It’s a familiar story for key stakeholders. A major company shift, like a new business direction or a full restructuring, launches with fanfare.
But soon, the initial excitement gives way to a quiet, slow failure. Six months in, the expensive new software is mostly untouched, and teams have slipped back into their old routines.
Every detail of the rollout was managed perfectly, except for the one that mattered most. The plan accounted for the technology and the timeline, but forgot about the people who were supposed to bring it all to life. Their jobs were changing, and no one stopped to guide them through it.
Successfully steering that human element is the entire point of change management. It is the necessary work of leading people through a period of disruption. Change begins by learning to anticipate their concerns, getting them on board, and helping them adapt so the new way of working actually works.
What follows are the principles and direct steps to build yours.
What is change management?
Change management is the structured process of planning, implementing, and reinforcing organizational changes to help people and teams adapt and successfully transition from a current state to a desired future state. It focuses on the human side of change by helping people adapt to transitions, reducing disruption, and ensuring changes are adopted and sustained to achieve strategic goals.
Ignoring this discipline is a costly gamble, and the numbers back it up. Research from firms like McKinsey confirms that 70% of large-scale change programs fail to achieve their intended goals. Their research consistently identifies employee resistance and a lack of supportive management behavior as primary causes of these failures.
The field itself is a well-established discipline, built on decades of work by experts like Harvard’s John Kotter, who developed proven models for leading change.
What are the benefits of a successful management change?
When you facilitate change initiatives correctly, it can yield results far beyond a single project’s success. The improvements appear directly in the company’s financial returns, in its ability to hold on to top performers, and in its readiness for the next big challenge.
Protects the project’s ROI
The most immediate benefit of a good change management process is that it gets your teams to actually adopt the tools, business processes, and new directions you invest in.
The speed of that adoption is what drives the financial return. Research from firms like Prosci shows projects with solid change management are six times more likely to hit their targets. Their research also shows that projects with effective change management are five times more likely to stay on or under budget than those with a poor change process (approximately 81% success vs. 16% success).
Retains your top talent
Poorly managed corporate change creates uncertainty, which is toxic to your best people. It’s the fastest way to burn out top performers and crush their “discretionary effort”—that extra passion they voluntarily bring to the job.
The damage is measurable. Gallup’s extensive research on employee engagement consistently shows that periods of chaotic change cause motivation and productivity to plummet. Successful change management replaces that chaos with clarity, making it a powerful tool for keeping your most valuable people.
Builds a more agile culture
Every well-led change builds the organization’s capacity and confidence for the next one. It strengthens the trust between senior leadership and employees, making the entire organization more practiced at adapting.
Another good idea is to share a few growth mindset examples with the team, as this can help them see challenges as opportunities in practice, as well as how they tie into their own professional development.
Building this kind of trust is how companies like Amazon thrive on constant evolution. Their ability to pivot is the result of treating company culture change as a normal part of business and actively working to develop a growth mindset in its workforce.
Are there different types of management change?
Not all organizational changes are created equal. They differ in their scale, scope, and impact on the organization and its people. Correctly identifying the nature of the change you’re leading is the first step toward managing it effectively.
Most adjustments are adaptive, like refining a team’s weekly reporting process, adding some new technology, or updating a sales script. These are the small, incremental improvements that make existing workflows better. A transformational change is a fundamental overhaul of the business itself, such as a merger, an acquisition, a shift in the company’s structure, or a complete shift in the company’s business model. These transformation initiatives are often hardest for employees to successfully adopt.
Other changes affect the core company culture. A pendulum change is a sudden and dramatic shift from one extreme to another, like moving from a fully in-office culture to a 100% remote workforce. A paradigm change is a deeper shift in mindset, such as moving from a traditional, hierarchical management structure to a more agile and collaborative one. A business culture change course can help executive leaders guide this transition.
Finally, some changes happen at the personal level. An individual change involves an employee learning a new skill or adapting to a new team structure as part of their role. An exceptional change is purely administrative, like processing the necessary credentials and system updates after an employee’s legal name change.
What are the key aspects of change management?
Successful change management models combine several distinct disciplines. These practices work together to move an organization and its people from one way of working to another.
A structured plan is the foundation
A structured plan is the logistical backbone of any corporate change strategy. Many successful plans are built on frameworks like Prosci’s ADKAR Model, which maps out the necessary steps for individual change from awareness to reinforcement.
A focus on people drives the outcome
The human element is where most changes succeed or fail. It is the work of consistent communication, coaching, and listening to the teams being affected. Decades of research from firms like McKinsey confirm this, showing that the top reason for failure is employee resistance. A people-focused plan directly addresses that reality.
Minimizing disruption maintains momentum
Minimizing disruption is the practical work of keeping the business running while managing change. It means anticipating problems before they can affect customers or daily work. A factory might schedule an assembly line overhaul during a planned shutdown, completely avoiding a drop in production output.
Adoption is the measure of success
The ultimate goal is adoption, where people actively and skillfully use the new process or system. It represents a genuine buy-in from the team. A new sales process, for example, should lead to a measurable shortening of the average sales cycle.
A holistic view prevents silos
A holistic view means understanding that a change effort in one department will create ripple effects everywhere else. An update to the finance department’s invoicing software will always affect sales commission reports and customer support billing questions. Acknowledging these connections is the hallmark of a mature change practice.
What are the five principles of change management?
The core principles of change management stem from decades of real-world research. Analysts studied thousands of business changes to identify the common patterns that consistently appeared in successful projects, distilling that knowledge into the following framework.
Secure active and visible sponsorship
Securing active and visible executive sponsorship is the first principle of change management.
The best approach is to build a “sponsorship cascade”, where the primary sponsor and change leaders down the chain are all aligned champions for the change or change managers.
A change agent also has three core duties. They must consistently communicate the business reasons for the change, model the new behaviors themselves, and reinforce the change by aligning rewards and consequences to support people in the new way of working.
Involve and empower employees at every level
The second principle is to involve people at every level of the organization genuinely. The work is to build a bridge between the project managers and the daily reality of the employees on the front lines, tapping into the organization’s informal social networks.
Formal corporate communication is always filtered, but the most trusted information often comes from peers. Successful leaders create a network of respected and influential people to help carry the message. These agents are chosen for their social standing, not their job title. Their most important function is to create a two-way feedback loop, channeling raw, honest information from their teams back up to the project leadership.
Communicate frequently and transparently
Clear communication is a great ‘change campaign’ when done right. The message must be segmented for the audience because a senior executive needs different information than a front-line manager.
The single most trusted messenger for an employee is their direct manager, so the core work is to equip them first and provide new manager training, giving them the tools and information needed to translate the change for their own teams.
Assess and address the organization’s readiness
Readiness must be treated as a continuous diagnostic process. While surveys can be useful, the most valuable insights come from qualitative work like structured interviews with HR leaders and confidential focus groups with teams.
The goal is to uncover the why behind any resistance. A diagnosis of a performance gap, for example, directly informs the creation of a targeted training program designed to build both competence and confidence.
Hardwire the change into the system
The final change management principle is about making the change permanent. The most effective way to achieve this is to integrate the new way of working into the organization’s formal systems. That means rewriting job descriptions, updating performance management scorecards, and aligning compensation and bonus structures to reward the new behaviors.
When the systems that govern an employee’s career and paycheck reflect the new reality, the change becomes self-sustaining.
How vital is change management training?
A well-designed change management training program is a powerful part of the change management process.
While leaders set the organization’s vision, the change management training session is often the first place where employees can engage with the “why” on a personal level.
When employees understand the training goals and how they support individuals or the project’s objectives, they can ask direct questions and connect the broad business reasons for a change to the specific processes of their daily work.
Effective leaders can better manage this journey by using it alongside the five distinct stages of the ADKAR model.
For example:
- Awareness can begin with a leadership kickoff, but it is solidified via a change management course.
- Desire is fostered by change managers explaining the personal benefits.
- The training itself builds the core Knowledge, and follow-up coaching develops a person’s Ability to apply it.
- The new behavior is then locked in through Reinforcement, like celebrating early successes.
Change management training that happens without this context creates only compliance, not commitment. People may learn the new steps, but they won’t understand the purpose, which leads to minimal effort and a quick return to old habits. It also wastes the investment, signaling that the new skills are not truly a priority and eroding trust for the next change.
How to prevent a failed management change
You can improve the chances of a business change not failing with strategic initiatives that work well alongside the principles outlined in this blog.
First, define success in human terms by setting clear adoption metrics from the very start. A good metric is specific and measurable, like “90% of the sales team will use the new CRM for all customer interactions within 60 days of launch.” The practice forces the team to plan for and own the human side of the change from day one.
Second, co-create the solution. Bring a team of people who will actually use the new system or internal processes into the design phase to verify that it’s practical and to build early ownership. Co-creation also preemptively dismantles resistance before it can begin.
Defining clear metrics and co-creating the solution prepares the ground for success, which is then locked in by a well-designed change management training program. Effectively, programs are often guided by a blended learning philosophy, a concept best illustrated by the 70-20-10 model.
The model recognizes that true learning is a blend of 70% on-the-job experience, 20% social learning through coaching and peer support, and only 10% formal instruction, like a workshop.
Many companies make the mistake of focusing all their effort on the 10% formal workshop. A truly well-built program supports the other 90% of the learning journey by creating a library of just-in-time (JIT) resources like short video tutorials, searchable knowledge bases, and one-page reference guides that employees can access at the exact moment they need help.
The proof of change management
The story that opened this article ended with a failed project and expensive, unused software. That is not the only possible outcome. Six months after a well-managed launch, a different reality exists. In this version, the office is buzzing. Teams are using the new tool because it helps them succeed, and the promised business outcomes are showing up in the quarterly reports.
That successful outcome was not an accident. It was earned through a deliberate focus on the human dynamics of the change, a direct result of visible leadership inspiring confidence, an engagement plan that gave people a voice, and a training program that built real competence.
Implementing change, in the end, is simply the work of great leadership, a good change management process, and an HR strategy. Together, these change management skills guide an organization and its people from how things are today to a stronger, more capable future.
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