Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez published a piece in Harvard Business Review this week called ‘Model the Transformation You Expect Employees to Deliver’ that I have not stopped thinking about, and two numbers in it are the reason.
McKinsey analyzed more than a thousand transformations and found that when senior leaders visibly model the behaviors they ask for, the effort is 5.3 times more likely to succeed. Only 43% of leaders actually do it. Prosci’s benchmarking research, running since 1998, arrives at the same conclusion from a different angle: projects with a highly effective executive sponsor meet or exceed their objectives 79% of the time, while those with an ineffective sponsor achieve this only 27% of the time.
I have been making a version of this argument for years without those numbers to hand, so I am grateful for them. The comfortable story about why transformations fail is that employees resist change. The evidence says the bottleneck usually sits higher than that.
His prescription is three tests a senior team can run on itself. The calendar test: how much of the leadership team’s time actually goes to the transformation rather than to running the existing business? The uncertainty test: has this team ever sat together in a live bet whose outcome was unknown? The cancellation test: when did you last publicly kill something you had championed? I like all three, and I suspect most executive teams would fail at least two.
And here’s what nags at me. McKinsey’s Carolyn Dewar and Scott Keller made a very similar version of this argument in 2006, from a different set of research, in a piece called ‘The CEO’s Role in Leading Transformation.’ Role-modeling the desired mindsets and behavior was one of four functions they defined for a CEO leading a transformation, and their prescription included a diary analysis of where the CEO’s time actually goes against transformation priorities. That is the calendar test, twenty years early. So the advice has been right, published, and repeated for two decades, and only 43% of leaders do it. When advice this good goes unheeded this long, I don’t think the problem is that leaders haven’t heard it.
I agree with him, but I also want to add something based on ideas from my new book, Assembled. Aligned. Adaptive.
I spend a lot of the book on middle management because I think the guiding coalition that actually carries a transformation is the layer of directors and managers in daily contact with the work. They are the ones who both model and reinforce the behaviors that create the environment in which teams succeed day to day. For example, they are the ones who approve or deny a team’s request to talk to a customer. But you cannot fix a transformation by leaning entirely on the middle, and this article is a good reminder of that. If the senior team is not visibly living the change, the middle is being asked to carry something no one above them will pick up.
Here is the line in the piece I keep returning to. Nieto-Rodriguez points out that leaders revert to running the company through quarterly business reviews, capital approval committees, the annual planning cycle, and the performance management system, and that every one of those forums punishes the very behaviors the transformation requires. I think that is the most important sentence in the article, and I want to build on that idea and maybe add to it.
Look at what those four things actually are. Quarterly reviews and annual planning are strategy. Capital approvals are delivery economics. Performance management is org design and rewards. None of them is exclusively about leadership behavior. That’s not the whole fix.
The same is true of his three tests. Where a leadership team spends its time is a strategy question. Whether they can sit inside an unresolved bet is a discovery question. Whether they can kill their own initiative is both. Even the tests he offers already reach beyond leadership behavior.
Modeling is necessary. It’s also the first thing leaders turn to because their own behavior is the only part of this they can change without asking anyone’s permission.
A CEO can sponsor the riskiest bet in the portfolio, sit with their team in the ambiguity, and publicly kill something they once championed. Pass all three of his tests. And still lose the transformation to a funding committee nobody redesigned.
So the ask I would put in front of a senior leader is bigger than modeling behavior. At the top of the organization, the CEO and their team need to model the right behaviors across the full range of topics required for the transformation to succeed. They can’t point to the middle managers and expect them to carry the burden and enact the changes themselves. The executive leadership team needs to model and encourage the right behaviors in at least five crucial areas.
Strategy and outcomes. Is the strategy clear enough to guide real choices, and do your teams know which problems they are not solving?
Product thinking and discovery. Do the people closest to the customer have actual authority to discover and decide?
Flow of work and delivery. Do you understand the economics of your own delivery system well enough to know where work waits and what that waiting costs?
Team structure and org design. Is the structure you inherited helping the work, or quietly fighting it?
Leadership and culture. Is your own behavior creating the conditions for people to learn, tell the truth, and keep improving?
Most leaders, when they first see those five questions, go straight to the fifth one. It is the most personal, and it is the one that feels like leadership. But I think the first four are where the transformation either becomes real and enacts the right changes, or fails silently as everyone simply returns to their old ways of working.
None of that is a disagreement with Nieto-Rodriguez. He is right that the modeling has to be visible and that it starts at the top. I just think it has to cover more ground than his three tests measure, and I suspect that is why this advice has been correct for twenty years without ever becoming common.
So if you are a senior leader and you read all five of those questions, don’t try to fix all five. Pick the one for which your honest answer was worst, and do something visible about it this quarter. Then do it again next quarter. That’s how the culture of continuous improvement actually gets built, and that’s the whole ask.