Vargas’s organization has been trying to convince people to adopt a chief transformation officer since 2016 and has the data from 10 different studies to back up that role’s critical importance. However, he gets a lot of resistance. Those studies found something unsurprising but important: People act on their own best self-interests. This “people element,” as Vargas calls it, leads to the resistance to change “because change comes with fear,” he says.
That fear, according to Vargas, drives the machine that leads to an 85% disengagement rate among employees. At the heart of it is an unwillingness to tackle change. When change comes too late or doesn’t come at all, employees stagnate.
What may have been an exciting, innovative workplace becomes a quagmire that fails not only to engage employees but also to meet serious challenges. “Look at how many companies filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. recently,” notes Vargas, “and most of them were already suffering. The pandemic just broke everything.”
Without the ability to change as the world changes, many organizations folded like a lawn chair under the unexpected but not insurmountable pressures of the pandemic. Having an executive dedicated to change allows organizations to move swiftly on their feet instead of being victims of change.
