As many people are discovering right now, changing habits is hard. By this point in the year, the enthusiasm for those New Year’s resolutions has faded, and many of us have already slipped back into our old habits.
You’ve probably heard before that it takes about 66 days for a new behavior to become an automatic habit (Source: James Clear). But the time-to-permanent-change can be much broader—it can take up to eight months or more (Source: Wiley) in some cases, and the more complex the change, the longer it can take.
Certainly, becoming a more adaptable organization and developing your Adaptability Intelligence Quotient (AQ) is extremely complex—much more so than cutting back on sweets or even getting to the gym three days a week.
That means if you’ve made a resolution to improve your organization’s Adaptability Intelligence Quotient (AQ) in 2025, you need strategies that will keep the momentum and motivation going long after the “newness” wears off. To be frank, becoming more adaptable is a culture change, not a check-box exercise. It’s not a one-off project that you start and finish and forget. We tell clients often: if you don’t plan to make Adaptability a part of your everyday ethos, why waste your time or money on the assessments? Indeed, the real question is why are you spending your time and efforts elsewhere when Adaptability Intelligence has become mission critical?
You can’t afford to fail
Just like those New Year’s goals to get fit or lose weight, plenty of things can derail your AQ development efforts. But instead of snacks and Netflix leading you astray, for organizations, it’s typically a lack of trust, poor communication, and disengagement that get in the way. Or maybe your organization has “cried wolf” too many times, promising initiatives for big new changes that never stick. This lack of baseline commitment erodes trust and can undermine organizational change, even in the most well-intentioned organizations.
Perhaps the biggest risks of Adaptability failure are the financial and competitive impacts, which can be severe. Lack of Adaptability Intelligence leads directly to employee disengagement, and while it can be hard to quantify its direct impact on the bottom line, certainly tangible outcomes like productivity loss, absenteeism, turnover, replacement costs, opportunity costs and customer dissatisfaction can be distilled into dollars and cents.
Recognizing just how much disengagement is or could be costing you puts the risks and rewards of AQ development into perspective and provides a powerful incentive. Much like a weight loss challenge, you’re less likely to bail on the initiative when there’s real money on the line.
Make It Stick
So, what can you do to overcome those obstacles? To drive the type of culture shift that creates an adaptable organization full of team members who not only accept change but lean into it? How can you empower your team and organization to make change where it makes sense—and not just for the sake of change—and feel a greater sense of control when change is happening to them, not driven by them, so no one feels like a victim?
If your resolution is to engrain Adaptability Intelligence into your culture and make AQ part of your organization’s standard operating procedure, here are eight tactics to help make Adaptability “stick.”
1. Create Connections
In order to feel committed to culture change, your team needs to feel connected to the people around them, the organization, and the shared purpose. Nurturing a sense of belonging through collaboration, recognition and teambuilding exercises can help your team feel valued and appreciated—that their contributions matter and their uniqueness is part of the secret sauce of the organization. This, in turn, will create a stronger commitment to adopting the culture change necessary to become more adaptable as an organization.
2. Communicate Clearly
Explain the how and why behind your Adaptability Intelligence initiative and emphasize to your team why their input and participation is so important. Make clear how you plan to support them through the process and explain how becoming more adaptable can help them individually as well. Remind your team that this is an exercise in their personal growth as well that will help them to be more resilient in the face of personal challenges.
3. Let go of Assumptions
One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is to assume that the status quo will keep working. They think, “We’ve survived change before, we will do it again.” But the truth is that previous change probably fell within their scope of expected variance—which means adapting to it wasn’t that far outside their wheelhouse. In today’s environment, organizations must be prepared for apocalyptic change, and you can’t assume that you know how everyone around you will handle it. In an emergency, even the most well-trained first responder can freeze in a panic. One way to prepare for the worst is to practice for it: conduct failure-mode scenario drills that simulate scenarios that could “break” your company. Maybe it’s a cybersecurity breach, loss of a critical supplier, a natural disaster, or a major innovation breakthrough by a competitor. Practicing these scenarios can help you build both remediation plans and confidence.
4. Put Boots on the Ground
Leaders can’t connect with and build trust in their team from the corner office. The only way to get a sense of what’s really happening in the organization is to get out there and talk to people. Create a structured system—whether it’s 360 reviews, periodic check-ins, or “tour the floor” walk-throughs—to ask your team how they’re doing, where they’re stressed, what they need, and how you can improve the environment to help them adapt and be more resilient.
5. Invite Honesty
Ask your team for feedback and, most importantly, be willing to accept it. Whether it’s one-on-one, a suggestion box, or an online feedback system, invite their suggestions, insights, ideas and innovations. Set aside the judgment and ego and don’t punish people for answering the questions you asked them. Leaders must be willing to accept the good and the bad and create plans for improvement.
6. Be a Vulnerability Role Model
Too often people are reluctant to admit they don’t know something, don’t understand or are struggling with change. Leaders must create an environment where it is 100% safe for their team to feel and express discomfort, ask questions, experiment and not feel judged or fear failure. And that means leading by example. Employees are over 5X more likely to trust leaders (Source: DDI) who display vulnerability, and by demonstrating that you make mistakes, are willing to experiment and are constantly learning and evolving, you not only signal that it’s safe to do this but also that career growth doesn’t require perfection.
If all of this sounds far too complicated, don’t worry. The AQme Adaptability Assessment can take an inventory of your team and organization, giving you a foundation to develop and deploy these tactics. After all, you wouldn’t pursue a goal to run a 10-minute mile without first determining your current pace. Getting a baseline is crucial for knowing what steps to take, measuring progress and maintaining momentum and motivation.
Start by asking each team member to take the assessment to understand their current level of Adaptability Intelligence, their potential, and what they need within the work environment to be more adaptable. This inventory can also help you place the right people in the right roles, learn to appreciate everyone’s uniqueness and individual skills, and determine the type of support they’ll need along the way.
As you implement Adaptability Intelligence model, periodically re-deploy AQme assessments to your team to gauge how well your environment is evolving to support their Adaptability. Periodically measuring your progress is critical for maintaining the right kind of momentum and ensuring you don’t lose steam once the “newness” wears off.
You can do it. We’re here to help.
Sticking with new behaviors that foster Adaptability as an organization can be challenging, but the reward is worth the effort. After all, it could mean the difference between surviving and thriving.
To learn more about how to make your organization more adaptable and support your team along the way, contact us today.