McKinsey: The irrational side of change management

Conventional ideas about managing change emphasize the need for new corporate structures, processes, targets, incentives, and so forth. But you can’t implement them effectively unless you understand that employees don’t always behave in rational ways. When a company mounts a transformation program, for example, senior executives typically embrace Gandhi’s famous aphorism “Be the change you want to see” and commit themselves to role modeling the behavior required by the new dispensation. The problem is that many leaders believe, quite mistakenly, that they already are the change. It’s easy to delude yourself about this—how many executives would admit, even to themselves, that they are not, say, customer focused? In fact, we human beings consistently think that we are better than we really are; 94 percent of all men, for example, rank themselves in the top half of the male population for athletic prowess. The real bottleneck to role modeling—for executives no less than other employees—is knowing what and how to change at the personal level. Learn to engage with “The irrational side of change management” by reading the classic 2009 article.