Sometime next year, someone in a boardroom will ask why the transformation you funded, or the AI initiative you launched, hasn’t delivered what it promised.
If the honest answer is “we rolled it out and never asked what people would have to give up,” you no longer have a transformation problem. You have a leadership failure, and it has your name on it.
The odds already lean that way. Bain & Company reported in 2024 that only about 12 percent of business transformations achieve their original ambition. The common mistakes it named were about people, not technology: the wrong people in critical roles, top talent stretched too thin, and too little preparation for what comes next.
I learned this the hard way.
A project that delivered and still fell short
At a big global bank, I led a customer support team buried in manual work: address changes, duplicate statements and signer updates, dozens a day. For years the team had asked for relief. When the automation project finally arrived, they were thrilled.
The project delivered exactly what we promised the board, and the team got its hours back.
Then the identity problem started. Much of the team had built their sense of value on the very tasks they had asked us to remove. About half adapted to the new way of working within six months. Of 35 people, 14 left the team. Nine went to other companies and five to other roles in the firm. Too many were people we never wanted to lose.
We treated the technology as the finish line, and that was our mistake.
Go-live is not the finish line. It is the starting gun.
What we did next
We didn’t see the identity problem coming. By the time we did, people were already leaving, and we couldn’t get them back. So we changed course. We took four actions, each aimed at something specific we had gotten wrong: the mandate, the incentives, the identity transition and the momentum.
If you are starting a transformation, build all four in from day one. I didn’t have that advantage. If you are already in the middle of one and seeing cracks, it is not too late to put them in place.
1. Reconvene the team. Give it a new mandate.
What failed. We stood the project team down at go-live, as most transformations do. The people who knew the change best walked away on the day adoption started.
What we did. We brought the team back together. This time its mandate was to own adoption, not just the technical rollout, and it had real authority behind it.
Your test. Can you name the person who owns whether people actually work the new way, not just whether the system is live? Do they have the authority to change how work gets done?
2. Audit what you are actually rewarding.
What failed. We measured time saved. That told us the system worked. It told us nothing about the people.
What we did. Once attrition started climbing, we doubled down on the metrics. We measured not just time saved, but what people actually did with the time they got back. We tracked customer referrals and the number of clients on our risk list, because those two numbers told us whether the time was going into relationships. Referrals rose by an average of three a quarter, about a dozen a year, and the risk list came down.
Your test. Find every metric, every comp structure, every piece of praise in your leadership meetings that still quietly rewards the old way of working. If someone kept doing the automated work by hand this month, would anything you track flag it?
3. Invest real time in the identity transition, especially with middle managers.
What failed. 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. A rollout announcement did not answer the question people were really asking: is there still a place for me?
What we did. We started a real conversation every single day, beginning with the executive team and carrying it down through the managers to the front line. It wasn’t a status update. It was a discussion about what was working, what wasn’t, and what would make it better.
Your test. Ask someone on your front line what is and isn’t working with the change. Has anyone above their manager heard that answer?
4. Don’t give up when it stays uncomfortable.
What failed. We pulled back at go-live, right when the real work was beginning.
What we did. It took more than nine months of staying focused, naming the problem and having the conversation again and again. Only then did the new way stop being “new” and become how the team worked.
Your test. Whether you catch this early or late, the timeline doesn’t shorten. Is a leading indicator of adoption on every leadership agenda for the next twelve months? Are you telling the story of what’s working, out loud and in specifics?
What changed
Eventually the team stopped romanticizing the repetitive tasks they used to complain about. They leaned into the harder, more meaningful work they had wanted for years and put the time into their client relationships. Revenue from expanded client portfolios rose 10 percent, and our Net Promoter Score rose 8 points.
Time saved was never the return. What people did with the time was. What we learned set the stage for other robotics initiatives in that group and in other regions around the globe.
Not everyone made the shift. In every transformation I’ve been part of since, someone hasn’t. The win isn’t zero attrition. It’s being honest that the cost is real.
Why this matters more now
Our story was about simple task automation. Generative AI is coming for far more sophisticated work at far greater speed. The identity gap will open faster and wider, and leaders who wait for the attrition numbers to tell them will be late.
One thing to do this week:
Pick one of the four: mandate, incentives, identity or momentum. Test your own transformation against it, whether you are just starting, in the middle of one, or cleaning up after one.
The technology will do what you bought it to do. Whether your people make the shift is a leadership decision.
What happens when technology moves faster than our ability to adapt? 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.
