Change can be hard. You may experience this when attempting to break a bad habit or start a better one. Organizational change—such as mergers and acquisitions, restructuring, or adjustments to organizational processes—is no different.
It’s no wonder then that many organizational change efforts fail. You're not only adapting your own behaviors and ways of working, but asking others to adapt theirs. Without strong change management skills, organizational initiatives can be difficult to execute.
Research highlights the impact of effective change management: A recent study found a strong correlation between change management effectiveness and project success. Among organizations with excellent change management practices, 88 percent met or exceeded their objectives, compared to just 13 percent with poor practices.
Organizational change may be inevitable, but successful implementation isn't guaranteed. The difference often comes down to how leaders communicate.
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Communicating Change
Effective communication plays a vital role in guiding teams through change. Successful change communication begins with two questions:
Do our employees have the motivation to change?
Are our employees equipped with the ability to change?
Both are essential. Motivation without the skills or resources to adapt can stall progress, while the ability to change means little if employees aren't convinced the adjustment is necessary. Productive communication enables employees to overcome their barriers to change while building the organization's capacity to implement it.
Harvard Business School Professor Mike Tushman frames this as a challenge of organizational alignment. In the online course Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, which he co-leads with Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Charles O'Reilly, Tushman describes three interconnected elements:
Input: An organization's strategy, vision, and mission
Throughput: The processes, structures, and leadership needed to execute that strategy and align the organization
Output: The resulting performance, or the gap between current and desired performance
Clear communication connects the organization's vision with employees' day-to-day actions, ultimately closing the gap between current performance and future goals.
Here are four tips to help you create a winning change communication strategy.
4 Steps to Communicate Organizational Change
1. Define the Gap Before Trying to Close It
Before you can communicate change effectively, you must know precisely what you're asking people to change—and why. As Tushman explains in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, "People often struggle with crafting an accurate and actionable description of their gap.”
He says a successful gap statement includes four elements:
An owner
A clear timeline
A measurable target
A direct connection to organizational performance
Without those elements, broad calls to "do better" or "be more innovative" give employees little direction. A gap analysis can help define the problem, establish objectives, and create a message employees can act on.
It’s also crucial to understand what kind of gap you’re facing. In Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, O'Reilly identifies two:
Performance gap: When an organization fails to meet expectations due to its strategy, execution, or both
Opportunity gap: When leaders intentionally pursue a new strategy to capitalize on emerging markets, technologies, or business opportunities
Canadian athletic apparel company Lululemon's expansion into the United States, highlighted in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, illustrates how an opportunity gap can evolve into a performance gap. The company initially sought to capitalize on a new market by expanding its retail footprint. By 2008, however, declining sales per square foot and a struggling U.S. business meant the opportunity had become a performance challenge.
"Many organizations originally face an opportunity gap," Tushman says in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal. "But if they failed to make a strategic shift, they're often left scrambling to close what becomes a performance gap."
A clear gap statement gives employees a shared understanding of what needs to change, why it matters, and how success will be measured—creating the foundation for successful organizational change.
2. Anchor Your Message in Purpose
A gap statement appeals to the head, but changing behavior requires appealing to the heart. As Tushman puts it in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, "Purpose is the anchor for all your strategic choices.” Unlike quarterly targets, a sense of purpose inspires employees to embrace change—not just comply with it.
Former NASA Director of Space Life Sciences Jeff Davis experienced this firsthand. In Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, Davis describes how his team of scientists and engineers embraced a "not invented here" culture, seeing themselves as the sole experts responsible for solving the organization’s scientific challenges.
To test a new approach, Davis introduced one of NASA's toughest problems—predicting solar storms that could endanger astronauts—to an external crowdsourcing platform. Over three months, nearly 600 solutions were submitted. Despite promising results, many team members worried about confidentiality, questioned outside contributors’ value, and felt threatened professionally. As a result, only about 10 percent of the team initially embraced the new approach.
The turning point came when Davis reframed the team's purpose, reminding employees of their broader mission: "We aspire to keep astronauts safe in space,” he recalls in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal. That shift helped employees see crowdsourcing not as a replacement for their expertise, but as another tool for accomplishing their shared mission.
Leading Change and Organizational Renewal draws a broader lesson from this experience: introducing new ways of working requires navigating organizational culture shifts while ensuring employees don't perceive them as threats to their professional identity. Leaders should acknowledge those concerns while continually connecting new processes and technologies to the organization's purpose.
3. Make Your People Part of the Change
Once you've defined the gap and established purpose, deliver your message in a way that encourages participation—making employees feel like active contributors rather than passive recipients.
In Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, O’Reilly outlines a five-lever framework he developed known as the LEASH model:
Leader actions
Employee involvement
Aligned rewards
Signals, stories, and symbols
HR system alignment
People look for direct signals about how they’re expected to behave. The more those signals align, the faster a new culture takes hold.
The first lever—leader actions—emphasizes consistency. As O'Reilly notes in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, it’s “strong, consistent signals from not just one leader but from the entire leadership team" that shift behavior. Most leaders fail here because they get distracted or bored.
Takuya Shimamura, former CEO of Japanese glass manufacturer AGC, demonstrated this principle in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal. Two weeks after being named CEO, he sent a message to all 60,000 employees, asking them to return to the company's founding spirit and challenge themselves without fear of failure. As he put it in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, "It's the role of the leader to switch the light on inside all employees."
But Shimamura didn't deliver that message alone. He, his chief technology officer, and his chief financial officer formed what he called a "trio cabinet"—a leadership structure designed to ensure that all three executives spoke from the same perspective.
"All three of us were able to talk about various issues from the same perspective and send out messages that were as simple and easy to understand as possible," he explains in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal.
Employee involvement is equally important. As O'Reilly emphasizes in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, "When people are involved, when we make choices, we feel responsible, and we justify our actions." Shimamura reinforced this by visiting roughly 50 AGC sites annually and holding stratified town halls to give employees opportunities to speak up in AGC's traditionally hierarchical culture. The company also created the "Gong Show," where young engineers could pitch ideas directly to senior leadership.
Together, these two levers show that change communication is a two-way process—teams are more likely to view change as something they can help shape rather than something imposed on them.
4. Reinforce the Message with Rewards, Symbols, and Systems
Communication alone isn’t enough to sustain organizational change. When leaders emphasize new priorities but continue rewarding old behaviors, employees quickly see the initiative as lacking credibility. Lasting transformation requires reinforcement through aligned rewards, symbols, and systems.
Aligned rewards ensure that organizational actions match leaders' messages. While financial incentives matter, recognition and public acknowledgment can be just as powerful. At AGC, Shimamura introduced the CEO Award, an annual competition honoring employees who embraced innovation. As he notes in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, “recognition” and “praise” were the keywords. Each year, hundreds of teams submitted projects, with finalists presenting at a company-wide ceremony. AGC also redesigned executive compensation to emphasize long-term measures such as cash flow and asset efficiency.
Symbols reinforced the organization's message as well. To reflect its evolution beyond glass manufacturing, the company shortened its name from Asahi Glass Company to AGC. The acronym could also represent "Advanced Glass, Chemical & Ceramics," signaling that every business unit had a place in the company's future. The new slogan, "Your Dream, Our Challenge,” proposed by an employee, further reinforced the company’s new identity and purpose.
Finally, AGC aligned its systems with its communication efforts. Hiring, training, promotion, and talent development all supported the behaviors leaders wanted to encourage. As AGC CTO Dr. Yoshinori Hirai explains in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, "We think of people as very important assets.” AGC invested heavily in employee development, including building a dedicated school to train data scientists.
Employees are more likely to believe change is real when every part of the organization—from recognition programs and branding to compensation and talent development—reinforces the same message. When words, rewards, symbols, and systems align, leaders demonstrate that change is more than an announcement; it's an organizational commitment.
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After the Initial Change: Keep Communicating
Communicating change isn't a one-and-done effort. As your organization evolves, be prepared to restate the gap, reinforce the purpose, continue inviting employee involvement, and consistently recognize the behaviors that support the transformation.
Lasting organizational change requires more than a well-designed strategy—it requires consistent communication that keeps employees aligned, engaged, and committed throughout the process.
Ready to improve your organizational change management abilities? Explore Leading Change and Organizational Renewal—one of our online leadership and management courses—and download our free leadership and management e-book to navigate how to be a more effective leader and manager.
This post was updated on July 9, 2026. It was originally published on December 11, 2018.