You have been charged with implementing a significant new initiative for a new competitive strategy—and you need to align your team behind it. Your goal may be clear, but how clear is your execution plan for reaching it? If you’re like most executives, the answer is, not clear enough. Indeed, most major change initiatives fail, many of them soon after implementation begins through lack of an effective execution plan.

You have been charged with implementing a significant new initiative for a new competitive strategy—and you need to align your team behind it. Your goal may be clear, but how clear is your execution plan for reaching it? If you’re like most executives, the answer is, not clear enough. Indeed, most major change initiatives fail, many of them soon after implementation begins through lack of an effective execution plan.

Some leaders assume that their culture has the flexibility and openness required to accommodate major change or any level of change. They push the initiative through their team—only to encounter stiff resistance that ultimately sabotages the effort. Or they fail to articulate the initiative’s benefits. If people don’t understand the purpose of an initiative they’ll be skeptical about devoting their time and energy to it.

Some leaders also don’t realize they must stay involved during implementation and continually communicate the initiative’s importance. They make the error of just announcing it and walking away. The result is initiatives that do little other than die a slow death.

Executives who want to avoid these and other prevalent mistakes when implementing new initiatives should look to these five steps:

1. Assess the current culture

Before launching any change effort, carefully assess your team’s culture. Where possible seek objective and independent feedback on the team. The greater the change effort required the more important this step becomes. While assessing culture, resist any temptation to bury your head in the sand because you don’t want to hear uncomfortable truths. Those uncomfortable truths will ultimately block the change process if they are not addressed from the outset.

2. Condition the culture

If you’ve decided that the current culture is a poor match for the effort at hand, you must condition the culture. Make the business case for change—in compelling terms. Build the change process on wins and the best way to do that is to start with something simple, to build confidence and demonstrate that people can work effectively together. Building momentum through smaller changes is particularly effective. It shows people that they can rise to the challenge and enables you to begin more complex changes later.

3. Commit time and energy

Some initiatives, once implemented, reach a plateau. As the novelty wears off, people’s energy and enthusiasm wane. To combat this tendency, the best change leaders stay involved throughout implementation of the entire initiative. Leading an initiative requires intense focus, hard work, tremendous time, and endless physical and emotional energy. A change leader needs to constantly breathe new life into the initiative.

4. Construct an able implementation team

Assembling the right team to carry out an initiative is the most difficult yet most important imperative for change leaders. You want people who are enthusiastic about leading initiatives, but you also need to make sure they’re functionally suited to the job and motivated to make things happen.

5. Call on your courage

Initiatives require people to think and act in new ways. They can require a leader to change some individuals’ responsibilities or remove them entirely from the team or company. Your challenge here is to remain “both inspiring and unrelenting.” Let people know that there will be consequences for not supporting the initiative. Let them also know they will be rewarded for supporting the initiative. Often tying their compensation to the change initiative provides a transparent and measurable reward mechanism.

Leading initiatives will never be easy. But by applying a few potent principles, you can increase the likelihood that your initiative will survive the most common hazards.

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