Is the Right Person Running Your Transformation…?

Written By Matt Urmy

When was the last time you heard someone say, or you yourself had the thought: Did we put the right person in charge of transformation?

Often, it's not because the chosen person is incompetent; they're often among the most accomplished people in the building, with years of institutional loyalty, deep knowledge of every political undercurrent, and a career built on protecting the organization from risk.

That last part is the problem.

The State of Transformation

  • 70%+ of organizational transformations fail to reach their objectives — McKinsey

  • Only 30% meet or exceed their target value and result in sustainable change — Boston Consulting Group

  • 95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable business impact — MIT

  • 60% of employees are not supportive of organizational change at any given time — Gartner

In 2024, Susan Levin, a lecturer at Columbia University, published a paper that says, "Human brains are hardwired to resist change. The evolution of neuroscience has revealed this, yielding many fascinating insights into the biological and neurological causes of human behavior and the dynamics that can drive change and lead to conflict. Change is often met with resistance."

Thirty years of academic literature agree on the cause: it's not vision, budget, or technology. It's behavioral. Getting people to actually change how they work is a people problem for leadership, not a strategy problem. Geoff Moore captured it precisely:

"For most executive teams, battling the inertia demon is the biggest challenge they face. Sad to say, the demon usually wins."

The Blocker Problem

A career built within a corporation trains you to protect what is familiar, with self-preservation at the center, and not because of character flaws; it’s neuroscience.

When the brain perceives change as a threat to status, certainty, or autonomy, it triggers the same fight-or-flight response as a physical threat. The amygdala doesn't distinguish between a predator and a reorg. The result is resistance that feels entirely rational to the person experiencing it.

This is how organizations manufacture blockers. Not bad people, just people whose neurological wiring, reinforced by years of institutional incentives, causes them to dilute or quietly suffocate initiatives that are perceived as threats to the world they comfortably inhabit.

They sit at every level; control approvals, budgets, communications, and culture. And because they've been rewarded for protecting the organization from risk, they are often the most credentialed, most respected people in the room.

Unless they can personally understand why it is in their interest to move, they will not move. They've seen initiatives come and go, so they wait it out, and unfortunately, transformation efforts often die as a result.

There are two ways to deal with this, and both are necessary:

Leverage self-interest. Blockers need to see their own future in the transformation — not the organization's future, theirs. What does this mean for their relevance, their team, their standing two years from now if they engage versus if they resist?

Organizations do not need a building full of radical change agents; they need dependable professionals who are willing to put in the work year after year to drive results. Bringing needed transformation to the company requires leadership that understands this and can recruit champions by structuring the change in a way that incentivizes career employees to get on board.

Make the cost of blocking visible. Mandate without accountability is theater. When the C-suite grants a transformation mandate, that mandate has to carry consequences for those who obstruct it. Blockers who cannot adapt need to understand that the org chart will eventually reflect the transformation, not the other way around. The clearer and earlier the signal is sent, the faster the blockers become champions.

Often, people in large organizations wait to see which way the wind is actually blowing before committing to initiatives. The C-suite's job is to make that direction unmistakable.

The Loyalty Trap

Humans crave predictability and comfort. Again, neuroscience confirms this, and long-tenured leaders carry an additional burden: they must reconcile new initiatives with decisions they once championed. They have psychological skin in the current system. Asking them to disrupt it is asking them to invalidate parts of their own careers or reputations within the company.

This is why "Innovation Lead" titles often yield no noticeable or quantifiable results. Every bold move passes through layers of management, each capable of diluting it. The transformation leader without a real mandate becomes a highly credentialed bureaucrat.

What Works: A Portfolio, Not a Hero

The answer isn't a single transformation czar. That framing sets one person up to be an authority on everything — and authority on everything is authority on nothing.

The answer is leaders who are entrepreneurs.

The organizations getting this right are deploying a portfolio of entrepreneurs, each with a distinct domain and a deep operational track record in it.

How do you identify them? They're rarely the loudest person in the room. Look for the person who keeps asking, "Why are we doing it this way?" not to be difficult, but because they've seen a better way to work, then find out how instrumental they were in building or enabling that solution in previous roles. Find out whether they are intelligent observers orbuilders.

These people are not malcontents — they're people whose appetite for impact has outgrown their current container. They're not careless; they are serious operators who obsess more about innovation and value creation than about tenure.

In addition to identifying a credible leader, you have to understand whether they have the stomach for transformation. For entrepreneurs, this comes naturally. These are people who care more about solving problems and delivering results than they do career paths and job security. Doing hard things is what gets them out of bed in the morning, and if the only way to create change is to start their own company, they will do so.

These are not "change management experts." For example, a technology leader with proven domain expertise who has real migration scars and has iterated on a product that eventually overcame adoption resistance is completely different from a senior hire from an adjacent industry who is anointed as the company-wide "digital transformation authority," proselytizing wide-sweeping change at a quarterly all-hands meeting.

Domain depth creates credibility that breadth cannot. And credibility is what moves people. It's all about trust.

Transformation should never be chaotic, but it is messy. Sometimes there are blockers who simply cannot process the necessary change, and the successful transformation leader must be capable of making the required personnel changes decisively in a way that inspires people to participate and get with the program, rather than instilling fear that they are next and thus sowing more resistance.

Each entrepreneur in this model operates under a C-suite mandate, after executive approval. Their change plan moves through the organization with institutional authority behind it — but they're never stretched so wide that they lose the subject-matter command that makes them trustworthy in the first place.

Why the Big Consulting Firms Keep Failing at This

People trust people. Not brand names.

BCG and Deloitte feel safe from a procurement standpoint — nobody gets fired for hiring McKinsey. But that procurement logic rarely translates into execution. What it translates into is a rotation of junior analysts, a canned methodology built for the last client, and a final presentation that walks out the door at the end of the engagement.

Transformation doesn't travel in PowerPoint. It travels through relationships — a functional leader walking a skeptical department head through what's changing and why, answering hard questions without deflecting, building enough trust that the manager brings their team along willingly, and shares in the ownership of the outcomes.

Entrepreneurs are unusually good at this. They've spent their careers selling ideas that didn't exist yet to people with every reason to say no. That's exactly what organizational transformation demands: momentum built not on credentials but on conviction and leadership credibility that inspires adoption.

The Leadership Job

The C-suite's job in a successful transformation isn't to lead it — it's to protect the people who do.

That means approving the vision, publicizing the mandate, and running interference on the organizational immune system that will predictably try to reject what's new. Research shows that teams without psychological safety generate 63% fewer innovation suggestions annually. The entrepreneurs you've empowered can't build in that environment. Your job is to make sure they don't have to.

A transformation can fail even if you do find the right kind of leader, and not because the vision is wrong. They fail because the people with the vision lack authority, and the people with authority lack the courage to grant it.

If you are serious about transforming your organization, you have to find credible entrepreneurs to lead the efforts, and the executive team needs the willpower to handle the pushback that comes when the blockers emerge. Some people can't adapt, and they have to go.

Successful entrepreneurs know how to recruit, inspire, and make change feel like momentum rather than mandate — without alienating the dependable career operators who keep the lights on. Instead, they incentivize champions to step forward from the ranks, ensuring that the transformation process itself becomes the new cultural status quo.

Sources

Matt Urmy
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