Broken New Year's Resolutions? Failed Organizational Change Efforts?

Have you broken your New Year's resolutions yet?  If so, you're not alone.  Studies show that nearly 50% of New Year's resolutions are broken by the end of February.  Organizational change efforts follow a similar pattern: about 70% of all organizational change efforts fail to achieve the desired results.  How are these statistics related?

Broken New Year's resolutions and failed organizational change efforts have something in common: they both neglect "competing commitments" to their peril.  The learning that can occur through examining these competing commitments is the silver lining in the cloud.  Self-reflective individuals and organizations can celebrate their failures as a way to learn and grow.

What if we thought of our broken New Year's resolutions not as evidence of weak willpower, but as a sign of other important commitments that need just as much attention as our resolutions need?  A book that can help do just that is Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey's Immunity to Change: How to Overcome it and Unlock the Potential in You and Your Organization.

According to Kegan and Lahey, we break our New Year's resolutions because we don't pay attention to the commitments that compete with them.  For example, one of my resolutions last year was to clearly discern what to say yes to and what to say no to, and not take on too many commitments.  A few months later, I was just as overcommitted as ever.  It was only when I identified my competing commitment, to have enough interesting work (along with my fear that if I said no to anything, I would never be asked to do anything again), that I began to make progress.  Through understanding my competing commitment and testing my assumption that I would never be asked to do anything again if I said no to something, I found a way to honor both commitments and, as a result, achieved my goal.

Like individual New Year's resolutions, organizational change efforts tend to focus on desired change without digging deeper to examine competing commitments.  We're all familiar with the term "resistance," used to describe the forces that keep us from changing, both individually and organizationally.  It's easy to view resistance negatively, seeing it as the effort to cling to the old when it's time to usher in the new.  If instead of thinking in terms of organizational resistance to change, we can think in terms of competing organizational commitments, we can mine rich veins of learning.

For example, Sophia Housing, an organization serving the homeless population in Dublin, Ireland discovered that a "command and control" leadership style had crept into its otherwise collaborative culture.  Jean Quinn, the co-executive director, knew that it was time to focus on organizational change in order to bring the organization's leaders back into alignment with Sophia's values.

Jean hired a leadership consultant to work with the organization for six months.  It would have been easy for Sophia's leaders to go through the training and then slip back into old patterns. But by surfacing the competing commitment within the organization to not make waves by confronting "command and control" practices, Sophia's leaders realized what was occurring at a deeper level.  In their efforts to show respect toward one another, they had let slip important leadership values.  Their commitment to respect one another (which they thought included not confronting one another), they realized, had been competing with their commitment to a collaborative leadership style.  Once they recognized their competing commitment and realized that respect and confrontation weren't mutually exclusive, they were able to change.  The collaborative leadership culture was restored. 

The next time you're feeling discouraged by a broken New Year's resolution or failed organizational change effort, look deeper.  You're likely to find a competing commitment that is just as important and honorable as the "failed" commitment.  If you can find a way to honor both commitments together, you may find yourself well on the road to success.  What you learn from your "failure" can ultimately build a stronger foundation for moving toward your goal. 

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If you would like to become more effective in individual and organizational change through identifying competing commitments, consider joining us for a day-long workshop on the topic on March 22:

“Immunity to Change.” Rolling Ridge Retreat Center.  Margaret Benefiel and Jim Silva. March 22, 9:30 AM – 3:30 PM. North Andover, MA.

(The story of Sophia Housing grew out of Chapter 7 in The Soul of Supervision, edited by Margaret Benefiel and Geraldine Holton.  Used with permission of the publisher.)

Related articles:

Finding Light in the Darkness

Supervision and Organizational Change
Soulful leadership among the "least of these"

For more info: 

Margaret Benefiel, Ph.D., author of Soul at Work and The Soul of a Leader, and co-editor of The Soul of Supervision, works with leaders in healthcare, business, churches, government and non-profits to help them stay true to their souls. Visit her website.