Losing your best talent?!
TL;DR
Your most senior transformation leader is absorbing the system's anxiety. The board. The new CEO. The 17 changes are all happening at the same time. They do not tell you, because that is the job. They are approaching a quiet limit. When they hit it, you will lose them. Replacing them costs you 12 months of context that the new hire will not have. This issue names the signal, the mechanism, and one reply that surfaces who is at risk in your portfolio.
The article covered the following sections:
The signal
What you are about to lose, beyond the headcount
One private session, one return
One question, and a reply
This edition is also for you, the change and transformation professional who is carrying the load quietly. This article channels your voice to the sponsors.
Hello,
This edition is about a pattern I have been watching with sponsors, and one signal in your senior transformation & change people that you may not be reading yet.
🎧 If you prefer to listen to this edition instead, check out the link below to an audio podcast as a deep dive which is AI-generated based on this edition and Jess' intellectual property:
The signal
They have gone quiet.
The most reliable signal that you are about to lose a senior transformation or change hire is not a complaint. It is not a request for a raise. It is not a 1:1 where they tell you what is not working.
It is silence.
They have stopped pushing back on bad decisions. They have stopped surfacing the harder questions in steering committees. They are attending meetings but no longer driving them. They are working the same hours and producing less. They have gone quiet.
You may have noticed. You may have attributed it to the workload or to the program's cycle. The pattern I am watching this year says otherwise.
What you are about to lose, beyond the headcount
The hire is not what you lose. The context is.
When a senior transformation or change leader hits their capacity limit and leaves, you do not just lose a hire.
You lose 18 to 24 months of organisational context. The stakeholder landscape they have built. The political nuances they have absorbed. The decisions they have already made about which programs are real and which are theatre. The relationships they have cultivated in functions that do not report to them but matter for the work to land.
You lose the only person on your senior team who can see what is actually happening in the program, because they have been holding it all together.
The replacement will take 6-12 months to catch up to the context.The transformation pays for that gap.
2 private sessions, one return
Sometimes the intervention is small. The return is large.
Earlier this year, a VP of strategy and transformation I have worked with privately came to me, approaching exactly this limit.
She was working with me privately because there was no one in the system she could confidently channel her inner dialogue to. Two sessions plus an SOS call. Her words: "going on circles, even with all my years of experience and my greys."
The coaching untangled what was tangled.Reclibrating her focus and clarity created momentum.And she was able to take a 3-day break with the family without checking email, for the first time in months.
What that buys her organisation is not productivity. It is the retention of the person who holds the whole program together.
One question, and a reply
The question is not "Is my senior change leader okay?" It is "Which of my senior leaders has gone quiet recently?"
The question to sit with this week is not whether the hire is okay.
The question is:"Which of my senior transformation people has gone quiet recently, and what have I attributed it to?"
If a name surfaces immediately, that is the signal.
Email me with one sentence about which of your senior people has gone quiet recently, and what you have been telling yourself it means. I read every reply.
