Had never made their expectations clear to the people they were leading. Two out of every three. Before a single change had been announced. Before anyone had said the word transformation.
Read that again, because it undoes a comfortable story.
The comfortable story is that people resist change. The truer one is that most people were never aligned to the job in the first place, so there was nothing solid for the change to land on. You cannot move people toward a change when they cannot see the ground they are standing on. Most of the everyday job sits in fog, and they have been working inside it the whole time.
Unclear does not mean silent. It means the expectations lived in one head — the leader’s — and everyone underneath was left to guess, infer, and fill the silence with a version of the job that may or may not match.
A physical plant supervisor once told me: “They want us to embrace the strategic plan, but they don’t even know what I do.” He was not being difficult. He was being accurate.
The method is almost blunt in its simplicity: each person writes down what they expect of the people they work with, and what they believe those people expect of them. Then you match the two. Where they agree, you have alignment. Where they diverge, you have distraction — someone pouring real effort into things nobody asked for, or waiting, quietly, for things that are never coming. We call that gap the Distraction Index™, and it is almost never small.
One to forty-seven. One person summed up his entire obligation to his boss in a single line: “I think you expect me to do my job properly.” His boss had written forty-seven specific, separate things he expected that same person to do. Both of them believed communication between them was fine. It was not. It had simply never been made visible, so both were free to assume it was working.
Multiply that by every relationship in a department, and you have the real state of most organisations before change ever arrives. Not resistance. Fog. People are not refusing the map. There never was one.
This is why sequence matters. The error is not that the change was timed badly, something you fix by moving it later on the calendar. The error is that it was deployed before the ground beneath it was solidified. You are not building on a foundation. You are building on quicksand. The change becomes one more thing the leader can see clearly and the team cannot, and people do with an unseen change what they always do. They keep doing the job they already know, and the change never moves.
Alignment is not the soft part you get to if there is time. It is the precondition for the hard part working at all.
Do the alignment first, and the change has solid ground to stand on. Skip it, and communication, training, and executive sponsorship are just weight on quicksand. All three assume a clarity that two-thirds of your supervisors never established.
AI does not soften this. It sharpens it. Drop a new system onto a team that was already guessing about what their own supervisor wanted, and you have not added a tool. You have thickened the fog. The technology will work exactly as designed, the adoption will still fail, and everyone will blame the software. The software was never the problem. The fog was.
So before the next initiative, ask the question that sits underneath all of it. Not how do we get buy-in for the change — that comes later. First: do the people you lead actually know what you expect of them on an ordinary Tuesday? Not because you think you told them. Because you have checked.
Two-thirds of the time, the honest answer is no. Clear the fog before you ask anyone to move.