Sustaining Commitment: Moving Beyond Motivation in AEC Change

Mini Series Part 4:

Leadership in change management often fails not because teams lack initial alignment, but because commitment fades when motivation does. In this mini-series installment of Activating Curiosity™, Ryan Ware explores how construction and AEC leaders can shift from motivational fixes to building sustainable commitment—the daily disciplines, rituals, and accountability structures that keep teams executing change long after the launch energy wears off. Learn mindful change management techniques and collaborative leadership approaches that keep AEC teams engaged and committed to lasting change.

This conversation reframes a common challenge: leaders often assume commitment comes from alignment at the start. Instead, Ryan highlights that commitment is built through consistent check-ins, reflection, and intentional action throughout the change journey. 

Through the Five C’s of Change—Choice, Control, Clarity, Commitment, and Curiosity—this episode focuses on how commitment connects the foundation to real progress. Without it, teams fall into forced compliance, resistance grows, and momentum fades.

From missed goals to shifting priorities, this episode explores why commitment breaks down—and how leaders can strengthen it through clarity, communication, and presence.

This isn’t just about managing change—it’s about sustaining it.

What you’ll learn:

•  Why commitment is built through action, not motivation 
•  How check-ins keep teams aligned and prevent drift 
•  The difference between commitment and forced compliance 
•  Why competing priorities derail change initiatives 
•  How leaders sustain momentum through clarity and presence 

Who this is for:
Construction leaders, project managers, and AEC professionals focused on change management, leadership development, and team alignment.

Chapters

00:00 Building Stronger Relationships with Change
06:48 Understanding Commitment in Change
15:01 The Importance of Check-Ins
20:19 Navigating Challenges in Commitment
25:16 Curiosity as a Tool for Change

Overcast Innovations
Helping project teams coordinate building systems earlier for more predictable outcomes.

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Free Diagnostic ($500 value) for Activating Curiosity Listeners by NLA, to help your financial goals

Connective Consulting Group
Helping construction leaders simplify change, strengthen trust, and move forward with clarity.

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Transcript

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Ryan 0:58

Leaders have to remember those initial conversations. How were people talking about choice at the beginning? If they didn't make the first choice of the change, what are you hearing from them during the change? What is their current level of commitment with each step that they're taking? You're trying to avoid a forced compliance situation. And in change, when it is a forced compliance, that means they're not a willing participant, which means the weak area for them is that staying committed piece during the change, because otherwise they'll begin to look at those obstacles or slow progress as a reason that this change was never needed in the first place. I am Ryan Ware, and this Month episode is a continuation of the mini-series we started a few episodes ago, focusing on helping build stronger relationships with change within ourselves and within others that are part of our teams within businesses. And we can really only begin that journey by starting to do some, you know, self-reflection as it relates to change and things that we have gone through as individuals in our own lives. So we also talked about why the word relationships and why in this case we're talking about beginning to build stronger relationships with change and how should we be thinking about that? So relationships cannot be one-sided if they are to be strong. The only way to have strength in them is that both people involved in that relationship are willing participants and will give every effort to make sure that it remains strong. If it is one-sided relationship, then only one person may be giving effort while the other person is just receiving that effort but not giving any. So when it comes to change, when we begin to break it down into the components that we've been talking about over the past three episodes, and we'll continue in this episode, is that if we take each one of those and kind of understand how we have felt about change throughout our life and in each one of those areas, what it's meant to us? How did we react to it? And by doing that, we're bringing to light that relationship piece. Is it something that we have felt we've done well at or something we want to work on? So we began the journey talking about the word choice. And when it comes to change, we put it into a couple areas. In our personal lives or professional, we may have made that initial choice, the first choice to set a goal and begin on the journey. Or in some cases, we got second choice, meaning someone else set that goal out in front of us or made a decision to go through a change that we are now part of. The second component was around control. And this is something that we as humans, you know, again, like everything, choice is very important to us. We we we tend to fear a lot of things because we lack control in that moment or lack control of the entire journey. So we hit on that area uh to talk about how we can begin to kind of reflect on those things that we've seen in our life in order to strengthen our relationship with control once we have a better understanding of it. The third part was clarity. And we talked about how clarity is often something we as humans, we we believe that we want 100% clarity to start anything. And we talked about how many people in our lives, as well as ourselves, have probably said, hey, I would do this thing if I had 100% clarity. And I knew exactly how it was going to go. And we do that in construction all the time, or architecture is give me the data, and if the data shows enough, then and I know exactly all the steps and the ways to move through this, we'll begin that journey. But what we hit on in that episode, the last episode, was really that clarity is is sort of elusive, and it's more about that you're you're able to put a flashlight down and see that first few steps. You've set the long-term goal, you know where you're headed, you just don't know what you're going to anticipate every step of the way. You don't know how that's you know going to work and progress, but you know that how to do the action steps. You know that you're starting to shrink these goals down and to something that you can see on a daily to weekly basis to be able to move forward, to be able to get to that other side, while also recognizing that some of this is unknown, that there will be fog, it will be unclear. But that doesn't mean that you just back up and don't take, take the challenge on, don't move through the change. Because that area in the middle, that miss that messy middle area, that's where you're learning, that's where you're developing, that's where you're growing. So we began the journey by really focusing in on those three areas: choice, control, and clarity. So once you have gotten a better understanding of those for yourself as you're thinking about change, you can also begin to think about as a team, but you've made you've made all of those things now visible, you've discussed them, you have a better understanding of them so that you're recognizing them to begin to make the next step. And that is the uh fourth C of the five C's of change, which is commitment. And commitment is one of those things that we think, well, it's all about motivation, it's all about all these uh things that are going to drive us. And that's not actually the case because we've set a goal and we can go through things in our life and think about commitments, but we don't all stay committed to that change, whether it's personal or professional. There are things that will become obstacles, roadblocks. There are things that will impede us on that journey, but also derail us from completing all of the steps necessary to not only reach the goal on the other side that we're aiming to achieve, but to maintain it long term. So today we're going to talk about commitment and what that means to us as we think about our relationship with change, as we think about implementing change in our own lives, but also uh within our businesses and with our teams. So commitment being that fourth area, we've we've the choice is there. We understand who made it, we understand what's happening with that choice, we understand better because we've had more discussions about what's within our control and what is not. We understand to what level of clarity that we have. So we can begin to take those initial steps. If you think about things that you've wanted to change, let's just start with the personal and then go into some professional. So a lot of times, being at certain times of years, we think, hey, I want to exercise more. I want to eat healthier, I want to lose weight, I want to take a look at my financials and set new goals. And as we begin those journeys, we have all of the motivation and intention. There is something that is intrinsic that we believe we need to uh complete in order to be awarded and rewarded on the other side of it of that achievement. So we begin those areas. Let's let's talk about the ones within our personalized, which, okay, we want to go to the gym. We've talked about that one uh over some of the past episodes. We we can buy you know the pass in order to be at the gym every day, all year long. We can spend those financially to make the choice, like, hey, that will motivate me. But when we're thinking about that commitment, it isn't just, hey, I made the payment to go to the gym. The commitment is going to be constant. There's going to be a check-in as you're going through your daily activities to your setting the alarm for the next morning. That is a check-in. Waking up with the alarm going off and not hitting snooze, that is a check-in. That's once you actually make it to the gym, you know, staying focused about what it is that you're aiming to achieve. You can end up in burnout very quickly, just like anything in life, that if you're not going through a routine, you will begin to feel the slowness and the progress not hitting exactly what you want. And when we start seeing things slow down and the progress isn't, you know, happening fast enough, that's when we start to say, this isn't working. Um, I don't know what I'm doing and why this isn't working. So you may take some days off. You may adjust, you know, something else in your schedule and try something different that then becomes a higher priority that starts to derail you even more. And before you know it, that pass that you bought at the beginning of the year, you were using it intensely in January, maybe a little bit in February, but by May, June, you're no longer involved in the gym. And you start to think back like, well, I set this goal. How did I not hit that? How did I not achieve it? And with everything that's going on in our life, so much, so much activity, so many people striving to get our attention, so many things that will uh become more important to us than the commitment that we set, we we have found that I don't even remember giving up on this. I don't even I don't even remember stopping doing it. And that happens all the time, even in finances. And there are a lot of times when the commitment was there initially that months down the road, we barely even remember making the choice to make the change. But the current state that we're in is exactly where we were at the beginning. So when it comes to commitment, one of the things to understand about our own minds and the neuroscience behind how our brain works is that we have current habits in place because it's something that we were committed to and we stuck with for a long period of time. And our brain wants to move very quickly. It doesn't like to slow down, it doesn't like when new things are introduced, it sees that as a threat or fear begins to come into place. So we tend to pull away from that. And when we're talking about commitment, it's understanding how we see those things and think about them. Because those areas that we're doing on a daily basis now, the things that we barely have to think about in our lives, they're easy. They don't, they don't stress our thought process. They don't over make us overexert energy to think about. But when you see something that's new, a new commitment, that that area that we're talking about of going into the gym and sticking with it, that's happening in a new area within your brain. It's something it hasn't recognized. Not only your muscles, but your mind and how it's assessing those things about how you feel about it. And in those cases, we're talking about creating new habits. We're talking about unlearning some of the things of the past, and we're relearning how to learn again to introduce something new. So whether it is uh in your personal life or within business, we have to understand that, hey, it is natural for us to be a little bit skeptical of something. It is natural for us to think a certain way when we are shown something or trying something for the first time, or it's something that we've just have never actually seen. So again, to stay committed to those areas, it is not only presence and all the things that we talked about, like we have to understand that it's natural to feel some of these things, that you're not superhuman. None of us are, none of us are superhuman at change. We just have built stronger relationships and understanding how these things make us feel. And that neuroscience behind it, just recognizing it, recognizing that those habits that you have now were built over time. And so too will this next change and goal that you have set for yourself and you have set for your team. So commitment isn't a one-time event just like change. Commitment is that check-in. It is a daily to weekly, monthly, quarter check-in against each of those action items that you are setting for yourself. And by doing those check-ins, you are reinforcing internally that the goal still remains. That your intention of what you want to achieve by the time you have reached the other side of this change is still in alignment for yourself. And you can call audibles, you can make changes to the goal, as long as it the big picture goal that you're aiming to do, and as you're taking those action steps and steps through the fog and you're gaining more clarity, there may be adjustments that have to be made. But that is where getting more aligned with the commitment being not motivation, but the check-in points to ensure that you are not getting derailed, you are not getting sidetracked, you are not having competing commitments start to take priority. And one of the things that we do as coaches is ensure we understand what makes the goal so important. And that's true whether it's personally and it's true if it's professionally within a company and a business all trying to implement a change. That that area of importance is the check-in. Is this still an important goal for myself? Is this still an important goal for the business? And by continuously questioning those, you're not trying to make yourself waver. You're just trying to look at the current situation that you find yourself in and ensure that it is aligned, that it is still important. Because without important, or if it's not meaningful, that's where other things take priority. That's where your commitment level begins to waver. And that commitment doesn't just waver for yourself and your personal life. The wavering of the commitment happens, and we think about it in our businesses, where you know how you feel about change, but what about everyone else? So we've discussed this in the past episodes, is that you're learning more about one another. You're building trust by having conversations, creating that psychological safety in order to be able to have the conversations necessary to work through the change, to be able to ask questions without fear of any sort of reaction or retaliation. And if you if you think about it, each of those individuals has their own point of view of change. And we talked about the importance of why a leader has to stay present and have presence within the change, is that each step you're taking, each point, if there isn't commitment being maintained by each of those individuals who has their own view of change and their own view of this current change that's happening, as commitment levels in some people begin to waver, it pulls down everyone. Progress begins to slow for the entire uh the entire change and what you're aiming to do. So that then begins to impact other people who are involved in the process as well. So then everyone begins to feel this level of frustration. It may be someone who is not meeting the goals that they set for themselves for that week. And as a group, you have to figure that out. You have to figure out well, how do we get this back on track? And it may be that you have to realign the end goal date, but you have to look for these warning signs during the commitment of are we constantly just moving the end goal date? Are we constantly just shifting it in order to accommodate a certain group or a certain individual? And it is true that there are going to be those things that are going to pop up on your team during the change that may have to take priority. But if you're having those conversations when you're first beginning and how you're going to handle that as a group, as a team, and be able to still achieve the goal while maintaining those things that you have to on a daily basis. I've had people reschedule one-on-ones consistently because there were too many fires that they had to put out. Well, that's a sign of a bigger issue that we have to go back and try to try to assess like what's going on in the process, and why are we having so many fires? Because the one-on-ones, those meetings, those those opportunities to discuss and have uh important conversations about the business, like you can't just put those on the back burner all the time. And you can't do that when you're dealing with change. So things will come up, but the big part of it is as you're beginning the journey with commitment and stepping into that change is outlining what are you going to do when the day-to-day activities start to become the priority over getting action steps done to deliver on the change such that you're moving past current state and trying to get to that future state goal. And as you're going through this change, leaders have to remember those initial conversations. How were people talking about choice at the beginning? If they didn't make the first choice of the change and they are sitting in second area choice, what are you hearing from them during the change? What is their current level of commitment with each step that they're taking? Because again, you're trying to avoid a forced compliant situation. And in change, when it is a forced compliance, that means they're not a willing participant, which means the weak area for them is that staying committed piece during the change. Because otherwise they'll begin to look at those obstacles or barriers or slow progress or anything else that might be coming up as a reason that this change was never needed in the first place. And that's human. That's what we do. So you have to be able to, whoever is in charge of leading the change, as well as the leaders who are the ones, you know, overseeing and making sure that this change is happening for the entire business, because we're not talking about just, you know, five people in most instances. This is probably hundreds and sometimes, you know, could be up to a thousand people who have to go through a change. So you are trying to look for these warning signs. You're trying to listen for all of those obstacles I just mentioned, and trying to make sure that the level of commitment is constantly happening throughout the project that you're putting in place. Because without it, we'll give up. And when we give up, it's months down the road to even years down the road. And what ends up happening is, well, I'm just not going to change, the team's not going to change, or I tried that and it didn't work, or there's got to be a better way to do something than what we tried before when you didn't give it its fair shake because you didn't stay committed to it. And it's not that the solution is always going to work 100% for every person. And since all humans are different, like you can't just try to rinse and repeat all the time and expect everything to go exactly as it did for someone else that you know. That's just not the case. We're we're all different. So the patience and the empathy that we've talked about before that have to be uh, you know, applied in each of these instances, not only for yourself and any personal change that you're making, but any change you're making as a business is so critical to allow for the commitment check-in. And again, that commitment is why is this important? Why is this meaningful? Has anything changed that would make this different now? And if you're doing that routinely and you're checking in on progress and you're ensuring that people have the space required to achieve the goals as well as doing those daily activities that are going to keep coming up and you don't have competing priorities, then you can move through the change at a progress level that all of you are in agreement of. You're not giving up because you've allowed the space and you didn't rush through it. But if you constantly are pushing on the end goal itself without any check-ins or not being present and not being around through that change, then not only is the commitment level not happening, you're you're not getting any real data to know what could work if you back out of this commitment. What might actually get you from current state to future, because no one's trying, no one's learning, or a few are, but others aren't. And and that's what a lot of times in change management we have to figure out. And it's constantly the current state, but without doing any check-in on each point along the journey, each step and action along the journey of the commitment by the individuals involved in the change, alignment and meaningfulness, importance that the goal still be obtained, then we will be human and we will let other priorities take precedence, and we will let other things start to be obstacles and barriers, opposed to looking at the commitment as a way to grow, a way to learn, a way to test all the way through the change. So as we've discussed in the previous mini-series episodes, we have to start to understand our relationship with each of these components. Today's commitment, we have to understand why in the past have we given up on things, if we have. Right? Most all of us have set goals that we thought they were so important, and we put them in and we wanted to start to attack them and we wanted to start moving through them, and then we don't remember why we quit. That's just part of being human. But when we're starting to look back and think through those things, then we can get a better understanding of our level of commitment. Was it not important? Did I not make the first choice? It was it a control thing for me? What was what was it about clarity that made me not, you know, fully committed throughout the journey when I didn't know how every day it was going to go? So the foundation is choice, control, and clarity. Commitment is through the journey. That is what's happening to us from current state to future state and beyond. Because again, commitment isn't an event. It isn't just happening as a change goes on. You have to stick with it. You can't go through a goal setting of I want to hit a certain weight or I want to start exercising. Like, well, what happens when you reach the other side of that goal? And then things just bounce back to the way they were. Nothing has stuck. The commitment is an ongoing thing for you personally as well as what's happening within your business. So, again, the those areas of foundation all the way through the journey of commitment. And once you're in commitment and you are doing those check-ins, that's when you hit the fifth C. And the fifth C of change is curiosity. And curiosity is this powerful tool that we have to be ignorant of a subject that we have never come across or need to take a look at and reflect on because situations have changed from the way we've always believed it to be true. So in the next episode of the mini-series, we are going to focus on curiosity, which is my favorite thing and part of the title of the podcast, Activating Curiosity, because this is where we test. This is where the labs begin. And this is where we become more connected to the change. So I am hopeful that you are enjoying these mini-series episodes. Um, I hope that you're able to kind of take a step back and say, hey, I want to build a stronger relationship with change. I don't know how I feel about any of these five components. And I want to explore them for myself because when you start to do it and even start to question others about their relationship, not directly, but just by being more curious and asking them questions about things, not because you want to show what you know, because you're purely interested in knowing how humans work and relate to change, then we all start to get stronger and better at it. And we're going to need that more and more because everything is at an accelerated pace with technology changing only in our personal lives, but within every part of our business and how we are starting to see things change within the construction industry. So the next episode, again, will be on curiosity. And if you haven't had a chance to listen to the previous episodes, take some time, go back, walk through those. And again, these are just to start to make us think about our relationship. They are to activate that curiosity to get us to think about them each a little deeper so that we can become better at not only change in that personal life, but also that we can go out and lead change in construction or within our businesses or other parts of the industry as well. So until next time, I hope that you stay well. I hope that you're able to continue to look at things that excite you and challenges that you've been thinking about for a long time and you've started to strengthen that relationship for yourself with change, that you can begin to take those areas on. I hope you're able to continue to activate your curiosity as well as curiosity within activate curiosity. So next time we keep leading with curiosity.