From Noise to Clarity | Track 9

TRANSFORMATION LEADERSHIP: What Transformation Leaders Do Differently #28

Visual Thinking for Transformation | Post 28 of 30

Before you read: think of the best leader you have seen navigate a genuine transformation, not a change of process or a system upgrade, but a real shift in how the organisation works. What did they do that others did not?

Leadership that works well in stable conditions does not automatically work well in transformation. This is one of the most underappreciated truths in how organisations approach major change, and its consequences are visible in transformation after transformation where capable, experienced leaders who have earned their positions through genuine excellence in managing complex, stable operations find themselves struggling with a different kind of challenge that their existing capabilities do not fully address. The organisations that assign their most experienced operational leaders to transformation programmes without recognising that the challenge is categorically different are not making a bad people decision. They are making a category error.

The difficulty is not that stable-condition leadership is wrong. It is that transformation requires something additional, and that something additional is not primarily a set of skills or competencies that can be developed through training. It is an orientation, a way of standing in relation to uncertainty, to evidence, and to the people who are most affected by the change. That orientation is either present or it is not, and it determines more about how a transformation will go than any combination of technical leadership skills or programme management capability.

After observing many transformations across many different industries and organisational contexts, the same orientation appears consistently in the leaders whose transformations succeed and is consistently absent in those that struggle: they are more curious about what is actually happening than they are committed to what was supposed to happen. That single sentence contains more practical guidance about transformation leadership than most competency frameworks manage to produce across dozens of pages, because it describes an orientation rather than a technique, and orientation is what produces consistent behaviour across varying circumstances rather than skilled responses to anticipated ones.

“Transformation leaders are more curious about what is happening than they are committed to what was supposed to happen.”

The first difference: they update their picture

The most consistent differentiator between leaders who navigate transformation well and those who struggle is how they relate to new information that contradicts the plan. A stability leader who encounters evidence that something is not working as intended tends to treat that evidence as a problem to be managed: the message needs to be improved, the timeline needs to be tightened, the people who are not following the plan need to be redirected. The evidence is processed as an obstacle rather than as information.

A transformation leader who encounters the same evidence tends to treat it as data: something has changed, or something about the situation was not understood correctly, and the picture needs to be updated. This does not mean abandoning the plan. It means distinguishing between the plan and the current reality, holding both, and making explicit decisions about how to respond to the gap rather than pretending the gap does not exist.

This difference in orientation produces entirely different behaviour under the pressure of a transformation that is not going as planned. The stability leader doubles down on the original approach, increases communication about the plan, and manages the deviation as a performance issue. The transformation leader calls a meeting to examine what the deviation is telling them, updates their understanding of the situation, and makes a deliberate decision about whether to adjust the approach or maintain it with a clearer picture of what they are maintaining against.

In one case, a technology organisation was twelve months into a platform migration when usage data showed that adoption in one significant business unit was significantly below the projection. The programme director’s first instinct was to address this as a communication problem, to produce better materials and escalate the expectation for adoption. The CEO asked a different question: what is the low adoption telling us about the unit’s experience of the platform that we have not been hearing? That question produced an investigation that revealed a genuine usability problem with a specific workflow that was critical to that unit. The problem was fixable. It had not been fixed because nobody had treated the low adoption as information rather than deviation. The CEO’s orientation, curiosity over commitment to the plan, changed the quality of the response and the outcome that followed.

“Deviation from the plan is either a performance problem or information. Transformation leaders check which one it is before responding.”

The second difference: they stay close to the reality

Transformation leaders tend to maintain a closer, more direct relationship with the actual experience of the transformation than is typical for leaders at their level. They attend operational meetings not only to give direction but to observe and to listen. They have direct conversations with people at different levels about what the transformation actually feels like from where those people sit, not what the status reports say it looks like. They treat the gap between what they are being told in formal reporting and what they observe directly as information rather than as noise to be managed or discounted. This orientation requires a deliberate effort to resist the natural upward and outward pull of senior leadership, which increasingly insulates leaders from the operational reality as a transformation grows in scale.

This is harder to maintain than it sounds. As transformations grow in scale and complexity, the natural gravitational pull on senior leaders is toward governance, stakeholder management, and board communication. The transformation leader who stays close to the reality is choosing to spend time and attention on something that does not always appear on the governance agenda, because what matters most in daily operational reality is rarely what matters most in the formal reporting structure. The leaders who make this choice consistently report that it is the most valuable investment of their time in a transformation, not because it is dramatic but because it calibrates their understanding in ways that nothing else can.

In one case, a senior leader managing a large-scale operational transformation made a practice of spending one half-day per fortnight in a frontline setting, not to check on performance but to understand what the transformation was actually asking of the people doing the work and whether those people had what they needed to do it. These sessions consistently surfaced information that had not appeared in any formal reporting: specific friction points in the new system, confusion about decision rights that had never been resolved, examples of the new approach working well that deserved to be recognised and shared more widely. The senior leader described these half-days as the most useful hours she invested in the programme, not because they produced dramatic revelations but because they maintained a calibration between the official picture and the lived reality that she could not maintain from the boardroom alone. Several decisions were changed as a result of what she observed in these sessions. None of those decisions would have been changed on the basis of the formal reporting alone.

“The transformation leader’s most important source of information is not the status report. It is the conversation that never makes it into one.”

The third difference: they protect the people navigating the hardest parts

The third distinguishing characteristic of effective transformation leaders is an active and specific attention to the people who are bearing the greatest costs of the transformation, not just the people who are most visible in the change or most vocal about it, but the people for whom the transformation is genuinely hardest, often because they have the most to lose or the least support in navigating the change. This attention is not general goodwill. It is specific, directed, and expressed through concrete acts rather than through statements of care in town halls.

This is different from general empathy or good communication about the transformation. It is a deliberate orientation toward the human cost of the change, expressed through specific acts of recognition, support, and protection. Transformation leaders notice when someone is struggling and respond directly rather than hoping the struggle will resolve itself or flagging it as an HR matter. They create specific support for the roles and the people who are being asked to change most significantly, proportionate to the size of what is being asked. They acknowledge publicly when the transformation is asking something genuinely difficult of the people going through it, rather than maintaining a relentlessly positive public posture that leaves people feeling that their difficulty is invisible or illegitimate.

In one case, a transformation had significantly changed the roles of a group of senior specialists whose expertise had been central to the organisation’s identity for two decades. The transformation was necessary and well-designed. But it had asked more of this particular group than of almost anyone else in the organisation, and the internal communication about the transformation had consistently celebrated the new direction without ever acknowledging what it had cost this group to get there. They had given up something real and significant, and nobody in a position of authority had said so out loud. The transformation leader intervened specifically, calling a session with this group that was explicitly designed to acknowledge what they had been asked to give up, to hear what the experience had been like for them, and to recognise the specific contribution they had made to making the transformation possible. This session did not change the transformation or reverse any of the decisions that had affected this group. It changed how the group experienced having been through it, and the difference in their subsequent engagement with the organisation and with the next phase of the transformation was significant and lasting.

Transformation that leaves the people who navigated the hardest parts feeling unseen produces a specific kind of damage to the organisation’s capacity for future change. Those people remember, and what they remember shapes how they engage the next time they are asked to carry something difficult. What transformation leaders do differently, in this as in everything else, is they notice what is actually happening rather than only what was supposed to happen, and they respond to what they notice with the kind of directness and specificity that makes the response feel genuine rather than performative.

What is the hardest part of your current transformation for the people who are navigating it, and does your leadership response match the size of that difficulty?

Next time, we look at Leading Change You Did Not Choose.

If this resonates, you will find a deeper exploration of how to see business situations clearly in The S.T.A.R. System: Applying Visual Thinking for Career & Business Success, available on Amazon.

Ai Yat Goh is the co-author of The S.T.A.R. System: Applying Visual Thinking for Career & Business Success(Marshall Cavendish Business, with Sherrie Low). Follow Ai Yat on LinkedIn and Medium.

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BK HAN Candy Chan RH Malini GOW Hui Yian Germaine Kwek Lawrence Lee Joelynn Koh