Choosing Change: How Leaders and Organizations Drive Results One Person at a Time

CHAPTER NINE

Determination

Coping with Setbacks

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.

—Abraham Lincoln

IN CHAPTER 4, we defined determination at the individual level as “firmness of purpose; resoluteness.”¹ This definition also works for organizations. In both cases, things happen during change efforts that shake confidence and cause a loss of focus. We refer to those things as setbacks. At the individual level, you are tempted to abandon the change effort and revert back to your old behavior. Likewise, organizations can give up before change has taken root. As we noted earlier, some 75 percent of organizational change efforts fail.²

Setbacks are so common during organizational change that ...