Jesse Jacoby
A few years ago I sat in on the kickoff for a two-year operating model program at a midmarket medical device manufacturer. The readiness assessment had come back strong. Eighty-one percent of employees said they understood why the change was happening. Governance was defined, the roadmap was credible, the funding was approved, and the CEO opened the session by saying this was the most important thing the company would do in a decade.
Forty minutes in, the COO raised a sequencing concern. He thought two of the four workstreams were going to collide in the same quarter on the same plant. The CEO said something warm about appreciating the input and moved to the next slide. Nobody wrote it down. The CFO caught my eye for about a second and looked back at his laptop.
Eighteen months later the program was restructured, which is the polite word for what happened. The two workstreams had collided in the same quarter on the same plant.
The readiness assessment measured the organization. Nothing measured the six people at the front of the room, and they were the variable that mattered.
The Assessment Nobody Runs
We are thorough about diagnosing everything except the group commissioning the diagnosis. Organizations run readiness surveys, stakeholder analyses, culture assessments, and capability maturity scores. Almost none of them ask the prior question: is this leadership team capable of leading this change?
Part of why is obvious. The executive team commissions the assessment, so the assessment does not point at them. Part of it is that we lack a decent instrument. You cannot survey your way to this answer, because a leadership team’s self-report is the least reliable data you will collect. McKinsey’s transformation research found that 86 percent of leaders said they had role-modeled the behavior changes the transformation required, while only 50 percent of other participants agreed they had.1 Both groups were in the same building.
What does work is observation. Leadership teams have a small number of habits that are visible in ordinary meetings, and those habits predict transformation outcomes better than any readiness score. Here are the five I watch for, and what each one tells you.
Pattern One: What Happens to Disagreement
Watch what the team does the first time two executives genuinely disagree in front of others.
Healthy teams slow down. Somebody asks a clarifying question, the disagreement gets stated in terms both people accept, and it either resolves or gets explicitly parked with an owner and a date. The tell is not whether they agree at the end. It is whether the disagreement was allowed to be fully articulated before it was resolved.
Unhealthy teams do one of two things. They smooth, which is what happened to my COO with the sequencing concern. The objection is acknowledged warmly, absorbed, and never engaged. Or they escalate to the most senior person in the room, who rules, and the losing party goes quiet in the meeting and continues to disagree everywhere else.
Both patterns push the conflict underground, where it does not disappear. It resurfaces as slow resourcing, quiet non-adoption, and a workstream that keeps missing dates for reasons nobody can name. If disagreement cannot survive contact with the room, the transformation will be fought in hallways for two years.
Pattern Two: Whether Anyone Will Sequence
Ask the team to put their initiatives in order and watch what happens.
The failure mode is not disorganization. It is that every executive’s initiative is priority one, and the team has no mechanism for saying that something important will wait. Sequencing requires someone to accept that their thing goes later, which requires trust that later still means yes. Teams without that trust refuse to sequence, and what comes out instead is a roadmap where everything is parallel, which is a roadmap that has made no decisions at all.
The cost shows up in leadership attention, which is the genuinely scarce resource. McKinsey found that transformation success roughly doubles when senior leaders and initiative leaders spend more than half their time on the transformation, and that only 43 percent of them actually do.1 A team running nine parallel priorities cannot give any of them half of anything. The refusal to sequence is what guarantees the dilution.
The diagnostic question I use is simple and uncomfortable: which of these are you willing to be visibly behind on in March? A team that cannot answer has not prioritized. It has listed.
Pattern Three: Whether Ownership Survives the Meeting
Ownership is easy to assign and hard to keep. Watch what the named owner actually is when the meeting ends.
The degraded version sounds like ownership and is not. A function owns it rather than a person. A steering committee owns it, which means a calendar invitation owns it. Or a person owns it but controls neither the budget nor the people required to deliver it, which makes them accountable for an outcome they cannot produce. That last one is the most common and the most corrosive, because it looks correct on the governance chart and quietly teaches everyone that ownership is ceremonial.
The sponsorship evidence here is unusually consistent. Prosci’s benchmarking research has ranked active and visible executive sponsorship as the number one contributor to change success in every one of its reports since 1998, and organizations with extremely effective sponsors met or exceeded objectives roughly three times as often as those with very ineffective ones. Yet half of participants reported that their sponsors had less than an adequate understanding of what the sponsor role required.2
Read that last part carefully. The single most predictive factor is a role that half the people holding it do not understand. That is not a competence problem. It is an expectation-setting problem that lives with the executive team.
Pattern Four: How Fast Bad News Travels Up
This is the one I would keep if I could only watch a single pattern.
Amy Edmondson set out to show that better hospital teams make fewer errors and found the opposite in her data. Units with stronger teamwork and leadership reported higher medication error rates, not lower. The resolution was that better teams were not making more mistakes. They were able to discuss them. Units where a mistake meant you got in trouble simply reported fewer, which looked like performance and was actually silence.3
Executive teams have the same property, and transformation makes it acute, because a transformation generates a continuous stream of unwelcome information. The question is not whether your program will hit trouble. It is how many weeks pass between the day someone knows and the day you do.
The observable version: when a workstream lead brings a problem to the leadership team, what happens in the next ninety seconds? Do they get questions about the problem, or questions about why it was not caught sooner? Does the team move to help, or move to establish that the failure belongs to someone specific? Watch the status reporting too. A portfolio that is uniformly green eighteen months into a hard transformation is not a healthy portfolio. It is a team that has learned what color to use.
Pattern Five: Whether They Change First
The last pattern is the simplest to state and the hardest to fake. Does the transformation require anything of the executive team itself?
If the answer is that the operating model changes for everyone below the leadership team while the leadership team’s own meetings, metrics, decision rights, and calendar stay exactly as they were, the organization has already drawn the correct conclusion about how serious this is. People are extremely good at reading this signal and they read it fast.
The same McKinsey research found that transformations where senior leaders modeled the behavior changes they were asking for were 5.3 times more likely to succeed, and that transformations where senior managers communicated openly about progress, including the parts going badly, were eight times more likely to succeed.1 Those are not soft factors. They are the largest effect sizes in the dataset, and they are entirely within the executive team’s control.
Running the Audit on Your Own Team
None of this requires an engagement or an instrument. It requires sitting in three or four ordinary leadership meetings with these five patterns in front of you and writing down what you actually observe rather than what you hope is true.
The harder part is what to do with the answer. If the audit comes back poor, the useful response is not a leadership offsite, which tends to produce agreement in the room and no change in the room’s behavior. It is narrower and more structural: change how disagreement is handled in the meeting, force an explicit sequencing decision with a named thing that goes later, fix the ownership that lacks budget authority, and put one uncomfortable item on the agenda every month so that bad news has a scheduled route upward.
Most transformations are not lost to strategy or to execution. They are lost to a leadership team that could not do these five things and was never asked whether it could.
Before you approve the next one, sit in your own meetings for a month and score yourselves honestly. If you find you cannot, that is the finding.
References
- McKinsey & Company, “The science behind successful organizational transformations.” McKinsey’s transformation survey research found that organizations were 5.3 times more likely to succeed when senior leaders role-modeled the behavior changes being asked of employees, and 8.0 times more likely when senior managers communicated openly about the transformation’s progress. It also found that 86 percent of leaders said they had role-modeled the required changes while only 50 percent of other participants agreed, and that success roughly doubles when senior leaders and initiative leaders devote more than half their time to the transformation, which only 43 percent do.
- Prosci, “Primary Sponsor’s Role and Importance,” drawing on Prosci’s Best Practices in Change Management benchmarking research. Active and visible executive sponsorship has ranked as the number one contributor to change success in every Prosci benchmarking report since 1998. Organizations with extremely effective sponsors met or exceeded project objectives roughly three times as often as those with very ineffective sponsors, and 50 percent of participants reported that their sponsors had less than an adequate understanding of the sponsor role and its responsibilities.
- Amy C. Edmondson, “Learning from Mistakes Is Easier Said Than Done: Group and Organizational Influences on the Detection and Correction of Human Error,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 1996. Edmondson’s study of nursing units across two hospitals found that units with stronger team climate and leadership reported higher rates of medication errors. As she later described the finding, better teams were not making more mistakes but were more able to discuss them, while units where errors brought blame reported fewer. The work became the foundation of her research on psychological safety.
