Model the Transformation You Expect Employees to Deliver
Executive Take
If a CEO demands agility or AI adoption from staff while keeping their own workflow, meetings, and decision-making untouched, the transformation stalls regardless of the messaging budget behind it.
Executive Summary
HBR piece argues that transformation initiatives succeed or fail based on leader behavior rather than communicated strategy. The core claim: employees calibrate their own response to change by observing what executives actually do, not what executives announce or ask of others.
Why It Matters
Leadership and HR executives running change or digital-transformation programs should treat this as a diagnostic: if adoption is lagging, the first place to look is the executive team's own visible behavior, not the training curriculum.
Bizquad Perspective
Most transformation failures get blamed on employee resistance or poor tooling when the more uncomfortable and more fixable cause is usually sitting in the C-suite's own calendar and habits.