Is change leadership obsolete?

Change is coming too fast and too furious for anyone to keep up with, let alone believe in and support

IF IT FEELS like change is getting harder to pursue, either from the employee or employer side, you’re not imagining things ― it really is getting harder to move things in a new direction, according to new research from Gartner HR.

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“Only one in three mid-to-senior level business leaders said that the last change they led achieved healthy change adoption,” the research found.

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Looking into the why, the research pointed to a trust gap. “The nature of change today has made it ungovernable,” said Gartner HR’s director Kayla Velnoskey. “Organizations experiencing ungovernable change are 1.6 times less likely to experience high change trust.”

In a nutshell, change is coming too fast and too furious for anyone to keep up with, let alone believe in and support. Company leadership, the report found, is often working from the wrong playbook. “Typically, leaders use inspiration and the vision of change to get employees to adopt change,” said Velnoskey. “However, Gartner analysis found that the inspirational approach only works when there is high change trust.”

“When you think about it, we’re living in a world characterized by low trust in general,” Velnoskey continued, “and then you layer on top of that this history of broken promises when it comes to organizational change.”

Indeed, “change is a constant” and “move fast and break stuff” have been regular refrains in business for over a decade, and leaders have adopted change, flexibility and agility as values worth pursuing. But it comes with a cost.

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“We’ve trained people to brace for disruption, not to believe in transformation,” stated leadership coach Gia Lacqua. “On top of that, reasons for change are poorly communicated. “That erodes trust faster than the change itself,” she said.

The takeaway, said Velnoskey, is that change is contextually different now. “We have evidence that this might have worked in the past, but it’s not working in today’s environment,” she said. “Change is different. The world around us is different. And we need to start doing something different.” Kieran Delamont