Step Up, Step Back: How to Really Deliver Strategic Change in Your Organization

by Elsbeth Johnson

Many strategic change efforts fail. And virtually all of them are harder than they need to be. Why is this? And what can we do to make change more likely to stick?Dr. Elsbeth Johnson, a former equity analyst and London Business School Professor now teaching at MIT, has spent a decade researching how to deliver strategic change in practice. Based on asking managers what they needed from leaders, rather than just asking leaders what they did, her resulting Step Up, Step Back approach challenges some of our most fundamental beliefs about how to lead change – and indeed, about what we even consider to be 'leadership'.The Step Up, Step Back approach suggests leaders need to step up and do more than they typically do in the early stages of the change – in specific ways and at specific times; and then step back and do less than they typically do in the later stages of the change – again, in specific ways, at specific times. The result is not only change that sticks, but empowered, motivated managers who can get on with delivering change, without needing ongoing input or cover from leaders. Using real-world examples of how to apply the science in practice, Step Up, Step Back gives you a roadmap for how to deliver strategic change in your organization.

349 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 20, 2020

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book on what leads big change initiatives to succeed or fail, taking a longer term (3+ year) view on change programs focusing on 4 case studies from a big company. Some useful concepts to take away on the importance of building systems rather than relying on personal agency of leaders to sustain the change.

The keys to a successful change initiative are for leaders (division or CEO level) to step up at the beginning with clarity, align words with action and resources, then step back in the later stages (years 2 and 3) with focus on just one change initiative, and consistency.

There are useful things to draw from the book, but it seems targeted to a pretty narrow set of circumstances - big company, CEO / division GM, company wide change initiative. Generic guidance is probably useful in other circumstances. In general the book didn't excite me or motivate me - I preferred principles of life and work by Ray Dalio, which has a similar concept to Elsbeth's "systems" in his discussion of "tuning the machine".