Your Employees Are The Customers Of Change. Treat Them That Way

Roughly three out of every four organizational change programs fail to achieve their stated objectives. That number hasn't moved much in 50 years, despite armies of consultants, mountains of change-management frameworks, and no shortage of executive resolve. So why does change keep failing, and why does it keep failing in the same ways?

Julia Dhar has spent her career inside that question. A managing partner and director at Boston Consulting Group and founder of BCG's Behavioral Science Lab, Dhar is a global authority on how leaders and organizations make decisions under pressure—and on why those decisions so often unravel when change is on the table.

Before BCG, she competed as one of the world's top debaters, an experience that shaped her lifelong study of how people reason, disagree, and build better outcomes together. Her TED Talks on productive disagreement have reached armies of viewers. She’s also held public sector roles in New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

With two colleagues, Dhar is coauthor of How Change Really Works: Seven Science-Based Principles for Transforming Your Organization, a book grounded in behavioral science and tested across dozens of industries in more than 50 countries.

Dhar's central claim is that change failure is rarely a strategy problem. "It is that the transmission of that intention through the organization, clearly communicating why we are changing, setting expectations about what will be different, and giving people the tools and resources for how they can successfully change, doesn't happen," she told me. The failure, she said, is behavioral in two senses: leaders can't shift the behavior of thousands of people, and they often make a behavioral error of their own at the outset, delegating the hard work of implementation while assuming, "well, how hard could that be?"

That assumption rests on a gap Dhar calls "change distance"—the space between how executives and employees experience the same announcement. To measure it, her team surveyed 6,000 people, including 1,000 executives and several thousand employees and frontline managers, and asked how they'd feel if a change were coming to their professional life with no details yet provided. "Disproportionately, about two-thirds of executives say, 'I feel positive about it.' Only a little around half of employees say I feel the same way. There's a really significant gap," Dhar said. The statistically correct answer, she noted, is neutral—there isn't yet enough information to feel anything.

But executives default to optimism employees don't share, which means, in her words, "making any successful change in an organization first a challenge of persuasion and explanation, and then about providing good quality behavioral on-ramps in order to help people make a shift."

That gap helps explain a habit Dhar wants leaders to break: blaming employees for resisting. She draws the comparison to how executives would never accept that excuse from a marketing chief. "If you said to us, ‘Well, look, our customers are just not very motivated,’ we would never find that an acceptable explanation. We would never tolerate that. However, we accept versions of that inside companies all the time," she said. The fix, in her framing, is to treat employees as "customers of change"—the original working title of her book—and ask what would make the change easy for them to "purchase," rather than assuming reluctance is simply a character flaw.

Dhar points to research dating back to a 1940s pajama factory in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where psychologist Kurt Lewin's students ran early experiments on worker involvement. When employees had no input into how their tasks were sequenced, productivity collapsed. When they got to shape the process themselves, output dipped briefly, then rebounded past prior targets. "The basic insight is that we may actually feel quite positive about change, but we absolutely resist being changed," Dhar said. "We absolutely resist change happening around us." Her shorthand for the lesson: "People don't burn down houses that they helped to build. They just don't."

Involvement alone, though, isn't enough. Dhar draws a sharp line between being consulted and having actual agency. "Agency is the ability for people to make choices and to direct resources, including their own energy, in response to their context," she explained. "They have to have some freedom of action to do something." She connects this to the well-documented IKEA effect, in which people prize things more when they've helped assemble them. Citing research by Harvard's Mike Norton, she noted that people "will pay up to 68% more to their much less professional box than the one assembled by a professional." The organizational version, Dhar said, is psychological ownership: "the thing that we have built ourselves we value much more, we care about much more, we love it much longer than something, even if beautifully done, that was imposed upon us."

Dhar is also unusually prescriptive about pace. She recommends measuring employee sentiment roughly every two weeks during a transformation—a cadence many leaders find startling. "What you basically sacrifice by doing that is the opportunity to make a micro-adjustment," she said. Wait a month or six weeks instead, and "what was a minor thing has the potential to be a pretty significant, maybe even expensive crisis."

Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding involves the scar tissue left by past failures, which can linger for a decade or more even among employees who weren't around when the failure happened. "That's a terrific example of the emotional truths that linger in organizations," Dhar said. Her remedy isn't avoidance, but direct conversation—giving people space to talk through what went wrong before launching the next effort. "There are very few things that get better by not talking about them," she told me, adding that for leaders communicating through change, the operating rules are simple: "be honest, be specific, and to the maximum extent possible, be timely."

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Dhar what she'd hope to hear if I interviewed her clients a decade from now. She didn't reach for a metric. "I hope they would say, ‘You know, we read this book, or we heard this idea, we got some training on this concept, and we embedded that in our organization and we use it every single day," she said.

That answer is worth sitting with. Most change initiatives are graded on whether they hit a launch date or a target number. Dhar is measuring something slower and harder to fake: whether an idea outlives the person who introduced it, and whether the people who lived through the change are the ones still carrying it forward.

The next time a transformation effort stalls in your organization, the more useful question may not be why employees are resisting change. It may be why no one asked them to help build it.