Beyond Performance 2.0, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8The Senior Leader’s Role

Does Change Have to Start at the Top?

By this point, we hope the Five Frames of Performance and Health approach to making change happen at scale has been laid out clearly. It’s our firm belief that by following this path, almost any organization can make change happen successfully. What’s more, the change you’ll achieve will be both sustainable and continuously improved upon day after day, week after week, and month after month after the formal program concludes.

As we’ve seen again and again in the company examples we feature in this book, leadership and role modeling are central to the change journey. In some ways we were hoping our research would lead us to a counterintuitive insight that the role of senior leaders is far less important than we’ve all been led to believe by management literature. We found the opposite. Our research shows that transformations are 2.6 times more likely to succeed if they have strong involvement from the top of the organization.¹ John Mackey of Whole Foods Market explains why: “As the co-founder and CEO, I’m the most visible person in the company … our team members are always studying me … I’m always on stage.”²

For this reason, we devote an entire chapter to the role of the senior leader in spearheading a transformation. Who exactly qualifies as the relevant “senior leader” will depend on the change challenge being taken on. Our work mostly revolves around enterprise-wide change programs, and the senior leader ...