A recent expert panel hosted by Oliver Wight noted that business leaders may expose themselves to doubt, if their behaviour fails to live up to staff expectations during a change campaign. Partner Monte Maritz explores the predictable tests that expose a leader’s commitment, or its absence, and how bosses can re-engage with their audiences to succeed again.
Your finance team knows budget season is coming. Your programme lead knows you promised dedicated resources. Your operations director remembers last week’s speech about focusing on the long term. They’re all watching to see what you, as the decision-making leader, do next, and whether it matches what you said.
If you’ve led a change programme that lost momentum, you probably failed a test you didn’t even know you were taking.
Monday.com’s early 2025 research illustrates the perception gap: 45% of senior leaders believe change has been managed well. Quiz managers, and it drops to 32%. Ask individual contributors, and it’s just 23%. Leaders believe they’re succeeding. Their people know otherwise.
This isn’t about communication failures or inadequate training budgets. It’s about behaviour. Specifically, yours. Here, it is important to examine why they get it wrong, and the moments that expose the gap between intention and action.
Tests that expose you
A major FMCG client spent months preparing for change. The workshops were complete. The commitments were made. Everyone in that business knew the real test was the upcoming budgeting process. Everything we’d done together was about rebasing the organisation, understanding the mismatch between their product portfolio and what the market wanted, and building evidence-based forecasting.
Leadership failed it completely. After all the talk of realistic planning and data-driven decisions, the message from the top was familiar: “I need 10% more. I don’t care where you get it.”
Every pound spent on that change programme went straight out the window. Not because the methodology was flawed, but because leaders failed the test that mattered.
Budget time is the first and most obvious test. Do you accept a plan built on demand signals, or do you override the evidence and demand arbitrary growth?
Resourcing is another test. You promised dedicated people for the programme; when a headcount freeze arrives, do you honour those commitments or find reasons why this situation is different? Daily behaviour is perhaps the most revealing. A week after declaring that short-term firefighting must stop, do you call to ask why a specific truck didn’t reach a specific customer?
It’s not the speeches that matter, or the posters on the wall, or the town hall presentations. It’s these critical tests, and your people are paying close attention.
Safe boldness versus personality boldness
There’s a distinction worth understanding: the difference between safe boldness and personality boldness.
Safe boldness, which I see so often, is buying new technology. It’s commissioning reports, sponsoring initiatives at arm’s length, approving budgets for programmes that other people will run. These feel like decisive actions. They carry the appearance of commitment. But they keep you comfortable because they don’t require personal change.
Personality boldness is different. It’s the leadership courage that changes ways of working: yours first, then everyone else’s. It means admitting that the current approach isn’t working. It means accepting that the data might be more accurate than your instincts. It means letting go of behaviours that have served you well for decades.
Large companies often hedge. They say “we’ll do it” while privately thinking “but we won’t commit fully”. The investment environment encourages this: appear progressive, minimise risk, protect optionality. But hedged commitment produces hedged results.
Here’s what experience teaches: the bold initiatives that failed because leaders lost their nerve significantly outnumber those that were conceptualised wrongly. The ideas are rarely the problem. The courage to see them through is.
Speed of reconciliation determines success
When you encounter change, you must reconcile how your own beliefs and behaviours need to shift. This reconciliation takes time. The question is how much.
If that reconciliation takes too long, you lose the audience. People watch you wrestling with whether to commit, and they draw their own conclusions. Momentum dissipates. Cynicism builds. The programme becomes another example of leadership saying one thing and doing another.
MIT research published in July 2025 found that 95% of generative AI projects haven’t moved beyond pilots and therefore failed to achieve ROI. Notably, for the 5% that scaled, the ROI was huge. To be in the latter camp requires bold commitment from the top down. The technology isn’t the barrier. Leadership’s inability to reconcile what adoption requires, including changes to their own decision-making, explains most of the failure.
People aren’t resisting change. They’re resisting the likelihood of failure. They’ve learned, through painful experience, that leader enthusiasm at launch rarely survives contact with reality.
Effective leaders make change personal. They help people place themselves in the future state and understand what it means for their work, their teams, and their daily experience. This requires vulnerable, relevant storytelling.
“Let me tell you why this worked for me” lands differently than “you’re all going to see wonderful things”. The first is personal and specific. The second is distant and generic. Disconnected stories reveal disconnected values.
The worst thing a leader can do when asking teams to change is make it sound like a third-party exercise. “We are going to go on this great change; you guys are going to see amazing things.” Everyone hears the gap between “we” and “you guys”. That gap is where commitment goes to die.
What are the upcoming tests in your change programme? The budget review, the resourcing decision, the moment when short-term pressures collide with long-term commitments? Are you ready to pass them? Your people already know the answer. They’re waiting to see if you do too.
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