Transformation is not for the faint-hearted

In almost every company I have worked in, everybody agreed that something had to change. Writing the strategy down is the easy part. Everyone nods, everyone is on board, and at the end of the workshop there is a document you can live with comfortably.

The hard part comes afterwards.

Because as soon as the change becomes concrete, the uncertainty arrives. Suddenly people defend the old way that nobody really liked yesterday. Processes everyone complained about for years become sacred overnight. That is not bad faith. That is human. What frightens us is usually not the new thing, it is the uncertain one.

Who it hits hardest

It often hits hardest the people who have been there longest. And that is the part most transformation plans overlook entirely.

Someone who has built a role over years suddenly stands next to somebody who started much later, and both are learning the same new thing. The experience that used to be their value counts for nothing in that moment. And the new person may even be quicker at putting it into practice, because they have nothing to unlearn.

That is hard. And it is not something you can facilitate away.

I have watched someone with fifteen years of service sit in a training session and, for the first time in a long while, be the one who had to ask a question. If you as a manager only look at the project plan in that moment, you lose exactly the people who are your greatest asset.

The valley of tears is real

In change management, the phase where resistance and a drop in performance coincide is called the valley of tears. For a long time I took that for a consultant’s picture. It is not one.

The most important sentence about it is this: if your team is stuck in the middle of it or rebelling, that is not a sign the transformation is failing. It is the sign that it is actually happening.

What does not happen when everyone keeps working amiably as before is change. Quiet in the shop is not a good signal during a transformation, it usually proves the thing has not reached anyone yet.

The real leadership task in that phase is not to avoid the valley. It is to keep it short and to leave nobody alone in it.

What actually helps

Three things worked for me, and none of them appears in a slide deck.

First: explain why. Not once, but constantly. People do not go along because a decision was made, they go along because they understand which problem it solves. Whoever knows the numbers can think along. Whoever does not can only obey or block.

Second: build visible wins early. A team that has nothing to show after eight weeks except new fields in the CRM is right to be sceptical. So I prefer to start with the part that gives something back quickly, even when it is not the strategically most important one.

Third: make the experienced people carriers, not casualties. Someone with twenty years of customer knowledge is the most valuable person in the room during a transformation, as soon as you give them a role in which that knowledge counts. Being a role model, onboarding new people, shaping the professional part of the new process. It costs nothing and changes everything.

Sales cannot transform on its own

And then there is the most uncomfortable insight. Sales cannot transform on its own.

If marketing keeps throwing leads over the fence, if product management plans on a different rhythm, if finance does not carry the new pricing logic and the board asks for the old metrics after eight weeks, then sales gets stuck halfway through the change. Visibly so, because in sales every deviation lands in a number immediately.

Transformation is a team performance or it is nothing. Anyone taking on a transformation as a sales leader should therefore ask beforehand which other areas will move too, and who will enforce that. The answer says more about the chances of success than any business plan.

Why it is still worth it

Honestly, transformation is more exhausting than I expected. For everyone involved, myself included.

But there is no alternative. The half-life of competitive advantage keeps getting shorter, the B2B buyer has changed, and what was a differentiator five years ago is standard today. Permanent change is not a fashion, it is the only way to stay in the market.

Whoever stands still has already lost. They just notice it later.