A VP I was coaching last year opened a session by telling me nobody was adopting the new way of working. He was six months into the rollout and the adoption numbers were flat on the page in front of him. I asked whether any team had actually done it. He said yes, one had, early on, and it had gone well. I asked what the manager's name was. He looked at the ceiling for a while and said he would have to look it up.

The rollout stalled that quarter and got folded into a different initiative the following spring.

The number underneath the number

DDI, a firm that sells leadership assessment and development and therefore has an obvious commercial reason to go looking for gaps in leaders, published an analysis in January drawing on more than a hundred thousand assessments.1 The finding that got picked up was the ranking. Executives came out weakest of any level at leading change, 8% rated strong, against 30% for mid-level leaders and 15% for frontline and emerging ones.1

Sitting underneath that ranking is a figure I have not been able to put down. On visibly rewarding the behaviors a change is supposed to produce, 1% of executives scored strong.1 One in a hundred.

What flat adoption numbers are actually measuring

The comfortable reading of a stalled rollout is resistance, comfortable because it puts the problem in other people's attitudes and out of your hands. That 1% points somewhere less flattering and considerably more fixable. If almost no senior leader is visibly rewarding the new behavior, then someone looking around at the end of a quarter sees the same people promoted for the same things as before. Nothing in the observable record has moved. Carrying on as you were is not obstruction under those conditions. It is an accurate reading of what the organization pays for.

A change nobody gets rewarded for is a change your people can wait out, and most of them have watched waiting work.

The surrounding figures say the same thing from other angles. Executives scored 11% strong at addressing resistance.1 Mid-level leaders scored 10% at asking questions.1 Frontline and emerging leaders scored 13% at actively engaging others in the change.1 Each of those is a way of finding out what is really happening and doing something about it, and each is close to absent. Announcements go out and very little comes back, and for the people who did what was asked, nothing observable happens at all.

Why rewarding is the one that collapses

Rewarding asks something of a leader the other behaviors do not. You have to know about a particular instance while it is still recent enough to matter. To thank a manager for running her first genuinely honest retrospective, you need to know she ran one, roughly when, and enough about how it went to say something that is not boilerplate. That information does not travel well upward, and by the time it might, the moment has passed.

When I raise this with executives, most reach first for compensation. The conversation goes to bonus structures and whether the incentive plan can be reopened before the next cycle. That is a slow instrument and usually the wrong one. What moved behavior in the places where I watched a change hold was smaller and faster. Someone gets named, in front of people who know them, for something specific they did, while it is still fresh.

The objection arrives immediately and it is always the same one. What about everybody I did not name. Singling out one team feels arbitrary, and there is a genuine worry about looking like you have favorites or about missing good work done in a less visible corner. The worry is fair. It is also, I suspect, much of why the number sits at 1%. Being slightly unfair to the unmentioned is a risk leaders can picture, and staying silent is a cost that never appears on anyone's register.

There is a cheaper version almost nobody uses, which is telling a team what came of it. Most people who change how they work never find out whether it made any difference. They adopt the new process, hear nothing back, and settle on the obvious conclusion that the exercise was theater.

Back to the VP

He did eventually find the manager's name. By then she had moved to another part of the business, and her old team had dropped the way of working she piloted. When he asked them why, they said they had assumed it was optional, because nothing came of it the first time. He described that to me as a communication problem.

I would put it differently. That team ran an experiment, produced a result, and got no response from the organization that had asked them to run it. They updated on the evidence, which is what competent people do.

So the question I would leave you with is narrower than asking whether your change is working. When somebody in your organization did exactly what you asked last month, what happened to them?