One of my clients asked me recently, “What is the most important success factor in a transformation?”
My answer: motivation.
Motivation is so important that I use it as a criterion for deciding whether to take on a project.
If you’ve been or worked with consultants, you will recognise this scenario: The company wants to make a change, but no one inside the company has the time or desire to manage it. So it hires a team of consultants to run the change for them. The consultants fly around like busy bees, running analyses, exhorting people to act, coaching, cajoling and compensating for them. When the consultants leave, the whole thing falls flat.
A former client once called me six months after I left, asking me to fill in a progress report for their senior management.
Yeah.
So I don’t do those kinds of transformation projects any more.
Whether it’s a new strategic direction or an operational transformation, the change has to be the company’s actual priority. Not somewhere on the list after all the stuff that really matters is done. It has to be the stuff that matters. I can help my clients achieve something that they want, but I can’t want it on their behalf.
Mind you, I’m not saying that transformations will succeed with just motivation. I am saying that they will fail without motivation. And that motivation has be genuinely felt by the leadership team. Otherwise they will focus their efforts on the things that do matter to them.
If you’re running a programme that’s stuck, now is the time to ask yourself what your real priorities are. How do you spot one of those? Not making time to discuss the programme. Not doing any of the ‘important but not urgent’ actions. Or feeling like the whole thing is extra work on top of the ‘real’ work that needs to be done.
Maybe now is the wrong time for running this programme. Or maybe, if the pressure is real, the timing is right but the focus is wrong. The way to get it unstuck is to have a discussion with the whole leadership team about priorities, then build the structure to support the execution of those priorities.
If it matters to you, you will get it done.
This is the kind of work I love, helping companies to get things done that really matter to them. If this is a conversation that you’re having right now, I would love to talk.
© Veridia Consulting, 2025
