Does this sound familiar?
The board approves the business case for transformation, the new platform is licensed, and a Global Capability Centre opens in Bengaluru or Manila with its first 200 hires on the books. Eighteen months later the savings are only partly there, the offshore team continuously waits on head office for decisions, and the onshore managers meant to lead the handover are simply doing the work themselves. Nothing has broken; but the value is leaking away between the steering committee and Monday's stand-up.
You recognise this story, because transformations are now a constant: 72% of large organisations run four or more enterprise-wide transformation initiatives a year, according to a Forrester Consulting study for SAP of 1,007 VP-level leaders. Forrester calls human dynamics "the last mile" of transformation, and it’s in this last mile that majority of the return is won or lost.
The hard-dollar case for the human side
Boston Consulting Group's 2026 research finds that only about one in four transformations captures both short- and long-term value. Where people-centred change management is built in from the start, the likelihood of sustained performance improvement rises by 90%, and those companies outperform peers by 15% in total shareholder return. Gartner arrives at the same result from another direction: organisations with above-average healthy change adoption report twice the year-over-year revenue growth, yet only 32% of leaders say the last change they led got there.
In one Boston Consulting Group case, a global beverage company upskilled 250 leaders before rolling out more than 4,000 initiatives across 24 countries; over 95% of employees understood the program's purpose, supply chain costs fell 15-20% and productivity rose 55%.
Where the value leaks
The primary barriers named by Forrester's respondents were people problems, not technology problems: poor communication of the transformation vision (54%), inadequate training or upskilling (53%) and fatigue from constant change (52%), against a backdrop where 79% of employees have low trust in organisational change. Only 6% of organisations reached Forrester's "leader" tier, and those leaders were about twice as likely as beginners to credit a dedicated change management and training function (38% vs 18%) and early employee involvement (33% vs 16%). A 2026 review of 170 peer-reviewed studies in the Journal of the Knowledge Economy finds culture, skills and leadership recurring as barriers, with many of those in charge lacking the competencies to communicate a clear vision.
The Global Capability Centre (GCC) multiplier. Offshoring is a transformation inside a transformation. India now hosts 2,117 GCCs employing 2.36 million professionals, according to Nasscom and Zinnov. They are no longer back offices: EY's 2025 GCC Pulse Survey found more than half now share accountability for global decisions, yet nearly 80% report that less than 10% of leadership roles are based locally. The work is moving quickly; the judgement, context and trust needed to run it smoothly move far more slowly. PwC India and FICCI surveyed 200 senior GCC executives and put a figure on this gap: unresolved skills gaps could place 19.32% of GCC sector value at stake by 2030. The leadership gaps cited most were change management at scale (58%) and human-AI teaming design (54%), communication and stakeholder management showed one of the widest gaps between demand and supply, and new hires take an average of 8.69 months to become fully productive.
Can human skills be trained?
It is a fair question for a CFO or business leader. A May 2026 World Bank meta-analysis found that training improves socio-emotional traits by an average of 0.46 standard deviations, with the largest effects on openness to new ideas.
So in short? Yes.
That matters, because in the WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025 63% of employers named (soft) skills gaps as the main barrier to business transformation, and they expect 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030.
Whether your business is redesigning work around AI, reworking its operating model, reskilling its people, cutting structural cost, moving work into GCCs or reshoring it, reinventing the customer experience or chasing net zero (most organisations are now doing several of these at once), each transformation succeeds or stalls on the same thing: human skills. AI and operating model change need critical thinking and the judgement to know when to trust the machine. Workforce and cost programs need resilience and adaptability from people asked to change again and again. GCC and offshoring moves need leaders who build trust, communicate and collaborate across time zones and cultures. Customer and business model reinvention needs creativity, curiosity and empathy. That’s why employers rank analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, and leadership and social influence as today’s top core skills. It’s also why GCC leaders say their biggest leadership gaps are change management at scale (58%) and human-AI teaming (54%), not technical know-how.
Five ways to make your business transformation successful
Using GCCs as an example
1. Fund capability alongside the technology
Most GCCs spend around 3% of their operating budget on talent, while 93% of their leaders say it should be at least 6% (PwC India-FICCII). A business case that funds the platform but not the people running it is perhaps better known as a software order. Double the investment. It’s still lest that 10% of your operating budget.
2. Start with purpose, then make change routine
Simon Sinek's work rests on people committing to a clear WHY before giving instructions; purpose gets us moving, and repetition keeps us on track. Gartner's model shows employees are three times more likely to adopt change on time and in a healthy way when leaders turn it into routine - even when trust is low.
3. Develop leaders on both sides of the transition
BCG found that when leaders are aligned on their roles and able to shape their teams' behaviours, the likelihood of sustained improvement rises by 27%. Onshore managers must lead teams they rarely meet, and GCC leaders need the confidence to challenge head office.
4. Involve people early, onshore and offshore
Early involvement was one of the clearest markers of Forrester's leaders, and BCG finds the likelihood of sustained improvement rises by 19% when everyone knows what needs to change, how they can contribute and how their work will evolve.
5. Measure adoption as closely as cost
Only 25% of organisations embed transformation goals in senior-leader KPIs (Forrester). Track adoption with the same discipline as cost, as BCG's beverage client did through pulse surveys, and it earns the same boardroom attention, engagement and action.
Why now?
Any competitor can buy the same AI tools or stand up a GCC. What is far harder to copy is an organisation that can change again and again without exhausting its people, a capability that is built, measured and funded like any other.
Maxme builds the human skills that make the transformation successful, for leaders, managers and teams across Australia, India, the Philippines and Vietnam. If your next transformation or GCC build has a budget line for technology but not for the people running it, let's talk.
The technology was never the hard part. Success is human.
More human goodness you might like:
