Rather Than Relying on Inspiration to Get Employees to Implement Change, Leaders Must Instead Routinize Change
Gartner defines healthy change adoption as the success elements that leaders can directly influence – getting employees to act on change, do so on time, and in a healthy way that doesn’t adversely impact employee performance and engagement and cause undue stress.
“Changes today are continuous, stacked on top of one another, highly interdependent and often driven by factors external to the organization,” said Kayla Velnoskey, Director in the Gartner HR practice. “While leaders are used to operating in a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) environment, the nature of change today has made it ungovernable.”
Ungovernable change has lowered employees’ trust in the organization’s ability to change effectively. An April 2025 Gartner survey of 141 HR leaders found that organizations experiencing ungovernable change are 1.6x less likely to experience high change trust. Another April 2025 Gartner survey of more than 2,850 employees revealed that 79% of employees have low trust in change.
“Organizations with better than average healthy change adoption report two times higher year-over-year revenue growth rate,” said Ingrid Laman, Vice President, Advisory in the Gartner HR practice. “For companies with more than 50,000 employees, this can equal up to $2.2 billion USD annually.”
Typically, leaders use inspiration and the vision of change to get employees to adopt change, however Gartner analysis found the inspirational approach only works when there is high change trust. When change trust is low, Gartner’s model predicts that only one-quarter of changes led by inspirational leaders would achieve healthy change adoption.
The best change leadership approach is when leaders routinize change, so it becomes instinctive for employees to adopt change as part of the normal course of doing work. Gartner has identified three ways HR can help leaders routinize change to achieve healthy change adoption (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: How HR Helps Leaders Shift From Inspiration to Routinization
Source: Gartner (July 2025)
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- What are core change skills – skills needed by employees to prepare for and adopt change regardless of the type of change – that employees must practice?
- How and when do they practice these change skills?
- How can leaders get employees to commit to practicing these change skills?
“When leaders routinize change, our model predicts that employees are three times more likely to adopt changes on time and in a healthy way even though they have low change trust,” said Velnoskey.
