Organisations that rely on inspiration and vision to win employee support for change projects are less likely to succeed than those who make change routine, according to new research from Gartner.
According to Gartner analysis, an inspirational approach to change works only when there is “high change trust”.
When change trust is low, modelling predicted that only one-quarter of changes led by inspirational leaders achieved healthy change adoption, defined as “getting employees to act on change, on time and in a healthy way that doesn’t adversely impact employee performance and engagement or cause undue stress”.
“The best change leadership approach is when leaders routinise change, so it becomes instinctive for employees to adopt change as part of the normal course of doing work,” the business said in a statement outlining the research.
“In Australia, the inability of managers to lead change has been a significant factor contributing to employee dissatisfaction, with manager quality the top reason employees left their employers over the past year,” said Neal Woolrich, Director, Advisory in the Gartner HR practice.
“HR leaders have a great opportunity and a duty to address this, by teaching leaders how to build change reflexes in their teams.”
HR has three ways to help leaders so they can shift from an inspirational approach to routinisation when it comes to change adoption, according to Gartner.
The first way is by helping leaders communicate that constant change is today’s business reality and focus employees on making regular progress on the change journey.
According to Gartner, leaders must regularly prepare employees for change and focus on acknowledging progress on interim goals.
“To business leaders, this sounds like more work than they have capacity to tackle,” said Ingrid Laman, Vice President, Advisory in the Gartner HR practice, in a statement.
“HR can help by showing business leaders that acknowledging the change journey is not more work; instead, it requires them to apply the skills they already have in new ways, redistributing and balancing their time and effort to make change leadership sustainable.”
Helping build change reflexes
The second way HR can help is by equipping leaders with tools and techniques to regulate the emotional component of change, as leaders often feel great discomfort when they are asked to lead through or adopt changes.
The third way is to teach leaders how to build change reflexes for intuitive action. This means helping leaders identify what core skills matter the most and finding moments within daily work to practise those skills.
According to Gartner, HR leaders should partner with leaders to address the following:
- What are core change skills – skills needed by employees to prepare for and adopt change regardless of the type of change – that employees must practise?
- How and when do they practise these change skills?
- How can leaders get employees to commit to practising these change skills?
Benefits of healthy change adoption
Gartner outlined these ways in the wake of recent changes in workplaces across the world.
“Changes today are continuous, stacked on top of one another, highly interdependent and often driven by factors external to the organisation,” said Kayla Velnoskey, Director in the Gartner HR practice, in a statement.
“While leaders are used to operating in a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) environment, the nature of change today has made it ungovernable.”
The need to shift to a routinised approach comes as the inspirational approach only works when there is high change trust among employees, according to Gartner.
“When leaders routinise change, our model predicts that employees are three times more likely to adopt changes on time and in a healthy way even though they have low change trust,” Velnoskey said.
Laman said organisations with better-than-average healthy change adoption report two times higher year-over-year revenue growth rate.
“For companies with more than 50,000 employees, this can equal up to $2.2 billion USD annually,” Laman said.