engineered them. In other words, they had never retired any of their organisational debt. Now, they were facing years of preparation before they could make a positive and logical change, resulting in a massive delay in realising the return from their investment. In effect, they were paying interest on their debt. Types of organisational debt From our experience, organisational debt shows up in multiple ways: 1. Operational debt This type results from complexity created by expanding the organization. As they grow, organisations add new processes, new markets, new products, etc. However, they often fail to eliminate or reduce the processes, markets and products that have become redundant or obsolete. The result is hidden costs of doing business that slowly burden the company and consume resources that could otherwise be eliminated or reassigned. 2. Knowledge debt This occurs when people move within an organisation or leave it. The intent of past decisions is lost,and all that remains behind is the effect of those decisions, good or bad. 3. Cultural debt This describes the behaviors and practices ingrained in the culture and fails to evolve with the changing environment. Separately, operational, knowledge and cultural debt are a major challenge to change efforts. Together, they can be fatal. How to Reduce Organisational Debt With Enterprise Change Management Like financial debt, getting out of organizational debt is best handled by 1) not accumulating it and 2) strategically reducing the debt you already have. Building an enterprise change management (ECM) capability is one way to affect both situations. By creating a framework for change that is utilised at all levels—and by increasing the speed of adoption, change utilisation, and proficiency in new ways of working—your organisation will be better able to reduce its organisational debt and increase responsiveness. Building an ECM programme that impacts organisational debt requires a few essential actions: Make change a strategic imperative – Organisations that make change a key part of their strategy and evaluate leaders on their ability to lead effective change will also prioritise the elimination of organisational debt. Create an enterprise-wide structure for change – Having the frameworks, tools, and competencies for change widely available to those who will use them and building the competency of leaders, managers and employees to use them enables them to eliminate organisational debt. Build a cadence for change – Avoid the “big interventions” by making change continuous. Create a cadence for the organisation that is not overwhelming and keeps the energy level high. Organisational change is like exercise: the more you do it, the less energy it takes. Companies with low organisational debt have a sustained strategic advantage. They are able to “out change” their competitors, be responsive to internal and external pressures, and more rapidly realise their return on the investments they make. Developing an enterprise change management strategy is great way to reduce or eliminate your debt and start making change part of your organization's competitive advantage.