Learn the LEVERS of Change
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify the six key levers for driving sustainable change.
- Explain why each lever is important for building effective strategies for influencing change adoption.
Leadership Lever
To implement change, leaders need to reset priorities, approve budgets, remove barriers, and model desired behaviors. Their actions send a strong message about the priority and importance of the new initiative.
Not only do leaders wield formal authority, they also have tacit social authority. People look to them to understand what the organization values, how to behave, and what's acceptable. Leaders not only have the power to motivate others to change, they have the power to make change easier by removing obstacles and roadblocks, approving budgets, and reorganizing teams.
When designing a change management strategy, be deliberate about the role leaders will play—beyond mere sponsorship or basic support. Leaders should be ready to sacrifice time, previous priorities, allocated budget, and even ego if they want a change initiative to succeed.
For example, a prominent Fortune 500 CEO announced to his company that he would no longer review sales data in spreadsheets or PowerPoint slides, only as data reported through Salesforce. This commitment caused Salesforce adoption to skyrocket as employees began using the tool to accurately report business activity to the CEO.
With AI dashboards, leaders can be more in touch with change efforts than ever before. They can get a pulse on what’s working and where to step in, making their decisions data-informed and effective for their organization.
Ecosystem Lever
People are social beings. We’re constantly looking for cues from others about what’s good, bad, acceptable, relevant, or cool. Other people’s actions and attitudes influence our own behavior, whether we notice it or not.
Take, for example, the Framingham studies, a longitudinal study that tracked the health habits of a small town. Researchers found that people who spent time with others who smoked were much more likely to smoke. Additionally, spending time with people who were unhappy increased a person’s likelihood of becoming unhappy. They also found the opposite—spending time with happy people increases your likelihood of being happy.
Remarkably, researchers found this influence extended beyond direct social connections. They found that if a person’s close friend or spouse spends time with a happy person, their likelihood of being happy increases by 10%. Social influence is a powerful thing. Using it in your change efforts can make all the difference!
Change is a team sport, and the Ecosystem lever is all about teamwork. Smart change-makers don’t push forward without identifying and securing stakeholders. They engage all impacted stakeholders, and they identify and focus their efforts on aligning socially connected opinion leaders. In doing so, they get quick and powerful traction across the entire organization. Stakeholder management, change networks, and other social tactics ensure change becomes socially supported and normative.
Values Lever
Want people to care about the change? Tie it to what matters most to them. Change-makers demonstrate how change fits with people’s sense of mission and purpose through storytelling, and by creating direct and meaningful experiences with the new conditions.
A CIO of a large organization realizes they need to build momentum around a customer-centricity initiative that requires people to work differently. They know asking people to disrupt old habits and learn a new way of working isn’t enough. They decide to bring a customer in to talk with the internal team about how the technology the organization builds, deploys, and uses affects the CIO’s daily life.
Following the event, a senior developer taps on the CIO’s shoulder and says, “I’ve been in this organization a long time and this is the first time I’ve actually met face-to-face with a customer. It was fantastic. I always thought our day-to-day work had a positive impact, but I guess I didn’t really know.” Everyone leaves the experience inspired to give extra effort and make the changes to improve the customer experience.
The Values lever is all about tapping into people’s personal motivation. It’s about capturing people’s hearts, and if done well, will result in people giving extra effort to see the change through. However, this can be tricky. It’s impossible to force anyone to be personally motivated. So what can a change agent do? They can connect the change to what people already care about. Draw a clear, sincere link between the change and what people already care about and value to create advocates. Consider using AI tools to gain a deeper understanding of what employees care most about.
Perhaps there’s an employee engagement survey or other feedback mechanism that you can reference as a starting point. Use AI to uncover patterns around shared values or preferences that you can use to tie your messaging to what’s going to be the most motivating to your team.
Enablement Lever
Ultimately, people can’t do what they don’t know how to do! Communicating about the change and providing people with skill-building, training, and coaching are two important elements of effectively managing change. Whether your goal is adopting a new technology system or fundamentally changing the way people work, you need to equip them with the knowledge and skills to confidently do the job.
There's a common factor to personal excellence in any domain: Practice, practice, practice. The best make time for deliberate practice with feedback from a coach. While you might not be trying to create excellence in your end users, the more proficient people are in any activity—whether using technology, or working in a new agile environment—the more likely people are to adopt and enjoy the new behavior. When you think about enabling others, make sure there is a heavy dose of practice. Virtual AI coaches (like the Agentforce Sales Coach) are great resources for tailoring training and providing instant feedback to make learning hands on and fun.
Enablement is often the first, and sometimes only, strategy professionals think of when they roll out a new change. They focus on building a communication plan, rolling out training, and think, “OK, we can check change management off the list... We’re done, right?” But time and time again, we’ve seen that communications and training alone aren’t enough to sustainably shift behaviors and promote new ways of working within an organization. They are an important piece of the puzzle, but they don’t tell the full story when it comes to managing change.
Rewards Lever
Change becomes exponentially more difficult when legacy incentive systems entice people to behave in exactly the wrong way. Rewards are all about tapping into extrinsic motivation—putting in place tangible and intangible rewards and recognition to encourage people to behave in a certain way. Examples of rewards are everywhere. Schools use grades as extrinsic motivation to encourage students to adopt sound study habits. Professional athletes train for years to compete for the rewards and recognition that come with winning a championship in their sport.
At work, those extrinsic motivators are things like recognition programs, gamified leaderboards, perks, performance management systems, and payment (think: bonuses, commissions, and spot rewards). They can be powerful influencers on peoples’ behavior but should be used in moderation. Research has shown that overemphasizing extrinsic rewards can degrade the effectiveness of other LEVERS in place. They can even produce the opposite of the intended results.
Take, for example, the reading incentive programs that schools often use to encourage students to read over the summer months. One study of incentive programs found that although the reading rate rose, the overall quality of the students’ comprehension and their perceived enjoyment of the activity was lower than when they were encouraged to read for fun. Reading was no longer presented as an activity worth doing for the sake of enjoyment, but to obtain a reward. At one school, once the library ran out of the reward item, students were even less likely to read than before the incentive program was put into place!
Rewards certainly affect behavior, but use them in moderation, and not as the primary motivator.
Structure Lever
The tools we use and the physical spaces in which we work can have a significant impact on the way things get done in an organization. AI tools can help simplify workflows and redesign spaces to make new habits stick. Clear processes can be used to create clear expectations, which drives culture. Consider the culture you want to promote and the behaviors people need to make the change successful. Now think about the physical workspace, processes, and tools that are currently in play. Do they improve peoples’ ability to adopt desired behaviors, or create friction and make those behaviors more difficult?
Let’s say you want to promote greater levels of collaboration and information sharing within your organization. Consider the range of structural factors that can affect your ability to make collaborative behaviors easier to enact.
Structural Factors |
Questions to Ask |
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Processes |
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Environment |
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Technology |
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Structures |
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The Structure lever enables you to create tools, resources, reminders, processes, and spaces that make new ways of working easier and old behaviors more difficult to hold onto.
Implement the LEVERS Model
LEVERS help us understand the forces that shape human behavior to influence change. Implement the LEVERS model in unison when designing a change initiative.
In other words, when planning and executing a change, include tactics that draw on each strategy to reorganize the personal, social, and structural landscape to support successful, sustained change adoption. The more strategies you implement, the more likely you are to succeed in your change efforts. Align new ways of working with your digital strategy, and you've got change that sticks.
In the next unit, you learn how to build a plan that increases your likelihood of success. But first, a quiz.