Measure change and make it matter: Examine adoption and impact
When I was in business school, one course I dreaded was accounting. As an aspiring management psychologist, I was not at all interested in credits and debits. I expected the course to be deadly boring. Surprisingly, it turned out to be one of my more memorable courses, partly because the professor had a master’s degree in psychology.
Now, over 20 years later, I still remember one of his thought-provoking lessons, “What you measure is what people will do.” (The other one was “cash is king,” which is a topic for a different post.)
Compliance vs. adoption
Every January, my respected colleagues at Gagen-MacDonald publish a white paper that is always worth a read. This year, in “Five Priorities in 2024 for Human-Centric Leaders,” the first of their priorities was “Advancing from Change Strategies to Adoption Strategies.” They examined how business leaders typically assess the success of their change initiatives by measuring compliance rather than adoption.
Here's an example of what they’re talking about. Suppose a company wants to increase the number of women in senior leadership roles. They set the following goals:
Create an Employee Resource Group for new employees.
Start a mentorship program matching senior women leaders with middle managers.
Celebrate Women’s History Month.
Develop a more generous maternity leave policy.
Then, at the end of the year, they measure whether they met all of these goals and eureka! They did! They can feel great about the success of their change initiative.
Missing data = limited measurement
Except—they have no way of knowing whether any of these changes did, in fact, enable more women to move into senior leadership roles. They haven’t asked women what the barriers are. They haven’t addressed workplace attitudes or behaviors that discourage or prevent women from moving into senior roles. They have measured compliance, but they have no data on whether any real change occurred in the culture or practices of the organization.
Not only does this lack of measurement undermine the likelihood of real change, it leads to skepticism and change fatigue among employees.
Of course, it’s much easier to measure whether we started a program than it is to measure whether the program had real impact. But as Professor Bryant taught us, that will lead to a superficial checking of the box rather than the meaningful change that will make our businesses better.
If you’d like to talk more about leadership and effective change, contact me at ggolden@gailgoldenconsulting.com.
