Beyond Buy-In: Getting Commitment to Change

Jeff Wetherhold helps teams change together, effectively, and without losing their humanity in the process. With over 20 years of experience guiding mission-driven organizations, Jeff blends behavioral science, change management, motivational interviewing, and proven communication skills to help teams move from disconnection to alignment, and from good intentions to real impact. Across healthcare, higher education, and public service, Jeff has trained thousands of professionals in how to co-create change with those who may be skeptical or disengaged.  Jeff is the Founder of MI for Health, a consultancy grounded in the belief that better outcomes start with better conversations. He holds a Master’s in Education from Harvard University and is a faculty member with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Jeff is also a Prosci Certified Change Practitioner and a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers.

More about Jeff and his work at https://www.jeffwetherhold.com/

Interview Summary

In this episode of the Nonprofit Exchange, I had the pleasure of speaking with Jeff Weatherholt, a change communication and leadership advisor. We delved into the critical topic of moving beyond mere buy-in to foster genuine commitment to change within organizations. Jeff highlighted the distinction between buy-in, which is often transactional and one-sided, and commitment, which involves individuals finding their own reasons to embrace change.

We discussed the alarming statistic that 88% of organizational changes fail to produce lasting results, emphasizing that this is a widespread issue, not just a personal failure of individual leaders. Jeff pointed out that many leaders tend to over-focus on strategy while neglecting the human side of change, which can lead to resistance. He urged us to reconsider the term “resistance,” suggesting that it often oversimplifies the complex feelings individuals have about change.

Communication emerged as a central theme in our conversation. Jeff stressed that plans alone do not change people; effective communication does. He encouraged leaders to engage in meaningful conversations that allow for two-way dialogue, rather than simply announcing changes. By doing so, leaders can better understand the motivations and concerns of their teams, ultimately leading to more successful change initiatives.

We also explored the importance of vulnerability in leadership and how it can foster trust and openness. Jeff shared practical strategies for leaders to prepare for difficult conversations, emphasizing the need to listen actively and reflect back what they hear.

As we wrapped up, Jeff encouraged nonprofit leaders to reach out to those they struggle to engage, as these conversations can yield valuable insights. He reminded us that effective engagement is a skill that can be developed, and that the way we communicate about change truly matters.

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou

Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange, where we explore leadership principles, systems, and strategies that help nonprofit leaders create lasting impact. I’m Hugh Ballou. I’m your host. Today, we’re looking at one of the most important leadership challenges in every organization, not just nonprofits, but this is universal. It goes into family and other things too, but it’s a universal principle. It’s how to move beyond buy-in and build real commitment to change. We got the ideas. We want people alongside of us. We don’t do this alone. Many organizational changes do not produce lasting results. Too often leaders focus on the plan, the structure, or the strategy while missing the most important challenge, engaging people who may be skeptical, discouraged, fatigued, or disconnected from the change. Our guest today brings a practical, evidence-based approach to helping leaders have better conversations that create alignment, motivation, and sustainable commitment. Jeff Weatherholt is a change communication and leadership advisor who helps mission-driven organizations stabilize engagement, and reduce turnover during change. A former behavioral science researcher, Jeff has spent more than 20 years helping organizations sustain change through evidence-based communication systems and skills. Through sustainable change systems, Jeff helps equip leaders, managers, and teams to engage people ethically, listen more effectively, and build communication patterns that make changes last. Jeff’s stated passion is helping people have better conversations with those who feel differently from them, regardless of their beliefs. So, Jeff, welcome to the show today and help us with this title, Beyond buy-in, getting commitment to change. What’s the difference between buy-in and commitment?

Jeff Weatherhold

Well, first of all, thank you for having me, Hugh. I’m excited to be here. The difference between buy-in and commitment is that buy-in is transactional. If they’re buying, you’re selling. And that puts you in a frame of mind where you’re focused on one-way communication. It puts you in a frame of mind where you’re not looking for input, you’re looking for approval of something that’s already been completed. Commitment is what it looks like when someone’s found their own reasons to move forward in a change. That doesn’t mean they agree with you. That doesn’t even necessarily mean the change is gonna be helpful to them, which means a commitment isn’t always realistic, but it’s often realistic, and we often leave it on the table. So when we approach the work of leading change as the work of buy-in, we end up speaking to those who already agree with us. getting agreement that it’s not very hard to get, and speaking past those whose minds can be open to engaging in change.

Hugh Ballou

I love it. I love it. You cite that 88% of organizational changes fail to produce lasting results. What does lasting results mean in practical organizational terms?

Jeff Weatherhold

So this finding comes from a survey. Actually, a set of surveys conducted from 2013 to 2023. It’s published in the Harvard Business Review in 2024, if anyone wants to look it up. And lasting results in these studies means that the change is in place and functioning after the formal change project ends. Most changes dissolve once the pressure or the consultant or the attention is removed and we know that. What I like about this finding is that it’s a product of international surveys and that 88% figure for failed changes was consistent across 10 years. But I use this because it helps people normalize the fact that they’re not struggling with this alone. If you are a leader who is struggling to engage others in change and make change happen in your organization, it’s not you, it’s us. If every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it gets, our system is designed to let you down seven times out of eight, and there’s a better way to lead change.

Hugh Ballou

Wow. Wow. If you’re coming by watching this on a video, this is the nonprofit exchange. We’re talking about important stuff today. And I’ve seen this, Jeff, repeated over and over in my years of doing this. So why does so many leaders over-focus on strategy and under-focus on the human side of change? And could that be a reason that many people resist change?

Jeff Weatherhold

We train them to do that. We teach them that that’s the answer. So I don’t want to put that on leaders. I need to put that on us, myself included, as change management practitioners. We have historically taught this work as a technical discipline, that if you’ve got the right information, the right model, the right plan, you’re going to win people over. You’re going to get them to buy in. Plans don’t change minds. Conversations do. For as complicated as organizational change is, where to start is very simple. Organizations change when individuals make decisions to change. And those decisions change when the conversations that they have change. When we ask people, what’s missing? This failed seven times out of eight. What did you need to make it successful? They tell us they need help communicating. They need help getting engagement and support. They need help engaging and supporting others. They ask for help communicating about change. We have a nasty habit of dismissing that. We feel like it sounds like a soft skill, like it sounds like something that’s tougher to package and sell. So we don’t, and we leave leaders with results that we know aren’t gonna meet their expectations.

Hugh Ballou

we forget that there are people that know things we don’t know. And I don’t know where this came from, but many leaders, including myself, feel like we have all the answers, when really, we should have the right questions. And we should be, as a musician, I’m trained to listen. So are there some repeated patterns across different types of organizations about this resistance to change? And what’s really happening below the surface?

Jeff Weatherhold

Well, first, I would ask us to pause on that word resistance. And again, I want to put this on us as change management practitioners and leadership educators. You can’t get away from this word, even if you try. Resistance to change is everywhere. When we tell someone they’re resistant, when we approach them as if they’re resistant, we’ve attributed intention to their decision. We’ve made it personal. In most cases, we’ve generalized their attitude toward one change to their attitude toward all changes. And who is that true for? My attitude toward one change isn’t my attitude toward every change in my life. There are a lot of diverse reasons underneath of people’s hesitance about change that we can learn from and that we can act on and there are much more realistic and cost-efficient to address than a blanket judgment of resistance. Resistance is a label for something that fails people 88% of the time. So if we want to put that label away, we can start to see the full spectrum of what’s underneath of it. Most often, people don’t understand why change is happening. If we’re to believe the surveys, that’s the most common reason for staff and leaders that change isn’t successful. People may feel threatened. They may have relationships threatened. They may not understand how to do the work, or they may not be confident making that real in day-to-day practice. What lives as a change may not become part of daily work. There’s a full spectrum of reasons underneath these. And when we learn how to engage around those, when we learn from those, what happens is we get enough information to make it actionable. Resistance gives you as a leader nothing. It tells you nothing about what to do next. That information is there for the taking, if we can put that label aside.

Hugh Ballou

Oh, that’s so good. You’ve referenced this already. You have this big statement on your homepage, your website, which we’ll see later. What’s it? Plans don’t change people. Communication does. Can you illuminate that a little more, especially We’ve got it in our brain. So there’s and you’ve already said it’s a two-way street. This communication is back and forth listening and talking and then the fear factor. So talk did explain a little bit more about you mean about communication and how that’s so beneficial.

Jeff Weatherhold

Yeah. People’s decisions about accepting change start with conversations. I mentioned that earlier. I think it’s essential to know that people haven’t all made up their minds about change. We tend to approach it as if it’s a binary phenomenon. This is the product of a well-known bias in behavioral science, the binary bias. We like to take rich sets of information and reduce them to two options at either end of the spectrum. Nobody who I’ve ever met has to look far in their life, for examples of the binary bias in their work or beyond their work. But we do that with change. People are in or out. They’re for it or they against it. When in reality, people have complex feelings about change. We’re ambivalent. We have reasons to consider and we have reasons not to. When we learn how to listen for those, All of a sudden, we realize there are natural resources there. There is fuel there that we can use. They have reasons to think about it that we can strengthen. There are angles that we can speak to directly. But those get covered up. when we approach this as something that people are for or against, that they support or they’re resistant to. So knowing how to communicate, making these conversations something that’s intentional and specific, allows you to learn more about what’s already there that you can build on instead of you as a leader making it all yourself.

Hugh Ballou

So there’s a tendency for leaders to announce, here’s what we’re doing, here’s the change we’re gonna do, instead of engaging people in a conversation about the benefits, the potential and the process. So talk a little bit about, you highlight that, talk a little bit about how we do that part.

Jeff Weatherhold

Yeah, well, I think, Communications, messaging, announcements or town halls or whatever are an important part of making it clear where we’re going with change, but we can’t stop there. When we take those as the total of what communication is supposed to be, we end up speaking to those who already agree with us. A plan based on what you already know and communications based on what you already know are only gonna reach the people you’re already reaching. They’re not going to engage with that complexity. They’re not going to understand what you need to design around that you weren’t already aware of. They’re not going to give you new information. And that is one of the key parts of engagement. It’s not just helping people find their own reasons to change. It’s helping you understand what’s going to make this change work for this group. You don’t get to lead change in a vacuum. It doesn’t matter if it looks good on paper. What matters is if it changes your organization and if it impacts your clients or whoever it is that you’re there to serve. Communication is where that happens. It’s where you learn what you didn’t know you had to learn. It’s where you understand what motivation is already there to strengthen and where you as a leader actually need to step in and provide more effort. In the absence of that, leaders are doing all of the work themselves. They’re assuming that a plan is going to do the work that communication is much better positioned to do. They’re generating all of the motivation and reasons for change, when in reality, they ought to be equipping their staff members, their teams, to do a lot of that work with what they already have.

Hugh Ballou

He used the word impact folks. That’s what we’re here for impacting whether we’re in a business or a charity, which is a business. We’re impacting people’s lives. So I’ve had a sales background and let’s talk about the fictitious topic about conflict of conflict. So it happens, you know, where people are breathing. It’s a sign of energy, but people do have different opinions. And I’ve met so many people that avoid it at any cost. And it’s like the elephant in the boardroom. It’s there. Nobody wants to address it. So I learned in sales, I’ve learned that an objection was a request for information, which helped close the sale. Now, if we use too many tools, people could think we’re manipulative. So how do we balance using useful tools and not being manipulative?

Jeff Weatherhold

First of all, we want to be clear as leaders where people have agency or autonomy and where they don’t. Where do they have the freedom to make decisions within change and where don’t they? We want to be clear who change benefits because not everybody benefits from every change. And that doesn’t need to be the case for this to be done well. But we do need to be clear who benefits and how. When we start from that place, then we set leaders up to understand, where is my job clear communication? If there are boundaries that aren’t negotiable for whatever reason, how can I focus on clarity in those? And where are there opportunities to engage? Because we know if anyone’s going to make a decision to change, they need some sense of freedom. or autonomy in that process. And that doesn’t mean it has to be the freedom they would pick out of a lineup. Not everybody gets their first choice every time, that’s okay. But there is freedom in every change. That’s why this work is hard. That’s why we’re having this conversation. If there weren’t, this would be very straightforward. Understanding that, for me, is really important where are the boundaries on where I can engage and where is it my job to communicate clearly? How do I message that and take the input that I’m actually equipped to use as a leader and reflect that back to staff in a way where they can see whether they got to contribute what they wanted or not. Contributions were made and they mattered and decisions were made and communicated. And we have a shared sense, maybe not agreement, that’s a lot to ask. but a shared sense of what it means to contribute to change going forward. That’s engagement.

Hugh Ballou

Change can be a transformational process. So as a conductor, When I step on the podium, I’ve spent two or three hours preparing for every hour. So I actually know what I’m dealing with. I’ve prepared for it and I teach leaders for a meeting. It’s the same same ratio if you’re going to be effective. So how do we equip ourselves to have these conversations instead of just swinging it? How do we prepare ourselves for these hard conversations and think through the paradigms because We have to be prepared first before we engage people, don’t we?

Jeff Weatherhold

Yes, we do. So I draw on a number of skill sets. The one that is foundational to my work is called motivational interviewing, which has been around for a bit more than 40 years at this point. Motivational interviewing provides us with a skill set to help strengthen that motivation when we’re able to focus on it. If we want to think about where we start with skills, it starts with putting aside some of those assumptions we’ve already addressed, that we don’t have in or out attitudes about change. We have nuanced feelings that can be worked with. Then we teach people to hear those. And we teach them to hear motivation and demotivation in what everybody offers. In MI, we refer to this as change and sustained talk. We all have reasons to consider change and reasons not to. And we express these. And when you learn to listen to them, you will hear them in every conversation you have. You will hear them often in the same sentence. I should make this a priority, but I don’t see it happening right now. They’re both in there. When we hear those, we can learn to strengthen them. And while we use some questions to do that, I work with clients more on reflection to do that, offering something back in the form of a statement. And we know this has a tremendous impact. One of the things that I try to impart in conversations like this is that we are amplifiers. Whether we know it or not, what we offer back has a profound impact on other individuals. So I talked about motivation. When we reflect that back, When we hear someone’s motivation and reflect it back to them, we make it 11 times more likely they’re going to share more. When we hear demotivation, reasons not to change, and we reflect that back, we make it 19 times more likely that they’re gonna share more. That doesn’t mean we can ignore those, but what we spend time offering back matters. If we’re spending a whole conversation trying to address objections, even if it’s for noble reasons, what we’re really doing is providing someone with the fuel to talk themselves out of change. We’re giving that airtime. So when we learn to hear this, when we learn to understand, wow, there’s a world of resources and motivation out there for me to strengthen, We can start to be very considerate about what we strengthen and why. And that is a game changer. That is what takes us from feeling like we’re struggling just to keep our heads above water to understanding that we don’t have to do all the work. That there’s resources out there in our organizations that we can use to get ahead of this and to start making this a more team effort.

Hugh Ballou

Wow. In in music ensembles the ensemble is a reflection of the leader If we’re not you can hear the same piece of music with different directors and it sounds entirely different so a lot of the capacity for Influencing I mean my main descriptor of leadership is influence because you can’t as a conductor You can’t make anybody do thing. You got a little white stick. You can’t make them but you can influence them. It’s so some leaders I used to be terrified in front of an orchestra. It’s like I went into middle school classroom the first time, I was afraid, and I could smell it, and went for the jugular. So Mary Bowen, psychiatrist, talks about anxiety and being contagious. So some people are afraid, and I am too, we’re afraid of being criticized. for our position, for being, having boundaries, like you’ve talked about, and being definitive. So how do we address that insecurity about, and how do we manage being criticized?

Jeff Weatherhold

Yeah. What we receive as criticism is part of someone’s feelings about change. I don’t think it makes sense to push back on that. I think we can engage with it. We can acknowledge it. We can ask them to elaborate on it if it’s not constructive in ways that help us understand where they’re coming from. But we can also learn to listen for all of the other things that are there that hearing criticism may lead us to ignore. When you hear something that’s negative or that you take personally, it’s easy to focus only on that. When there are full range of nuanced feelings in most of these conversations. I also think it’s helpful to understand what kind of feeling that is. And what I mean by that is that there are feelings about change, whether or not something’s going to work, whether or not we like it. And then there are feelings about identity. I talk about these as beliefs, who I am as a person, who we are as a team, how we work. Those are different. And I draw a parallel to how motivational interviewing is used in psychiatry where we make a distinction between someone’s language about change and somebody’s feelings about the practitioner that they’re engaging with. We talk about that as discord. But there’s a big difference between someone’s feeling about a change. This doesn’t make sense with the way we do this already. Or someone’s feelings about themselves. This isn’t how I work. we address those differently. So when we hear what we regard as criticism, often that’s something that’s about someone’s identity. Their identity or a group identity has been impacted. And we want to learn how to engage with that very specifically. We can’t be successful with the same tools that we would use to engage with a feeling about change. Your attitude about this why will or won’t work is not the same as your attitude about who you are as a person. The tools that we learn for how to work with motivation in these conversations get used very differently in those two scenarios. But the first step is knowing to differentiate them.

Hugh Ballou

We want to pretend sometimes, Brene Brown writes about vulnerability. How is that important in dealing with all of these different dynamics you’re talking about?

Jeff Weatherhold

Yeah. I think vulnerability for me means understanding the emotions that you’re feeling as a leader, understanding how your personal feelings and your professional feelings interact around a change, and being willing to share that and honor the fact that someone else’s do as well. In mission-driven work, in non-profit work, we all bring our whole selves to the table. And sometimes that’s wonderful, and sometimes that’s challenging. And both are okay. One of the challenges is that we need strategies for engaging with that. I’ve had leaders tell me before, you know, I feel like a therapist at work and nobody ever trained me for this. And they’re smarter than they realize often. They’re asking for skills that therapists and counselors find very familiar. Vulnerability is a key ingredient in that, but that requires that we’re practiced and skilled in this. Just telling someone to be clear or telling someone to be vulnerable for me isn’t gonna get you very far. Tell me how. Give me different skills or different approaches so that I can show up as myself with confidence that I might not have had before. That’s a prerequisite for vulnerability. So while I wanna ask for that from leaders, I don’t wanna pretend I can just say, be more vulnerable. and that’s gonna help. You need different inputs and you deserve different inputs if someone’s gonna ask that of you.

Hugh Ballou

There’s some gems today. People are gonna want to know where to find you. So your website is your name, Jeff, weather, W-E-T-H-E-R-H-O-L-D.com. So right there, plans don’t change people, communication does. What else, people listening, tell them what they’re gonna find when they go there.

Jeff Weatherhold

You’re going to find more information on why this work is important, and then you’re going to find specific ways in which I work with clients, both as leaders, individuals at the organization level and with practitioners who might be interested in teaching this work and working with others as well. You’ll find information on speaking engagements if that’s something you’re interested in. Most importantly, you’re going to get to learn more about why this matters. So if I could leave you with anything from this conversation, if you’re following traditional approaches to leading others to change, it’s very likely you’re hemorrhaging time and effort and that you know these aren’t meeting your needs. They aren’t meeting others either. So if you want to learn more about a different approach to leading change, just visit jeffweatherholt.com.

Hugh Ballou

A lot of a lot of good stuff there So a couple quick questions as we end this wonderful interview for a non-profit leader listening today. What’s one change?

Jeff Weatherhold

Conversation they should have right now I would think about the person or the audience who you’ve struggled to reach most And how you can engage with them. That doesn’t mean you’re going to convince them right away But you have something to learn from them and what you have to learn from them, whatever it turns out to be, is really important. So sometimes people hear that and they think, but they’re not gonna be the early adopters. It doesn’t matter. And there’s truth to that. They’re not gonna be the first ones to accept change, but they’re gonna be the first ones to notice if the door is closed to them. So leave that door open and have a conversation with the person who you’re most struggling to reach.

Hugh Ballou

Great wisdom today. Here are a couple of quick, rapid fire questions. What’s the most common mistake leaders make when they hear resistance?

Jeff Weatherhold

They label it as resistance and they fight it instead of hearing nuance and engaging with it. What is one listening skill that can immediately improve trust? Learning how to reflect back what you’ve heard before you respond, giving someone the time and space to elaborate on what they’ve offered. What is one habit that helps leaders stay neutral and curious? Learning to hear the nuance and change, learning that there’s a full spectrum of feelings out there for you to engage with and how to engage with them.

Hugh Ballou

What do you want our audience to remember after this conversation?

Jeff Weatherhold

I want them to remember that the way in which they engage with people about change matters. This isn’t an act of charisma. This isn’t something that people who are good with people do well, whatever that means. It’s a skill with evidence for it. You can develop it. You can get better at it.

Hugh Ballou

Jeff, thank you for helping us understand that sustainable change is simply not a strategy problem. It’s a communication and engagement challenge. You’ve given us so many helpful tools. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your time with us today. And remember, you can find them at jeffweatherholt.com. Jeff, thank you for being my guest today on the Nonprofit Exchange.

Jeff Weatherhold

Hugh, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for the conversation.