You've probably heard these words before: The only constant is change. But in practical terms, what does that statement mean to executives? How are you supposed to act on it? And how do you know if you're making the right changes in the right way at the right time?

John Fleming, Ph.D., has a pretty good idea. A Gallup principal and chief scientist of customer engagement and HumanSigma -- a management approach that helps organizations increase the bottom line by maximizing the employee-customer encounter -- Fleming has analyzed the successful and unsuccessful change efforts of dozens of companies. His research has given him insights into why some companies that initiate change succeed and why others fail.

Fleming's conclusion is that successful organizational change effort isn't a matter of will, but of action. And change doesn't have to be sweeping, expensive, or immediate, but it does have to be implemented correctly. Furthermore, real change shouldn't be "inflicted from the top down," as he says; it has to bubble up from the bottom too.

In this interview, Fleming discusses what transformational change requires from an organization. And even though fundamental change requires a lot of hard work and a lot of faith, for some companies, it's worth it.

GMJ: What's the secret to successful and sustainable organizational change?

Dr. Fleming: To create change -- to transform or alter how your company optimizes the value of its employees and customers -- you must do some active work. The idea of change on its own isn't enough; you must buckle down and do something. As Franklin Roosevelt said, "It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."

Too often, companies will decide that something has to change, then they implement some metrics to determine if they've been successful. Then they stop at the measurement phase, assuming that measurement by itself will improve performance. But in most situations, measurement is simply the first step.

GMJ: A lot of companies -- probably most -- don't have good objective performance metrics. But they do want to implement change.

Fleming: There's an interesting parallel here. In a recent study, we asked pharmaceutical sales reps to estimate how engaged their customers were using the CE¹¹ [Gallup's 11-item customer engagement assessment] items as a hypothetical proxy. Then we actually measured the engagement levels of their customers using the CE¹¹. What we found is that these two things were completely uncorrelated; sales reps' perceptions of how their customers felt had no relation to the customers' own feelings.

This example illustrates that in the absence of objective performance feedback, you're flying blind. No matter how good you think you're doing, you need the reality check that external metrics can provide.

Professor David Dunning and his colleagues at Cornell University recently did a study and found that in general, people are unaware of their own incompetence. In other words, it's difficult for people to know how bad they are at something. And the very fact that you're psychologically unable to recognize you are bad at something circumvents or short circuits your ability to improve. You need objective measurement to tell you how you're doing and to point the way toward making changes that will have an impact.

GMJ: But what do you do with those measurements? How do you know what will have the right kind of impact?

Fleming: First, you need the right measures. But then you must take action. There's a folk adage that really gets to the guts of all this: "If you pray for potatoes, you better grab a hoe -- but you also better grab the right hoe." You step back and ask yourself, "What kinds of actions or activities will likely bear the greatest fruit?"

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Article from The Gallup Management Journal