Good people don't leave a transformation. They leave a bad one.

A sentence that is only half true

In almost every discussion about change in sales, someone eventually says that in a transformation the good people leave first. They have alternatives, they are approached regularly anyway, and when things get restless, they take the call.

That is not entirely wrong. When resistance is suppressed instead of taken seriously, it often ends in quiet or actual resignation, and the step out of the door is taken mostly by those who are in demand on the job market. (Lauer 2019) And whoever fails to show a perspective for too long after a change in leadership will see the best people leave first and the new leadership lose its legitimacy. (Bendig, in Kohne and Bauer 2025)

Both findings, however, do not describe the change itself. They describe how it is led. Good people don’t leave a transformation. They leave a bad one.

Often it is the other way round

My experience follows a different order. When I took over a sales organisation, people who had carried it for a long time had often already left. The transformation was then not the trigger for their departure but the answer to it.

That changes the starting point. You do not begin with a well-rehearsed team that you rebuild, but with a gap and with the people who stayed. Everything that follows stands or falls with them.

Those who stayed are not the leftovers

It is tempting to see those who stayed as the part that had no alternative. That is wrong, and it is dangerous.

Those who stayed have often lived through several attempts already. New managers, new plans, new announcements, and in the end much stayed the same. When exactly these people are sceptical, it rarely has to do with a lack of performance. It is experience. A third of employees in Germany suffer from change fatigue, above all where changes come in quick succession with no time to recover in between. (Franke-Jordan, Berger and Heilfort 2025)

On top of that comes something that happens with every change in leadership. The experienced people know how things work, how decisions come about and when a rule can be interpreted generously in the interest of the company. A new boss puts this unwritten structure under stress. (Bendig, in Kohne and Bauer 2025) Whoever knows most about it has the most to lose. Their resistance is therefore often not unwillingness but an understandable reaction.

Whoever treats this scepticism as a problem loses exactly the people they need most for the transformation.

The captain

In my first leadership role, I took over a team that had seen many changes of manager before me. The belief that things would develop for the better was gone. Every change was perceived as an instruction from head office, and head office was the enemy.

The key figure was a long-serving employee. Whatever he thought of something, the whole team ended up thinking the same.

When I presented a new staffing plan, meaning who works when and where, the reactions were once again classically negative. I said that we needed to adjust something here, but that I was happy to let the team help shape it.

Two evenings later he stood in front of me with a plan of his own. He had thought it through together with the whole team. In the end we had a much better plan than mine, and everyone was happy.

When he presented the plan to me, I told him that for the team he was like a captain in football. All the players take their cue from him. He was the informal leader of the team, without a title and without authority to give instructions, and that is exactly why he was so effective. He had not been aware of it. So we talked for a long time, about what I really wanted to change, why, and how important his support was for it.

With the plan in place, the team was happy, and he became my strongest supporter. That conversation was the key moment that made all later changes possible in the first place.

What makes a transformation positive

Looking back, it came down to three things.

First, influence. The team did not decide whether something would change, but it did decide how. The Dresden study also names better involvement of employees, alongside clear communication and realistic timelines, as a remedy for change fatigue. (Franke-Jordan, Berger and Heilfort 2025)

Second, the informal leader. The target state was already about involving opinion leaders. The scene shows why that matters so much. Informal power can support formal power effectively, and where formal and informal leadership work against each other, unrest and tension follow. (Schirmer and Woydt 2023) Informal leaders get their influence from the team itself, usually because they embody its norms particularly well. (Schreyögg and Koch 2020) That is why you cannot appoint them, you can only find them. And often the person everyone takes their cue from does not know the role they play. Telling them and sincerely asking for their support is not a trick. It is a recognition that nobody had expressed before.

Third, what comes afterwards. Quiet quitting often begins where an unspoken promise is broken or where effort and recognition no longer match. (Sass 2019) Whoever was allowed to shape the plan must then also see that their plan holds.

Above all of this stands the manager. In Germany, 3 per cent of highly engaged employees are actively looking for a new job, compared with 39 per cent of those who are not engaged, and the strongest influence on this engagement comes from the direct manager. (Gallup 2025) Whether the good people stay is therefore decided less by the change than by the person leading it.

What remains

That the good people leave first in a transformation is not a law of nature. They leave when it is badly led. Often they are already gone, and the transformation is the answer to that.

Success is then decided by those who stayed. Their scepticism is experience, not unwillingness. Whoever lets them shape the change, finds the informal leader in the team and keeps their word turns the biggest sceptics into the strongest supporters.