Why Do So Many Organizational Change Efforts Fail?

In: The public manager: the new bureaucrat, Band 44, Heft 1

Abstract

The brutal fact pointed out by Michael Beer and Nitin Nohria in their May 2000 Harvard Business Review article is that about 70% of all change initiatives fail. The failure of leaders to challenge themselves to change, and then model the behavior they seek in others, may be a large contributor to these failures. There are many models for conducting organizational change, and they all seem to focus on the process steps that the organization must take to initiate and implement a change effort. For change to work, a leader must be able to articulate what changes are necessary in his own behavior. Then, the leader must personally -- and authentically -- state why it is difficult to change while modelling the desired changed behavior. Consequently, the author came to understand that it is not the led that must change first, it is the leader. Otherwise, organizations will continue achieving a 70% failure rate. Adapted from the source document.