Are You Changed For Good? (And How Would You Even Know?)

Wicked is breaking box office records, and even if you haven’t seen it, you know the moment. Glinda and Elphaba, suspended in that impossible friendship, singing about how they've been "changed for good." It's beautiful. It's moving. And it makes you wonder: when does change actually stick?

Because here's what Wicked doesn't show you—the part that happens after the curtain falls. How do Glinda and Elphaba know they've changed? What if Glinda goes back to being superficial next Tuesday? What if Elphaba's courage was just adrenaline?

In the theater, we accept transformation at face value. In the workplace, we can't afford to.

The Performance Review Problem

We've all sat through the annual ritual. Your team member swears they've grown. They've learned. They're more collaborative now, more accountable, better at conflict. And you want to believe them—you really do. But six weeks later, they're falling into the same patterns, and you're wondering if anything actually changed or if you both just performed the scene well enough to move on.

This isn't cynicism. It's pattern recognition.

The truth is, most of us are terrible at assessing our own transformation. We confuse intention with action, moments with momentum, and one good week with sustainable change. We're all unreliable narrators of our own development stories.

What Gets Measured Gets Real…And Sticks

Consider this, a marketing director recently learned that change isn’t always for good. She felt like she was being an inclusive leader, making space for different voices, building authentic connections. Then she looked at the actual data—who spoke in meetings, whose ideas made it into decisions, who felt heard versus who actually was heard. The gap between her perception and reality was humbling.

That's the thing about measuring team dynamics: good intentions don’t let you off the hook.

When we measure dimensions like Cohesion, Clarity, and Courage—when we track whether people actually feel safe enough to disagree, whether accountability is distributed or concentrated, whether recognition flows freely or gets hoarded—we're not being cold or reductive. We're being honest in a way that feelings alone can't achieve.

The Courage Metric You're Probably Ignoring

Let's talk about healthy conflict for a second, because it's the muscle that Wicked is really about. Elphaba and Glinda transform each other because they challenge each other. Not in spite of it. Because of it.

But most teams don't measure whether healthy conflict is happening. They measure whether conflict is avoided. They track "alignment" and "togetherness” and mistake silence for agreement. Then they wonder why innovation flatlines and why the best people leave for places where they can actually say what they think.

If you're not measuring whether people speak up when they disagree, whether they challenge ideas without fear of retaliation or eye rolls, whether they can fail forward without career consequences—You're tracking symptoms, not solving problems.

So How Do You Know If Your Team Has Changed for Good?

Here's where you start:

Can you measure it over time? One great quarter doesn't mean you've built a high-performing team. It means you had a great quarter. Real change shows up in trend lines, not snapshots. Are your Transparency scores improving month over month? Is psychological safety increasing? Or are you just having a moment?

Does behavior match belief? Your team says they value accountability. Fine. But do they actually hold each other accountable, or do they wait for leadership to play bad cop? You can measure this. How often do peers address performance issues directly? How quickly do commitments get tracked and followed up on? Numbers don't lie the way our best intentions do.

Can you see it when things get hard? Transformation isn't real until it survives pressure. When a project goes sideways, does your team lean into transparency and problem-solving, or do they scatter into blame and self-protection? When stakes are high, does courage increase or evaporate? This is where data becomes invaluable—it shows you what happens when the theater stops and reality kicks in.

The Gift of Honest Measurement

Here's what strikes me most about Wicked—the transformation happens because someone bears witness to it. Glinda sees Elphaba differently. Elphaba sees Glinda differently. They can't pretend they haven't changed because the evidence is standing right in front of them.

That's what measurement does for teams. It bears witness. It says: here's who you were, here's who you are, here's the gap between who you say you want to be and how you're actually showing up.

And yes, that can be uncomfortable. But discomfort is usually where the real change starts.

A CEO I spoke with recently put it perfectly: "I thought we were doing great until I saw the feedback data. Turns out we were doing fine. There's a difference." There is. And the only way to close that gap is to measure it first.

Changed For Good—Or Just For Now?

So here's the question worth asking as you head into your next team meeting, your next performance review, your next strategic planning session: How do you actually know if anything is different?

Not how do you feel about it. Not what people say about it. How do you know?

Because transformation without measurement is just a really convincing performance. And your team—like Elphaba, like Glinda, like all of us—deserves better than applause for a show that doesn't change anything.

They deserve to be changed for good. And to know it's real.

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