The absence of focused change in employee ambition

One of the best ways to reduce employee resistance to change is to involve these employees (or obtain input from them) from the early stages of the strategic decision-making process. However, there seems little or no literature on what that input meant for the content and composition of the organizational change itself.

Therefore, this study is a pioneering study to quantify how employees’ ambition influences the choice for a strategic target. To start with such research, we performed extensive polls about a wide variety of strategic issues, all of which required (some sort of) organizational transformation. These polls objectively measured the ambition of almost 120,000 employees in more than 2,500 teams providing over 12 million answers. All of these teams unconsciously eschewed the ideal change focus: “Change a few things and change them well. Then, repeat.”

We calculated a rule-of-thumb of 20% teams with no ambition, 55% with no focus, and 25% with no realism. The perceived generic application of this rule has profound ramifications for the planning and implementation of organizational transformations.