Nobody Wants Your Transformation
Let me save you some time: nobody in your organization is excited about your transformation. The senior leaders who approved it are cautiously optimistic. The consultants who designed it are enthusiastic because they’re billing for it. And the people who actually have to live through it — the ones whose daily work, team structure, and sometimes employment are on the line — are somewhere between skeptical and terrified.
I’ve led multiple large-scale transformations. Support org restructurings, post-acquisition integrations, operational overhauls that changed how hundreds of people did their jobs every day. And the single most consistent lesson across all of them is this: resistance isn’t a bug. It’s the default state. If you don’t plan for it — if you assume people will get on board because the business case is compelling — you’re going to fail.
Why resistance is rational
The first mistake leaders make is assuming that resistance to change means people don’t understand the vision or don’t care about the business. That’s almost never true. Most of the time, the people resisting your transformation understand it better than you think. They just don’t trust it.
And they have reasons.
They’ve seen transformations before. They’ve sat through the kickoff meetings with the inspiring slides and the ambitious timelines. They’ve watched those timelines slip. They’ve seen the early enthusiasm fade into organizational fatigue. They’ve watched leadership declare victory before the work was done and move on to the next initiative. And then they’ve been left holding the bag — dealing with half-implemented changes, broken processes, and new systems that nobody bothered to finish.
When I took over a support organization that had gone through three reorganizations in two years, the team’s reaction to my plans wasn’t hostility — it was exhaustion. They’d heard the change pitch before. They’d been told things were going to get better. They’d been shuffled between managers and team structures without any of the underlying problems being fixed. By the time I arrived, the prevailing sentiment was: just tell us where to sit and we’ll wait for the next reorg.
That’s not resistance. That’s rationality. When people have been burned by change before, skepticism is the intelligent response.
The buy-in myth
There’s a popular idea in change management that you need to “get buy-in” before you can move forward. Build the coalition. Get everyone aligned. Make sure people feel ownership of the change.
I used to believe that. I don’t anymore. Not because buy-in doesn’t matter — it does — but because the way most organizations pursue it is theater. They hold town halls where the decision has already been made but they pretend it hasn’t. They send out surveys that are designed to confirm the conclusion leadership already reached. They create “change champion” programs where selected employees are given the illusion of influence over a process they can’t actually shape.
People see through this. They always do. And it makes the resistance worse, because now you’ve added dishonesty to disruption.
What I’ve found actually works is simpler and harder: be honest about what’s changing and why, acknowledge that it’s going to be uncomfortable, and then demonstrate through early actions that the change is real and that leadership is committed to seeing it through.
You don’t need everyone to buy in. You need the people you can’t afford to lose to believe it’s worth sticking around for.
The people you need most
Here’s the uncomfortable dynamic at the heart of every transformation: the people who are most critical to its success are often the most resistant to it. And it makes perfect sense.
Your highest performers have the most invested in the current system. They’ve built their expertise, their workflows, their professional identity around the way things work today. When you announce a transformation, you’re telling them that the thing they’ve spent years mastering is about to change — and implicitly, that the thing they mastered wasn’t good enough.
That’s a threatening message, even when it’s not intended that way.
When I led a post-acquisition integration that required combining two support organizations with different tools, different processes, and different cultures, the people who pushed back hardest were the senior team leads — the exact people I needed to make the integration work. They weren’t being difficult. They were protecting what they’d built. And frankly, a lot of what they’d built was good. The integration wasn’t happening because their work was bad. It was happening because the business needed consolidation.
The mistake would have been to dismiss their resistance as stubbornness and push through. Instead, I invested time in understanding what they were protecting and finding ways to preserve the best elements of both organizations. Not everything could be preserved — that’s the nature of integration. But the act of genuinely listening, of acknowledging that we were losing something valuable in the process of building something new, changed the dynamic. The resistance didn’t disappear, but it transformed from obstruction into negotiation. And that’s workable.
The 28 percent
During one integration, we eliminated 28 percent of redundant processes and roles. That’s a significant number, and it’s the kind of number that looks clean in a board presentation. But behind that number are real people whose jobs changed or disappeared. Real teams that were merged with teams they’d previously competed against. Real workflows that were retired even though they worked fine — because having two versions of everything isn’t sustainable post-acquisition.
I’ve learned to be very careful about how those numbers get communicated. “We achieved 28 percent redundancy elimination” is an efficiency story. But for the people inside it, it’s a disruption story. Both are true, and a leader who only tells one version is going to lose credibility with the audience that hears the other.
When we communicated the integration plan, I was direct about the impact. These roles are being consolidated. These processes are being retired. These teams are being restructured. Here’s the timeline, here’s the support we’re providing for people who are affected, and here’s what the organization looks like on the other side.
Not everyone was happy. Several people left. Some of the departures stung — people I wanted to keep, who decided the disruption wasn’t worth it. But the people who stayed knew what they were signing up for. And that honesty — even when it hurt — built more trust than any carefully worded corporate communication could have.
The middle management problem
In every transformation I’ve led, the make-or-break layer is middle management. Not the senior leaders who approve the strategy. Not the individual contributors who ultimately adapt to whatever new reality they’re given. The managers in the middle — the ones who have to translate the transformation into daily reality for their teams.
These managers are in an impossible position. They’re expected to be enthusiastic about a change they may not believe in, answer questions they may not have answers to, and maintain team morale while the ground shifts beneath them. They’re the shock absorbers of the organization, and most transformations burn through them without even noticing.
I make it a point to invest disproportionately in middle managers during any transformation. More communication, more context, more support, more honesty about what I know and don’t know. I give them permission to say “I don’t know” to their teams instead of forcing them to perform certainty they don’t feel. And I create channels for them to push back on decisions they think are wrong — because sometimes they are wrong, and middle managers are the ones close enough to the work to see it.
The transformations that fail are usually the ones where middle management is treated as a message-passing layer instead of a leadership layer. If your managers are just relaying decisions from above, you don’t have leaders in the middle — you have human email forwarding.
What actually makes transformation work
After leading enough of these, I’ve arrived at a short list of things that separate transformations that succeed from ones that don’t:
Speed over perfection. The longer a transformation takes, the more organizational energy it consumes and the more likely it is to stall. I’d rather make a good decision quickly and adjust than spend months building the perfect plan while the organization bleeds trust and momentum. The hardest part of any transformation is the uncertainty — and every day you extend the uncertainty, you lose people.
Visible early wins. People need proof that the transformation is producing results, not just disruption. Find something — anything — that’s concretely better as a result of the change and make it visible. A process that’s faster. A problem that’s resolved. A team that’s working better together than before. Early wins don’t have to be huge. They just have to be real.
Honest communication, always. I’d rather tell people “here’s what we’re doing, here’s what’s going to be hard about it, and here’s what I don’t know yet” than deliver a polished narrative that falls apart on contact with reality. People can handle hard truths. They cannot handle discovering that they were misled.
Retention of key talent. If your best people leave during the transformation, you’re going to end up in a worse place than where you started — regardless of how elegant the new org structure looks on paper. Identify who you can’t afford to lose, have honest conversations with them about their concerns, and make concrete commitments about their role in the future state.
The uncomfortable truth
Nobody wants your transformation. Not really. What they want is for the problems the transformation is supposed to solve to go away — without the disruption that solving them requires. That’s human nature. And dismissing that as resistance to be overcome is the fastest way to ensure your transformation joins the long list of change programs that delivered a new org chart but didn’t actually change anything.
The leaders who succeed at transformation are the ones who respect the resistance, move quickly, communicate honestly, and understand that the people living through the change are making a rational calculation about whether to invest their trust in yet another promise that things are going to get better.
Your job isn’t to convince them it’ll be worth it. Your job is to prove it — one decision, one action, one honest conversation at a time.
— Bruno