By Dr. Mansour Farhat, DBA, MQM, MOAR, FRSA, QMS 

Leaders in the Gulf rarely lack commitment to change. What they often lack is the set of everyday behaviours that turns commitment into results. Five questions can help leaders find the gap before a transformation begins.

Every year, organisations across the region submit themselves to scrutiny for excellence awards. Teams of assessors read their submissions, visit their sites and interview people from the boardroom to the front line. I have served as an assessor and judge on such programmes since 2010. Across many assessments, one pattern recurs often enough that I now look for it at the start of every site visit.

Leadership commitment to change is usually the strongest part of the story. Strategies are ambitious, transformation offices exist, and senior leaders speak with conviction about where the organisation is going. The evidence that change has actually taken hold, however, is often far weaker. New processes exist on paper but not in practice. Systems have been installed but are used half-heartedly. Front-line staff can recite the vision but cannot say what it means for their own work.

A typical case looks like this. The leadership team presents a compelling transformation story, with a clear strategy, a programme office and a portfolio of initiatives. On the site visit, assessors ask the people doing the work how their jobs have changed. The answers are vague. A new procedure exists, but teams still follow the old one, with the new form completed afterwards to satisfy the system. The commitment is real; the change has not reached the work.

The gap is not about commitment. It is about what happens between the commitment and the change.

The myth of the committed leader

Much of the popular advice on change tells leaders that their commitment is what matters most. If the top is behind it, the reasoning goes, the organisation will follow. The research tells a more careful story. Senior commitment is necessary, but it does not, on its own, produce employee support or successful implementation. What makes the difference is a set of specific behaviours: framing the reasons for change, taking clear decisions, and mobilising the people who must make it work (Battilana et al., 2010; Higgs and Rowland, 2005).

There is also reason to be sceptical of the familiar claim that most change efforts fail. That figure has little solid evidence behind it (Hughes, 2011). The more useful question is not how often change fails, but why some changes stall partway, delivering a new structure or system while the old habits carry on underneath.

In assessments, the stall usually shows up in one of five places. Each can be turned into a question that leaders should ask themselves before, not after, a transformation is launched.

Question 1: Can the people affected explain why this change is happening?

Not the leadership team. The people whose work will change.

A vision statement is not an explanation. People need to understand the reasons for change, what will be different for them and how success will be judged. When that understanding is missing, uncertainty fills the gap, and uncertainty breeds resistance (Bordia et al., 2004). Readiness for change depends on people believing that the change is needed and that it is right for the organisation (Armenakis et al., 1993).

A simple test: ask five people at different levels to explain the change in their own words. If their answers differ widely, the change has not yet been explained.

The contrast is striking when it appears. In organisations where change has taken hold, a technician, a project engineer and a department head give recognisably the same account of why a change was made, in their own words. In organisations where it has stalled, the only consistent account comes from the strategy document.

Question 2: Are decisions being taken, or deferred?

Change creates a stream of small decisions. Who owns this process now? What happens to the old report? Which exceptions are allowed? When these decisions are slow or unclear, people revert to what they know.

In many organisations I have assessed, the senior team is visibly committed but decision rights during the change are vague. Issues travel up the hierarchy and wait. Meanwhile the old way of working continues, because it is the only way that is clearly authorised. Leaders who want change to stick need to decide quickly, and to say clearly who can decide what.

Question 3: How much of the communication is face to face?

Most change programmes communicate a great deal. Newsletters, intranet pages, town halls and posters are all useful for informing people. They are much less useful for persuading them.

People commit to change when they can raise their concerns and get a real answer from someone who matters to them, usually their own manager (Elving, 2005). That takes one-to-one conversations and small-group discussions, which are slow and time-consuming. It is also where much of the real work of change happens. In my experience, the organisations that sustain change are those whose managers have been prepared and expected to hold those conversations, rather than those with the most polished communication campaigns.

One approach that works well is simple: before a change is announced widely, every line manager is briefed in a small group, given the chance to challenge it, and then asked to hold a short conversation with each member of their team within a fixed period. The questions raised in those conversations are collected and answered openly. It costs time, but it turns managers from messengers into owners.

Question 4: Who designed the change?

When a change is designed entirely by a central team or by external consultants and then handed to the organisation, it often meets quiet resistance. Participation in shaping a change builds ownership and reduces resistance (Lines, 2004). It also improves the design, because the people doing the work usually know where the problems are.

Involvement does not mean consensus on everything. It means giving the people affected a genuine role, for example testing a new process, shaping how a system is configured or deciding how the change will run in their team. A useful check is whether anything in the final design would be different had the front line not been involved. If the answer is no, the involvement was probably for show.

This question matters especially in family-owned groups, where authority is often concentrated in the owning family. Concentrated authority can make decisions fast, which helps with Question 2. It can also crowd out the involvement that makes change stick. Owner-leaders who are aware of this tension can deliberately create space for others to shape the change.

Question 5: How will you know the change has stuck?

Many organisations measure change the way they measure projects: on time, on budget, within scope. Those measures matter, but they say nothing about whether the new way of working has become normal.

The organisations that sustain change measure adoption and persistence. Are people still using the new process six months later? Has the old workaround disappeared? Do the people affected accept the change, or are they tolerating it until the next reorganisation? These are harder questions to measure, but they are the ones that tell you whether the change has worked. Excellence models make the same point when they ask for evidence of sustained results rather than one-off achievements.

A good adoption measure is usually simple. For a new reporting process, it might be the share of required reports submitted through the new route, tracked month by month for a year. For a new procedure, it might be the share of audited cases that follow it. The point is to measure the behaviour the change was meant to produce, and to keep measuring after the project has closed.

From commitment to traction

None of these questions is new, and none requires a large budget. Together they shift attention from what leaders say about change to what they do to make it happen. Leaders who can answer all five with confidence before they launch a transformation are, in my experience, far more likely to see it take hold.

For leaders of family-owned and government organisations in the Gulf, where change is now constant and expectations of performance keep rising, that shift matters. Commitment opens the door. The behaviours behind these five questions are what carry the organisation through it.

Further reading

• Armenakis, A.A., Harris, S.G. and Mossholder, K.W. (1993), “Creating readiness for organizational change”, Human Relations, Vol. 46 No. 6, pp. 681-703.
• Battilana, J., Gilmartin, M., Sengul, M., Pache, A.-C. and Alexander, J.A. (2010), “Leadership competencies for implementing planned organizational change”, The Leadership Quarterly, Vol. 21 No. 3, pp. 422-438.
• Bordia, P., Hobman, E., Jones, E., Gallois, C. and Callan, V.J. (2004), “Uncertainty during organizational change: types, consequences, and management strategies”, Journal of Business and Psychology, Vol. 18 No. 4, pp. 507-532.
• Elving, W.J.L. (2005), “The role of communication in organisational change”, Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 129-138.
• Higgs, M. and Rowland, D. (2005), “All changes great and small: exploring approaches to change and its leadership”, Journal of Change Management, Vol. 5 No. 2, pp. 121-151.
• Hughes, M. (2011), “Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail?”, Journal of Change Management, Vol. 11 No. 4, pp. 451-464.
• Lines, R. (2004), “Influence of participation in strategic change: resistance, organizational commitment and change goal achievement”, Journal of Change Management, Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 193-215.

About the author

Dr. Mansour Farhat, DBA, MQM, MOAR, FRSA, QMS, is a quality management and organisational excellence specialist with more than 20 years of experience across business excellence, ISO management systems, governance and strategic planning. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, he has served as an assessor and senior judge for international excellence award programmes since 2010.