Use the LEVERS Model to Diagnose Barriers to Change
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Articulate the desired outcomes of your change initiative.
- Use the LEVERS model to diagnose barriers to change.
Clarify the Change
To succeed in today’s fast-paced world, businesses, teams, and individuals must change to meet ever-evolving demands. You obviously know this—you wouldn’t have found this module if you didn’t!
One challenge with driving change is clarifying around what needs to change. Unclear objectives can cause a host of problems, from weakening your change initiative to missing your targeted outcomes.
For instance, a leader kicks off a change initiative to increase end-user adoption of Salesforce during a rollout of the tool to a large sales team. While this is a noble goal, ambiguity can result in disappointing results. After all, what does “adoption” really mean? If the sales team views adoption as simply logging in daily or inputting data after sales have taken place, rather than managing the full lifecycle of an opportunity, the leader might not get the value they hoped to achieve. Additionally, if the adoption has no clearly defined timeline, it might not show value quickly enough to meet the organization’s needs.
To create the clarity needed to be successful, use the time-tested format of SMART goals to articulate your aims. Your change objectives should be:
Specific | Explicitly state who needs to do what to achieve success. |
Measurable | Establish a way to measure if you’ve achieved the objective. |
Achievable | Ensure you can reasonably achieve success. |
Relevant | Ensure your goal can provide the value you’re seeking. |
Time-bound | Give your goal a deadline. |
Use the SMART format to draft a change statement that guides your change initiative.
Examples look like:
- 75% of sales reps will use Salesforce to manage their opportunities from lead to close by the end of the fiscal year.
- Ten development teams will shift to our agreed-upon form of Agile by the end of the year, as measured by a 10% increase in delivery predictability.
- 90% of teams will adopt the new employee onboarding process by the end of the quarter, as measured by completing the steps in the onboarding toolkit.
Think about your change initiative. How would you frame what you’re trying to achieve in the SMART format?
Diagnose the Barriers
Once you’ve identified what you’re trying to achieve, you can use the LEVERS model to diagnose obstacles that you’ll likely face as your organization begins to transform. This step can help you as you begin crafting effective strategies in the next step of the change process.
Ask the following questions.
Leadership | What are leaders currently doing that can make the change difficult? |
Ecosystem | What are key stakeholders, coworkers, and other groups doing that can make the change difficult? |
Values | What downsides might people experience with the change? Why might they not like the new direction? |
Enablement | What skills or information are people lacking that will make the change difficult? |
Rewards | Are there any misaligned incentives that will make the change difficult? |
Structure | What nonhuman factors, such as processes, systems, tools, and environment make change difficult? |
With a clear understanding of the challenges you might face as you try to help people change, it’s now time to craft a set of strategies to meet them. In the next few units, we review the LEVERS model that you can use to build a strong change plan.
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