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Why Transformations Fail: Sponsorship Isn't a Kickoff Email · The Science of Leading

• 0:00
  Welcome back to Science of Leading, I'm Claire Monroe with Edwin Carrington.
• 0:04
  Edwin, McKinsey's number keeps coming up on this show, that large transformation
• 0:08
  efforts fail around seventy percent of the time.
• 0:11
  Today I want to know why, because it's not for lack of vision.
• 0:14
  It's almost never vision, Claire.
• 0:16
  It's execution, specifically that people never actually change their day-to-day
• 0:21
  behavior.
• 0:22
  You can announce a transformation beautifully and still fail completely,
• 0:27
  because announcing something and living it are two different jobs.
• 0:30
  And that gap shows up as something very specific in mid-sized companies,
• 0:34
  doesn't it.
• 0:34
  Not a dramatic collapse, more of a slow drift.
• 0:37
  A slow drift is exactly right.
• 0:39
  Role confusion, duplicated work, shadow processes where people quietly route around
• 0:44
  the new system because it's easier.
• 0:47
  Manager burnout from constant escalation.
• 0:50
  And eventually, engagement drops and you lose people you wanted to keep.
• 0:54
  None of that looks like "the change failed" on a status report.
• 0:58
  It just looks like a rough quarter.
• 1:00
  There's a Gartner number cited by Harvard Business Review that stopped me cold,
• 1:03
  employee willingness to support enterprise change dropped from seventy-four percent
• 1:08
  in 2016 to forty-three percent in 2022.
• 1:12
  That's not a small shift, that's people actively bracing for change to not stick.
• 1:16
  And when willingness drops like that, it's rational, not cynical.
• 1:21
  People have lived through enough half-finished change efforts to stop believing the
• 1:25
  next one will be different.
• 1:27
  Which is exactly why the first element matters more than any communication plan.
• 1:32
  Strong sponsorship.
• 1:33
  Prosci's research on this is stark.
• 1:35
  Seventy-nine percent of projects with extremely effective sponsors met their goals,
• 1:40
  versus twenty-seven percent with extremely ineffective sponsors.
• 1:43
  That's not a small correlation, that's most of the outcome.
• 1:46
  Because sponsorship isn't a kickoff email, Claire, it's three specific behaviors.
• 1:51
  Consistency, the message doesn't change every two weeks depending on who's in the
• 1:56
  room.
• 1:57
  Presence, the sponsor shows up in the moments that actually feel risky,
• 2:01
  pushback, tradeoffs, missed targets, not just the celebration slide.
• 2:06
  And resourcing, time and budget and priority get protected when conflict shows up,
• 2:11
  not quietly deprioritized.
• 2:14
  So if a leader can't commit to naming the actual reason for the change,
• 2:17
  defining what "done" looks like in measurable terms, and being explicit about what
• 2:22
  stops to make room for it, that's not really a change initiative.
• 2:25
  Call it what it is, a communication campaign.
• 2:28
  Nothing wrong with communication campaigns, but don't expect behavior to change
• 2:32
  because of one.
• 2:33
  Okay, but here's what I think gets missed.
• 2:35
  Executives open the door.
• 2:37
  They don't determine whether anyone walks through it.
• 2:39
  That's the real bottleneck, and it's middle managers, every time.
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  They're the ones translating the change into what actually happens in a Tuesday team
• 2:47
  meeting.
• 2:48
  What "good" looks like now, what gets escalated versus handled locally,
• 2:53
  what stops being tolerated.
• 2:55
  If middle managers are confused about any of that, the entire organization will be
• 2:59
  confused, no matter how clear the executive vision was.
• 3:03
  And most companies pick the people leading that translation work based on,
• 3:06
  honestly, who's available or who speaks confidently in a meeting.
• 3:10
  Which is how you end up with visible leadership and invisible follow-through.
• 3:15
  The better selection questions are behavioral.
• 3:17
  Can they stay calm under ambiguity?
• 3:20
  Do they actually drive decisions, or seek consensus forever and call it
• 3:24
  collaboration?
• 3:25
  Do they handle conflict directly without torching trust in the process?
• 3:30
  Do they reliably follow through on routines, not just big moments?
• 3:34
  That's a very different hiring bar than "who's free next quarter."
• 3:37
  It is, and it's exactly the kind of signal behavioral data was built to surface.
• 3:43
  You can shortlist change leaders by the profile that actually fits high uncertainty
• 3:47
  and high stakeholder negotiation, coach the specific gaps in a manager's style
• 3:52
  before they become adoption risk, and even pair a vision-driver with an operator so
• 3:57
  the change stays both credible and executable.
• 4:00
  If you're picking who leads your next change effort and want more than gut feel to
• 4:04
  go on, OAD has a free Top Performer Profile that surfaces exactly those behavioral
• 4:09
  patterns, about seven minutes, results in twenty-four hours,
• 4:13
  no credit card.
• 4:14
  That's O-A-D dot A-I.
• 4:16
  Get the sponsor and the middle managers right, and you've already fixed the most
• 4:19
  common way these efforts die.
• 4:21
  Perfect place to leave it.
• 4:22
  Thanks, Edwin.
• 4:23
  Always, Claire.