Harvard Business Review LogoJuly 22, 2026David Malan/Getty ImagesLeaders must model the transformation they expect others to deliver. Yet many leadership teams undermine their own ambitions by promoting agility, experimentation, and innovation while continuingIn so many transformations I’ve advised, the same scene plays out. The CEO opens the all-hands meeting with conviction: “We are going to become more agile, more digital, more customer-obsessed.” The town hall ends, the slides go onto the intranet, and within a week, the senior team is back in the same operating rhythm as before: the same monthly reviews, the same dashboards, the same calendar dominated by the running of the existing business. The transformation lives in the deck—it does not live in the leaders’ personal calendars.
Model the Transformation You Expect Employees to Deliver
Leaders must model the transformation they expect others to deliver. Yet many leadership teams undermine their own ambitions by promoting agility, experimentation, and innovation while continuing to govern through legacy processes that reward predictability and risk avoidance. Employees notice the disconnect and follow what leaders do, not what they say. The most successful transformations occur when senior leaders personally sponsor the organization’s most uncertain initiatives, devote meaningful time to change, embrace learning, and demonstrate a willingness to change course when evidence demands it. Executives can test whether they are truly modeling the by examining how they spend their time (the calendar test), how they manage ambiguity as an executive team (the uncertainty test as a team, and whether they openly retire initiatives that no longer create value (the cancellation test).
