This week I was invited to comment on this recent Gartner research on change fatigue for an upcoming article. I’ll share the piece when it comes out, but in the meantime here are some of the thoughts I offered in response to this finding:
A Gartner survey revealed that employees’ willingness to support enterprise change collapsed to just 43% in 2022, compared to 74% in 2016.
What is change fatigue?
Change fatigue is a natural outcome of unskillful or unsustainable change efforts. It’s important to recognize that not all change exhausts us—on the contrary, when we are pursuing a purposeful vision, co-creating new ways of working and iterating as we learn what works, the process of change is energizing.
But all too often it goes the other way. When change is driven by narrow interests, “rolled out” by leaders and enforced by mandate, it leaves us disillusioned and depleted.
Especially because this top-down approach just doesn’t work. The latest research tells us that 78% of organizational transformations fail, and that failure rate is a major factor behind change fatigue. People wonder why they should bother to change when the change isn’t likely to stick anyway.
How do you see this show up in your work?
I see it all the time, and it often goes something like this:
A new leader comes in with a mandate for change.
They feel pressure to deliver results quickly, and move to action without understanding the system they’re working with.
They assume the whole system is aligned with the mandate, but systems are naturally resistant to change—especially human systems like a team or an organization. It takes time, but more importantly it takes dedication to addressing root causes of real issues. Change initiatives focused on short-term, silver-bullet solutions are likely to stay stuck at the surface with minimal impact on the system.
When the leader tries to enforce their mandate, the system rejects it like a virus.
More often than not, the leader leaves the organization and the cycle continues with someone new.
Most of the teams I work with are eager for change, but have been burned by promises of change that haven’t been met—think about the DEI commitments made in the summer of 2020—or have been left out of the process completely, right up until they’re asked to completely change their ways of working.
How can individuals manage their own change fatigue effectively?
The first step is to recognize that change fatigue is real, and that it isn’t doing you any favors. Change is inevitable, it’s not going anywhere, and as the rate of change accelerates, it’s in your own best interest to cultivate a change mindset.
I coach my clients to identify when they’re stuck in one of three transactional mindsets:
“For me” pushes change on others, for our own benefit
“To me” feels at the mercy of change we can’t control
“By me” puts too much pressure for leading change on our own shoulders
You can also think of these as villain, victim and hero mode respectively—and none of them set us up for sustainable success.
The alternative is to cultivate a transformational “through me” mindset. When we ask, “how is change possible through me?” we take responsibility for changing ourselves first, personally demonstrating the change we want to see in our system, and inviting others into co-creating it with us.
It’s always going to feel easier to blame others for change not working, but blame just perpetuates the change fatigue cycle as we dig ourselves deeper into disillusionment. Taking responsibility for ourselves first and foremost gives us back a sense of our own agency, making us more effective agents of change, wherever we are in the organization.
It’s always going to feel easier to blame others for change not working, but blame just perpetuates the change fatigue cycle as we dig ourselves deeper into disillusionment.
What can companies do to prevent change fatigue from happening or lessen its impact?
When it comes to change, companies need to focus on the how as much as the what. Organizational change is never linear, and it’s always more complex than you imagine it will be. And a complex system cannot and will not change just because we tell it what to do. How we engage the system, by which I mean the people within the team or company, is everything.
The companies that will be leading their industries five years from now are the ones that are focused today on setting a purposeful vision and creating the cultural conditions for their people to make it their own, and make it a reality.
It’s an interesting time to work in organizational change, as the pandemic has flipped the script—core paradigms around our relationship to work have shifted, and it’s now the leaders who are reckoning with change they didn’t ask for. We can see this in the return-to-office debate still raging in the U.S. The argument some leaders make, that eliminating remote work is essential for culture, is a classic surface-level solution to a systemic issue. It’s a distraction. As long as the conversation is stuck there, the us vs. them dynamic that results will wear everyone out. (Including leaders! CEO turnover is up 30% from 2021 to 2022. Nobody’s immune to change fatigue.)
I think most of us would rather be talking about how we can redesign our ways of working to allow us to be more effective, efficient and engaged for years to come. That kind of conversation is an antidote to change fatigue, and the foundation of a healthy, high-performing organizational culture.
Are you experiencing change fatigue or seeing it in your team?
How are you meeting it and/or mitigating it?