By Douglas L. Finton
April 21, 2011
Imagine an organization where all employees knew how to change any behavior that was undermining personal or corporate success – it would literally give them the power to change anything.
The reality most of us face, unfortunately, looks quite different. According to research firm Arthur D. Little, 85 percent of all corporate change efforts fail.
When I share this miserable report card with clients, a few are shocked – but none are especially surprised, in spite of the massive strategic failure this represents. It is what we have come to expect. Indeed, the tendency of most is to chalk the failures up to the accepted explanation, “nobody likes change.”
Few see the cause for what it really is: not a lack of will, but a lack of skill.
Counterintuitive as it may seem, the single biggest barrier to the success of organizational change efforts is their individual employees’ inability to change behaviors that are getting in their way. That’s because no problem is purely a personal problem – it also impacts the performance of the whole. No human system is more robust than the functioning of the individuals within it.
If we look closer at the quality of individual performance and execution, research shows that most people have a personal behavior challenge that drags down their work performance by as much as 50 percent – and have no idea what to do about it. In the face of that, one conclusion is inescapable for organizations: There is no strategy so brilliant that human behaviors can’t render it useless. If an organization is promoting wellness to lower insurance costs, for example, the effort will succeed or fail based on the individual employee’s motivation and ability to make the lifestyle changes that lead to corporate wellness in the aggregate.
And whether as individuals seeking to change, or organizations, whenever we fail to live up to expectations, our tendency is to fall into the willpower trap: we forget the ability side of the equation, and all of the social and structural forces we are subject to, and blame our failure on our own lack of character. If only we were more motivated, we could do this.