Four Signs Your Successful Transformations May Still Fail (Copy)

The automation project delivered exactly what we promised the board. The team got its hours back. The dashboard turned green.

Then people started leaving.

It wasn’t the skeptics or the low performers. It was many of the people who had done the job longest and done it well. Of the 35 people on the team, 14 left. Nine went to other companies. Five moved to other roles in the firm. A few of those moves were the right outcome. Too many were people we never wanted to lose.

On paper, we won. In practice, we had an identity problem nobody had planned for.

The team that asked for this

Years ago, I ran service and support across multiple regions at a big global bank. One of my customer support teams handled the unglamorous work: address changes, duplicate statements, updating the signers on an account. Dozens of requests a day, every day, all done by hand.

Every one of those tasks ate time nobody had budgeted. For years there was no funding and no technology to fix it.

The work that mattered most was the work that kept slipping. The team wanted to help customers get more from their accounts, write thorough answers to complex problems instead of two-line notes, and sit down with sales and product to improve the offering. They wanted training that would open up a real career path. However, all of that was pushed to “when I have time.”

Whenever a shortcut led to a customer complaint, the explanation was always the same: “I just didn’t have time.”

So, when our automation project was finally approved, the team was thrilled. For years they had asked, out loud and in every survey, for someone to take the dull work away and give them back the parts of the job that need a human being. We did exactly that.

“It’s special”

After go-live, I noticed one associate quietly avoiding the new automated process, even for something as simple as an address change.

I asked her why.

“My customer likes to work with me,” she said. “When I process their requests myself, it’s special.”

She wasn’t really talking about the customer. She was defending the one thing that still made her feel useful.

That conversation changed how I saw the whole project. Much of the team had built their sense of value on the tasks they had complained about for years. Complaining about a task and depending on it to feel useful are two completely different things. Most leaders don’t plan for the gap between the two. I didn’t.

The longer someone had done the job the old way, the harder they struggled. Their competence was built on handling every customer request themselves, no matter how mundane. When the system took over that work, it erased what made them feel needed.

Resistance, or a signal?

Most executives hear “it’s special” as resistance. They try to manage it, train it out of people, or wait it out.

It means something else. It is how a person tells you exactly where they have built their identity. They are also asking, without saying so, whether there will still be a place for them once the new system takes over their work.

Every transformation asks people to give up something. Few board meetings ask what.

Here is what I got wrong. We sold our project on efficiency. We told people what the automation would free them from, but we never did enough to show them what it would free them to become.

Four signs to listen for

Looking back, the signs were there before anyone left. Today they are the first things I look for when I work with executive teams in the middle of a transformation.

• People quietly work around a process the system now handles.

• Explanations framed around the customer relationship instead of the task. “They like it when I do it.”

• Your longest-tenured, most competent people are struggling more than newer hires.

• Time saved shows up on the dashboard, but nobody can tell you what the team did with it.

If you see two or more, you are not looking at a training gap. You are looking at an identity gap. Another training session won’t close it. Listening to what people are seeing, and acting on it, will.

The one who stayed

The associate who told me “it’s special” wasn’t the only long-tenured person facing that change. One of her longtime colleagues faced it too, and he handled it very differently. 

He wasn’t setting the world on fire. He showed up for the paycheck and handled problems efficiently all day long. He was also one of the loudest voices on what could change, though he never seemed to change himself.

After the system went in, he came to see me. He told me what he was seeing and how he thought we could improve the new processes. We listened and acted on his advice, and that motivated him even more.

The new approach still took him a while to learn. At first the new processes were slower than the old ones, but he stuck with it. Once he mastered them, he broke through. His own clients reached a higher level of satisfaction, and we promoted him to team lead to help others find their way. He was especially good with the new people we hired to replace those who had left.

He was the person I would have bet against, and he became the one who carried the change to everyone else.

Both associates would have called their work special. Only one of them was right. She was protecting comfort, work that was familiar and hers. But her client never needed an address change done by hand. They needed it done. What he built, his clients could feel. They got more of his time, and it showed.

Special was never the task. It was what the client felt.

What the time was worth

The people who made the switch finally did the work they had asked for. They put the time into their client relationships. Revenue from expanded client portfolios rose 10 percent; our Net Promoter Score rose 8 points.

That’s the return the business case never captured. The hours saved were the efficiency story. What people did with that time was the growth story. That growth came only from the people who stayed.

Why generative AI raises the stakes

Our story was about simple task automation. Generative AI is coming for far more sophisticated work, at far greater speed.

The people affected won’t be processing address changes. They will be your analysts, your relationship managers, your middle managers. Their version of “it’s special” will sound more sophisticated. Pay attention to what they say because it will mean the same thing.

The one I still think about

The associate who told me “it’s special” was one of the people we lost. I don’t know whether anyone ever gave her a new reason to feel essential somewhere else. I know we didn’t, and that was on us, not on her.

Leading a transformation isn’t about the technical rollout. It is about making sure people like her have somewhere to land, inside the organization or outside it, before they are forced to find it on their own.

So before the week is out, ask yourself who on your team is quietly protecting something that is about to disappear, and whether you have talked to them about it.

Somewhere in your organization, someone is telling you “it’s special.”

The only question is whether you are close enough to hear it. Listen to these insights on The Relevance Reckoning here.

About me: I love working with leaders to navigate transformation within their organizations. Let me know how I can help you at karengilhooly@karengilhooly.com.