Why Change Can Make Capable Teams Look Dysfunctional

A new function can exist on the organizational chart without becoming part of how the organization actually operates.

Organizations often respond to significant change by creating something new.

A transformation office. A strategic workforce planning function. An integration team. A centre of excellence. A new role responsible for organizational effectiveness, digital transformation, or enterprise change.

The logic is understandable. If something matters, give someone responsibility for it.

But assigning responsibility and creating organizational legitimacy are not the same thing.

A function can have a leader, a mandate, executive sponsorship, a budget, and capable people and still remain peripheral to how the rest of the organization operates.

The question is not simply whether the function exists. The question is whether the organization around it has changed sufficiently for the function to matter.

Credibility and legitimacy are different

When new functions struggle to gain traction, the explanation often turns toward credibility.

The team needs to build relationships. Demonstrate value. Understand the business. Earn trust. Establish expertise.

All of those things matter.

Credibility belongs partly to the individual. It develops through judgment, consistency, expertise, temperament, relationships, and experience. Organizations cannot simply declare someone credible and expect everyone else to believe it.

But organizational legitimacy is different.

Legitimacy comes from the surrounding system. It is created when responsibilities, expectations, decision rights, governance mechanisms, processes, and accountabilities make the function part of how organizational work gets done.

Consider a strategic workforce planning function.

The organization can hire excellent workforce planning professionals and ask them to support business leaders. Those professionals can build sophisticated models, understand operational requirements, and develop strong relationships. But if leaders are not expected to incorporate workforce planning into strategic planning, budgeting, investment decisions, or capacity discussions, the function remains largely optional.

Its people may become credible.

The function has not necessarily become legitimate.

Creating one role often requires changing several others

This is where organizational design becomes important.

Organizations frequently create a new function while leaving every surrounding function essentially unchanged.

A transformation office is established, for example, and given responsibility for enabling transformation across the business.

But what has changed for everyone else? Are functional leaders now accountable for delivering the transformations within their areas? Have planning processes changed? Have decision rights changed? Are transformation priorities incorporated into performance expectations? Are governance forums designed to resolve the cross-functional decisions transformation inevitably creates? What happens when operational priorities conflict with transformation priorities?

If the answers remain unclear, the transformation function may have been structurally created without being operationally embedded. That creates an unusual organizational condition: one part of the organization has been made responsible for enabling work that other parts of the organization have not been made responsible for doing.

The resulting difficulty can easily be interpreted as resistance, weak stakeholder management, insufficient influence, or poor change leadership.

Sometimes it is.

But sometimes the organization has simply placed too much responsibility for transformation inside the transformation function itself.

Personal influence cannot compensate indefinitely for organizational design

Strong leaders can overcome weak systems for a while.

A respected transformation leader may persuade colleagues to participate. An experienced workforce planner may build relationships that create access to important decisions. A talented integration leader may personally coordinate work across functions that lack formal mechanisms for doing so.

This can look successful.

It can also conceal an organizational weakness.

If the effectiveness of a function depends primarily on the personal influence of the individual leading it, the organization may have created a personality-dependent operating model. That becomes visible when the individual leaves, priorities change, executive sponsorship weakens, or the organization encounters greater resistance than personal relationships can absorb.

The problem is not that credibility is unimportant. It is that credibility and organizational legitimacy perform different jobs.

Credibility influences whether people trust the person. Legitimacy helps establish whether engaging with the function is part of their organizational responsibility.

Effective transformation often requires both.

Executive sponsorship is necessary, but it may not be sufficient

Organizations sometimes attempt to solve this problem through executive sponsorship. A senior executive publicly supports the initiative. The transformation leader reports into an influential office. Leaders are told that the work matters.

This can provide important political and symbolic support.

But sponsorship becomes meaningful operationally when it changes what happens elsewhere in the organization.

If a transformation office is responsible for helping Marketing redesign its go-to-market model, for example, Marketing must have a corresponding responsibility to participate in that redesign.

Otherwise the transformation team is effectively selling transformation to the organization one conversation at a time.

That is not necessarily transformation governance. It may simply be internal persuasion.

The distinction matters because large-scale organizational change eventually encounters competing priorities, constrained resources, disagreement, uncertainty, and trade-offs. At that point, personal influence alone is unlikely to be enough. The organization needs mechanisms through which those tensions can be resolved.

The operating model has to authorize the change

This is why creating a transformation function should be understood as an operating-model decision rather than simply a staffing decision.

A new function changes the organization only when the relationships around it change too.

Who must engage it? At what point? For which decisions? With what authority? Through which governance mechanisms? Who remains accountable for the resulting change? What happens when functions disagree? What behaviours and outcomes will leaders be held responsible for?

These questions establish whether the new function is embedded in the organization's operating model or merely attached to it.

The same principle applies beyond transformation.

Organizations routinely create functions intended to improve coordination across existing boundaries: strategy, workforce planning, enterprise architecture, organizational effectiveness, data governance, sustainability, integration, innovation.

Their success cannot be evaluated solely by examining the capability of the people inside them. We also have to examine the organization around them.

The broader leadership question

There is an understandable tendency to diagnose organizational difficulties through the people closest to the problem.

If a transformation team struggles to gain traction, improve stakeholder management.

If workforce planning is not being used, demonstrate its value.

If an integration office cannot coordinate decisions, strengthen its influence.

Those may be appropriate interventions.

But they should not be automatic ones.

Before asking whether the people leading change have built enough credibility, leaders should ask a more structural question:

Have we created the organizational conditions that make their work legitimate?

Because creating a function is a structural act.

Making that function part of how the organization actually operates is an operating-model act.

And transformation requires more than people who are capable of leading change.

It requires an organization designed to let them do it.

A question for reflection

Where in your organization are people being held responsible for outcomes that the surrounding operating model has not actually given them the authority, mechanisms, or corresponding obligations in others to produce?

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