Imagine you are leading a change initiative in your organization. Perhaps you want your employees to use a new generative AI tool. Perhaps you want them to follow a new procurement process. Perhaps you’re reorganizing your company, requiring employees to report to new managers—and managers to new executives. Perhaps you’re doing all these things at the same time. In any case, the change will affect your people, and they will need to do things differently.

It might be natural to think of yourself as the customer of this change. The notion is tempting: “My job was to decide on the change and announce it. Now, it’s my employees’ job to deliver that change to me.” And why not? If you can ask your employees to create a commercial product or an internal report for you, why shouldn’t you ask them to make a change for you?

The answer is: because many individuals feel threatened by change, and if you don’t first win them over your change effort is almost sure to fail. We’ve seen it happen many times.