When Senior Leaders Lack People Skills, Transformations Fail
by Jenny Fernandez
“Mindy,” a chief transformation officer at a growth biotech firm, was six weeks into a transformation when the data told her what her senior team couldn’t see: Engagement scores had dropped 40%. Turnover had doubled. And no one at the executive table had seen it coming.
Mindy’s CEO reached out to engage me as a coach for the senior leadership team, explaining, “Mindy doesn’t need help with strategy. She needs help getting her leaders to see what’s actually happening with their people.” He had watched the transformation lose momentum not because the plan was flawed, but because his senior leaders, though technically brilliant, consistently misread how people were responding to change. They would present a restructuring plan, see no pushback in the room, and genuinely believe everyone was aligned. Meanwhile, their teams were silently disengaging.
“These weren’t bad leaders,” Mindy told me in our first session. “They were promoted for domain expertise and strategic thinking. Reading people was never part of the job description.”
This situation isn’t unusual. In a 2021 McKinsey survey, fewer than one-third of respondents reported that their company transformations succeed over the long-term. Why the lackluster results? Weak aspirations, an unconvincing “why,” poor execution discipline, and failure to sustain performance have been cited as common leadership and organizational pitfalls. In my experience, it’s also the human element: leaders who can’t detect resistance, misread silence as buy-in, or dismiss valid concerns as complaints. When the people leading the transformation can’t read the people living it, even the best-designed initiative stalls.
In my executive coaching and leadership development advising work, I see this pattern repeatedly: Organizations bring in leaders to drive change, but without the ability to read people accurately, even the strongest teams drift toward misalignment. What looks like change resistance is often a leadership perception gap. Leaders who respond effectively don’t begin by replacing their teams or scrapping the plan. They begin by closing the gap between what leaders perceive and what people actually experience. The following strategies can help.
1. Diagnose the Gap Without Making It Personal
When transformation stalls, the instinct is to question commitment. But the deeper issue is often perceptual, resulting from leaders who genuinely can’t see the disconnect between their intended impact and their actual perceived impact.
My client “David,” CEO of a medium-sized food manufacturing company, discovered this firsthand. He brought me in to coach his VP of operations, who was reading resistance as laziness. “He would say things like, ‘people just need to get on board,’” David recalled. “But when I shadowed him in meetings, I watched him dismiss valid concerns as complaints. He genuinely did not see the difference.”
Research on C-suite skill gaps suggests that this isn’t about intelligence or effort but is instead a structural issue, where organizations often promote for technical skills instead of interpersonal ones like inspiring others and building relationships. For example, Gallup found that companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the managerial role 82% of the time, and its research suggests those decisions are often driven by prior-role success or tenure rather than demonstrated management talent.
Together, David and I designed “reality audits”: structured check-ins where he observed his senior team’s interactions with their direct reports, then compared their perceptions to actual engagement data. He would ask his VP, “How do you think that meeting went?” The VP would say, “Great, everyone’s aligned.” Then, David would show him the anonymous pulse survey from that same team: 8 out of 12 people said they didn’t understand the rationale for the change being discussed. That gap became the teaching moment.
The first reset is diagnostic. Before labeling anyone as resistant or tone-deaf, quantify the perception gap. Ask yourself:
- After key meetings, can your senior leaders accurately predict how their teams feel about the direction?
- Is there a measurable gap between what leaders report and what pulse data shows?
- Are concerns being surfaced through backchannels rather than in the room?
- Have you distinguished between leaders who dismiss feedback and those who simply can’t detect it?
Leaders are often responding rationally to what they see. When what they see is incomplete, confusion and stalled transformation are predictable.
Pro tip:
Conduct “Shadow & Debrief” sessions. Have an executive coach or trusted peer shadow each senior leader through two or three live interactions: a team meeting, a one-on-one, a skip-level conversation. Afterward, compare what the leader observed to what the observer saw. This isn’t surveillance; it’s calibration. Leaders rarely resist the feedback when it comes from a shared experience rather than a report.
2. Build the Skill Through Repetition, Not Training
When leaders struggle to read people accurately, I’ve found that the default response is often to send them to another workshop. That’s a reasonable impulse, but on its own, it’s rarely sufficient to change behavior. The Center for Creative Leadership research, the source of the well-known 70-20-10 framework, shows that roughly 70% of leadership development comes from challenging on-the-job experiences, 20% from coaching and feedback, and only about 10% from formal training programs. Leaders build interpersonal judgment primarily through repeated real interactions and structured feedback, not through one-off classroom events.
That distinction matters in practice. Leaders improve their interpersonal judgment most through structured reflection on real interactions—such as debriefing actual conversations, decisions, and meetings—rather than through simulations or slide decks.
Before engaging an executive coach, Mindy had invested in a training program for her leadership team. Post-training assessments showed measurable improvement, but three months later, the same blind spots had returned. The problem wasn’t knowledge. It was the absence of ongoing practice and real-time coaching.
Working together, we shifted her approach. Mindy began running “micro-debrief” rounds: five-minute conversations held immediately after interactions where leaders had to answer three questions:
- What did you observe about how people responded?
- What do you think they were really concerned about?
- How did your response land?
The key is doing this dozens of times, not once. For Mindy, that meant debriefing after one-on-ones, team meetings, and even email exchanges. After six months, her senior leaders started catching their own misreads before we did.
Pro tip:
Create a “perception vs. reality” protocol. After key meetings or town halls, ask each senior leader to predict team sentiment on a 1–10 scale. Then run a quick pulse survey asking the same question. Show them the gap. Do this monthly during transformation periods. Leaders become significantly better at reading people when they see their prediction errors quantified.
3. Redesign the System to Compensate for the Gap
Sometimes the transformation timeline is faster than the learning curve, and you can’t wait for skill development.
David faced this reality six weeks into his manufacturing transformation. He realized his operations leader wasn’t going to develop better people judgment fast enough. He had two choices: remove him or restructure how decisions flowed.
He chose restructure. McKinsey’s transformation research confirms that initiatives with embedded informal influencers—people given real ownership who act as thought partners to line leaders—had higher success rates than those relying solely on senior leadership’s judgment. Transformations that build interpersonal and leadership skills alongside technical execution are 1.5 times more likely to outperform peers.
David created what he calls “dual-channel decision-making”—not just a communication strategy, but a structural workaround for his operations VP’s blind spot. Every major transformation decision ran through two tracks simultaneously. The first was strategic: His VP of operations led formal rollout through the standard chain of command. The second was relational: His head of organizational development (OD) visited each department in parallel—with the VP’s full knowledge and buy-in—with the explicit charge of surfacing resistance patterns that weren’t reaching the top, and the authority to bring those patterns directly back into the decision process. The OD head didn’t just observe; she shaped what happened next. David designed around the gap instead of pretending it wasn’t there.
The approach slows down some decisions, but it prevents the much costlier slowdown of having to reverse course when you discover your team has been silently resisting for months.
Leaders may consider another structural fix: Change how you get information. The OD head also implemented “skip-level focus groups” every two weeks during the transformation. HR facilitated anonymous sessions where employees two or three levels below senior leadership could speak candidly. The output went directly to the CEO. “It completely bypassed the executives who couldn’t read the room,” David said. “Was it ideal? No. Did it keep the transformation from derailing? Absolutely.”
Pro tip:
Create an early warning system. Identify three to five people at each level who are willing to be candid observers. These aren’t formal roles, but informal relationships. Give them a direct channel (private Slack, monthly coffee with CEO, confidential email) to flag when leadership is misreading the organization. Compensate them for this labor. Treat their input as strategic intelligence.
4. Know When to Replace, Not Develop
Not every skill gap can be bridged through structural workarounds. Sometimes the answer is straightforward: Your senior leader isn’t equipped for the transformation you need to run.
McKinsey’s research on organizational health is instructive here: Companies that invest in developing people but avoid accountability consistently fail to convert that investment into performance. The ones that outperform do both: developing talent rigorously while maintaining clear standards for what good looks like.
David took that seriously. He spent eight months trying to develop the VP’s people judgment, restructuring his team, providing coaching, and creating clear feedback loops. Over time, David realized the VP wasn’t coachable. He fundamentally saw people as resources to be deployed, not humans to be understood. That mindset doesn’t change.
David eventually moved the VP into a strategic advisory role and brought in someone with stronger interpersonal capability. The hardest part isn’t making the decision. It’s recognizing that someone can be technically excellent and still be the wrong leader for a transformation that hinges on human dynamics.
Consider a structured six-month development period with clear milestones. This specific duration reflects common practice among experienced executive coaches, who typically design multi-month engagements to allow enough time for new leadership behaviors to be practiced and reinforced. Peer-reviewed research on leadership coaching shows that a structured coaching intervention can produce significant improvements in leaders’ role efficacy and trust in subordinates compared with leaders who receive no coaching, suggesting that a focused, multi-month coaching window can be sufficient to detect meaningful behavioral change. The signal you’re looking for is sustained behavioral change, not episodic improvement.
Pro tip:
Use the six-month window—not just as an observation period, but as an active investment. Pair structured coaching support with clear, measurable milestones for interpersonal improvement. Track whether teams’ perception scores improve, whether resistance patterns shift, and whether feedback moves from back channels into the room.
. . .
The transformation you planned may fail if the people leading it can’t read the people living it. The good news? Once you diagnose the gap, you have options. Build the skill systematically. Redesign the transformation to compensate. Or make leadership changes that match capability to requirement. What you cannot do is ignore it and hope people judgment magically appears when the pressure increases.
Editors’ note (April 6, 2026): This article includes additional points of evidence and refinements to some of the arguments.
Fonte: hbr.org
