To Make Organizational Change Effective, Focus on Behavior

Measuring behavior change helps gauge success.

This post is part of our change lifecycle series covering six steps: finding your leaders, power mapping, the Cookie Monster moment, moving your needle, your capacity for disruption, and determining your risk. Read the previous series post about the Cookie Monster moment here.

Change is something we all endure. We notice this now more than ever, as so many of us are still adjusting to working from home more than a year and a half after the COVID-19 pandemic began. 

Effectively navigating change is not always easy for leaders, but they can take steps to help make the process simpler and less daunting for their employees. According to Harvard Business School professor David Garvin, “Often, the most important thing a manager can do is not identify the need for change, but provoke the momentum to begin and maintain the change.” 

A successful initiative gets people excited about change while also preparing them to abandon old habits and embrace new behaviors. That’s why we tell our clients to focus not just on measuring the outcomes of a change initiative, but also on measuring the behaviors of the teams they want to act differently. 

Often when organizations identify new goals, they tend to do the same things they did in the past in order to achieve them. But it’s not just about measuring the end product when trying to gauge success; it’s about measuring the new behaviors that were exercised, and will continue to be exercised, in order to achieve a desired outcome.