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 36% of New Year's resolutions are broken by the end of January. By the end of six months, over half are broken. 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 a couple of years ago was to get organized and de-clutter my home office. A year later, my home office was just as cluttered as ever, cluttered with the photos and memorabilia that came from my mother's house when I cleaned it out after her death a year before. I realized that I had a competing commitment: to hold onto those objects from the past and the memories that came with them. My competing commitment, to honor my mother's memory, was one that I could celebrate. Once I understood my competing commitment, I could honor both desires: to honor my mother's memory and to get organized, and find a way to express both commitments in my life.

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, viewing 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, when Jim Sanger came to St. Mary’s Good Samaritan Hospital in southern Illinois as CEO, charged with merging two facilities, he knew that VPs, managers, and employees held competing commitments. They valued the relationships they had had on their old teams in the separate facilities, at the same time that they committed themselves to moving forward with the merger. Jim honored the competing commitments by acknowledging the old teams and the strong relationships that had developed there. He committed himself to treating everyone with dignity and respect, building on the strengths of the old teams. He held leadership retreats at which people from both facilities not only worked together but also socialized together, gradually coming to know and respect one another. He committed himself to a “no-layoff” policy: whenever someone in a management position would leave either campus (but not before), the position was merged with the parallel position from the other campus. While the organizational change took slightly longer to achieve that if Jim had used another approach, the new teams were rock solid. By 2007, ten years after Jim’s arrival, all the changes were still in place and the entire leadership team shared the same vision.

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.

If you enjoyed this article, see also:
Fourth of July: Independence Day or Interdependence Day?
Interdependence Day: independence depends on interdependence
Strengthening your organization in tough economic times

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