When Transformation Hurts - What Nobody Tells You About Change and People

The transformation was well designed. The business case worked, the new structure made sense, and management knew where they wanted to take the company. And my HR team and I were supposed to help bring the people along. But to help transform the business, we first had to transform ourselves. HR doesn’t become a change agent overnight. If it is used to focusing primarily on administration, responding to business requests and handling individual people matters, it cannot suddenly step into the role of a strategic partner capable of guiding an organization through fundamental change. And this is exactly where transformation fuckups begin. When we involve people too late, mistake communication for involvement, or expect managers to become natural change leaders without preparing them for the role. In When Transformation Hurts, we will look at transformation from a less polished perspective – through the eyes of an HR function that had to reinvent itself along the way to help others navigate change. Drawing on our experience at Seyfor, I will share what we underestimated, what we would do differently today, and what we learned along the way about people, change – and ourselves.