Behavioural Change Toolkit · Advising Senior Leaders

Leader Behaviour Contract

The organisation reads behaviour, not memos. This makes leaders’ own behaviour explicit, specific and visible.

Why it works: it converts “I support this change” — which costs nothing and commits to nothing — into something observable that other people can see happening or not happening.

How to introduce it

Don’t present it as a compliance document. Frame it as leverage:

“Every behaviour we’re asking of the frontline needs something from you. Not support in principle — one specific thing you do, and one you stop. If we get this right, it does more than the entire comms plan, because people read what you do far more carefully than what you send.”

Run it live in Workshop — Leadership Alignment (half day), not by email. Leaders filling in a form alone produce vague answers; leaders writing in front of each other produce specific ones.

The contract

[Name] — my commitments on [change]

What I will START doing

| # | Specifically | How often | Starting | |—|—|—|—| | 1 | | | | | 2 | | | |

What I will STOP doing

| # | Specifically | From | |—|—|—| | 1 | | |

What I will ASK FOR — and what I’ll refuse

| I will ask for | I will no longer accept | |—|—| | | |

When it dips

When performance drops in weeks 2–8, I will _______________ and I will say to my peers: _______________

How you’ll know I’m doing it

_______________

Signed: ______ Date: ______ Reviewed: day 30 / 60 / 90

Making the commitments specific

The whole value is in the specificity. Push every one until it passes the film test.

❌ Too vague ✅ Specific enough
“Champion the change” “Open every monthly ops call with two minutes on adoption, using the new dashboard”
“Support my managers” “Ask each direct report in their one-to-one what’s blocking it, and remove one blocker a fortnight”
“Lead by example” “Use the new system for my own approvals, including when it’s slower”
“Communicate the vision” “Use the agreed sentence, verbatim, in every forum for the next eight weeks”
“Be visible” “Spend two hours a month with the teams actually doing it, no slides”

The STOP list is the important one

Leaders find START easy and STOP hard — which is exactly why STOP is where the value is. Almost every change is undermined by something a leader continues to do.

Prompts that surface them:

  • What do you currently ask for that would undermine this? (A report in the old format is the classic. One director asking for the old spreadsheet keeps the old spreadsheet alive across an entire division.)
  • What exception do you routinely grant?
  • Where do you let people escalate around the new process?
  • What do you tolerate that contradicts this?
  • Which meeting still runs on the old data?

The most powerful single STOP

“I will stop accepting the old format, from anyone, from [date].”

It costs nothing, requires no budget, needs no project, and it does more for adoption than most of the rest of the plan combined. It’s also uncomfortable, which is why it needs to be written down and witnessed.

Making it visible

⭐ Publish the contracts to the teams they lead. This is what converts it from an exercise into a commitment.

Two things happen:

  1. Leaders write more carefully when they know their team will read it.
  2. Teams get a legitimate basis for holding leaders to it — which is itself a culture change, and often a bigger one than the change you’re actually running.

If a leader resists publication, ask gently what they’d want to change before it could be published. The answer is informative either way.

Reviewing at 30 / 60 / 90

Short, private, non-punitive:

“How’s it going with your three? Which one’s been hardest to keep up?”

Expect the STOP commitments to slip first — they require ongoing refusal, whereas START commitments become routine. Reinforce those specifically.

Leader Commitments kept Slipping Noted
       
       

⚠️ Never use this as a stick in public. The moment it becomes a scoreboard, leaders write safe commitments and the tool is dead.

When a leader won’t engage

A leader who refuses to name any behaviour of their own has told you something important. Don’t force it in the room.

Take it to the sponsor privately: “I’ve got contracts from five of the six. [Name] hasn’t engaged. Their teams will notice the gap and draw conclusions. How do you want to handle it?”

State the consequence, not the character. See Challenging Upward — Scripts.

→ Sponsor Briefing Pack · Social Norms and Influence · Executive Failure Modes

← Back to the Behavioural Change Toolkit

Last updated: 11 August 2026