One of the toughest change efforts we supported was made more difficult because the CEO was not willing to change himself in the very ways he was demanding that his organization change. The company was transforming its strategy, operations, business processes, and culture. The cultural goals included behaviors of greater teamwork, more overt sharing of information and power, increased risk-taking, and the essential need to drive decision-making further down in the organization. The new business strategy and operations needed these new behaviors to succeed.

When it became apparent that the CEO continued to make side deals, usurp key decisions, and exclude some of his key players from important change discussions, we knew that the leadership of the change was seriously impaired. How do you get senior leaders to really understand that they must model the changes they are sponsoring, or they will lose credibility, cause resistance and cynicism to mushroom, and be a major factor in their effort’s failure? How do you get leaders to walk their own talk?

This article explores the key change leadership issue of “modeling,” and provides insights for how you can get your leaders to model the changes they are asking of your organization.

Your change effort requires leaders to model new behaviors and norms if the new state you are trying to implement clearly requires new behaviors and norms to succeed. If the current mindsets, behavior patterns, and cultural norms are adequate to drive the new state, then you do not need leaders to model anything other than their current behaviors.

Typically, leaders see their major change efforts in terms of strategy, structure, business processes, technology, skills, products, and services—the “work” of the organization. Sometimes, such changes do not require much human or cultural change. Developing and using new technical or professional skills does not necessarily require personal change. Selling a new product or service does not typically require personal change. In these cases, modeling new behavior is not a requirement because there is no new behavior to model.

Most of today’s change efforts, however, do require significant changes in behavior to succeed. Many also require fundamental shifts in people’s mindsets and how they view the marketplace, people, or customers. If your changes are significant enough to demand changes in behavior, mindset, culture, relationships, language, or any other aspect of how people work with each other, then the challenge of leadership modeling is paramount to your success. Your leaders will have to model the new mindset and behavior first, or your employees will not believe that the change is real.

All personal change comes from within the individual, from the inside out. Some change efforts attempt to mandate changes in people from the outside in, through strategies like threat of job loss, new performance standards, or replacing old systems with new ones. Ultimately, however, change efforts only succeed if the people choose to change. Otherwise, they may change for a short while, and then revert to their old patterns. We have even seen people revert to using paper reports after their organizations implemented multi-million dollar IT projects. Personal change only sticks to the degree the people choose and commit to the change—for themselves.

When leaders overtly model the new behaviors first, they create a safe environment for managers and employees to change. They raise people’s willingness to choose the new direction. Without the modeling, however, employees are more reluctant to risk or invest in the new behaviors. Employees look to their leaders for the support—and the precedent—to change personally. Leadership modeling delivers both.

In the case mentioned above, we, the consultants, were clear about the leadership modeling that would be required, but the leaders were not, especially the CEO. This brings us to our second question:

Getting the leaders to see that they have personal work to do in the change is a challenging task, especially if the leaders think they can delegate responsibility for the effort to others and just get interim progress reports. We recommend several strategies to raise executive awareness.

Your strategy to accomplish this aspect of the change depends on the degree of personal change required of the leaders. If you need skills and behaviors that are only moderately different, you can plan for special training or use your existing executive development vehicles to accomplish this work during implementation. However, if the changes affect the leaders’ mindsets, behavior, and relationships, you need a more extensive and tailored approach. Consider these strategies:

A transformational change that is devoid of the leaders modeling the behaviors and norms they are asking of the organization is doomed to fail. It is essential to make the requirements for personal change relevant—and essential—to the success of the change. This type of work is not a “nice-to-do” type of thing. It is a key ingredient in your change strategy. If you are currently undergoing a transformational change in which the leaders are NOT modeling the new mindset and behaviors, find a way to “stop the action” for a risk assessment of this dynamic. Gather data to make the point. When your organizational and technical changes require shifts in leadership thinking and behavior in order to succeed, your leaders need to step up to their responsibility to walk the talk they are asking of the organization. Good luck!