When a rollout lands badly on the frontline, the productivity hit is the part most leaders can see. The cost they miss is quieter: it's the people who quietly start looking elsewhere, and it's rarely the people you'd guess.
In Episode #138 of Frontline Innovators, Kapil Dua joined Justin Lake to make the case that the real downside of a poor change isn't friction at launch. It's the slow erosion of trust that follows. Kapil is Associate Director, Change Management and Issues Management at a Fortune 100 company, and he has spent more than a decade leading large enterprise rollouts. The conversation moves from why the strongest performers leave first to how he runs change at the 20,000-person scale without losing the human part.
The biggest cost of a failed rollout is the people you can least afford to lose
Kapil's framing flips the usual conversation about change. Leaders tend to focus on the upside they're chasing. What they underweight is what happens to people when the change feels painful. Friction at the frontline doesn't just dissolve, it leaves a residue. As Kapil put it on the show, you're not going to lose your worst people, you might lose your best. The people who quietly leave are the ones with options, and they leave because they've decided the workplace has what he calls a taxed relationship with change.
That makes a change assessment more than a planning exercise. It's a read on the culture that future rollouts are going to land in.
Be honest when a change is going to mean more work, not less
A lot of rollout communications fall apart because the message doesn't match the reality on the ground. If a new tool actually adds five or ten minutes per task, telling people their lives will be easier is a fast way to burn credibility. Kapil's advice is simpler than most playbooks: tell the truth. Explain the trade. Explain what the company gets from the data they're now collecting, and what's possible on the back end because of it. Treat people like adults who can hold two ideas at once: this is more work for me right now, and I understand why we're doing it.
This shows up in his rule, repeated through the episode: right things, for the right reasons, in the right ways. When words and actions line up, people feel it.
Your cynics are your most useful people
Kapil's approach to skeptics is one of the most practical ideas in the conversation. He doesn't avoid them. He goes looking for them. The reason is straightforward: the people who speak up about what's broken are giving you real information. The apathetic ones aren't telling you they're fine, they're telling you they don't feel safe to push back.
He separates what someone is saying from how they're saying it. He gets curious about the perceived versus the real, and he pressure-tests the perceived. By the time the rollout reaches the wider audience, every objection has already been heard once, and the cynic is usually on board. Kapil told Justin he has converted every cynic he's worked with using that approach.
Two wolves, and why change always feeds the dark one first
Kapil shared a story he heard years ago in a sales role: a grandfather tells his grandson there are two wolves inside him, one full of fear, anger, and resentment, the other full of love, peace, and proactiveness. The grandson asks which wolf wins, and the grandfather says whichever one you feed.
Change, almost by default, feeds the dark wolf. It creates loss of control and unknowns, and people fill that gap with negative thoughts. That's not a defect of frontline workers, it's how humans handle uncertainty. Which means the job of a change leader isn't to argue people out of those emotions. It's to design the rollout so the gap doesn't widen in the first place: more honest communication, more empathy, more language that meets people where they are.
How to run change at the 20,000-person scale
Empathy on a team of twenty is easy to imagine. The harder question is how that scales when a single rollout touches more than 20,000 stakeholders. Kapil's answer is layered. He invests in a network of a few hundred people who sit between him and the frontline, leans on hundreds of one-on-one conversations to pressure-test assumptions, and uses that network to pull up the right frontline voices when he needs them.
He's also relentless about language. Every email, every slide, every internal label gets stress-tested for misreads, not just for clarity. The question isn't only "can this be understood?" It's "can this be misunderstood?" If the answer is yes, it needs another pass. Once the language is right, adoption stops needing convincing. People see it and they get it.
What success actually looks like
One of the more unexpected reframings in the episode comes near the end. Kapil's first wave of the current rollout reached almost 5,000 people, and they shut the support channel down two weeks early because the questions never came in. As he put it, a great change isn't celebrated, it's seamless. People came to work Monday the same way they came to work Friday, and they got on with their day.
That standard, no disruption, just thanks, doesn't get a launch party. But it's the version of success Kapil is chasing, and it's the one that compounds. He closed with a statistic from his sales days: it takes ten good experiences to erase one bad one. Get the first rollout right, and the next one starts on much steadier ground.
About Kapil Dua
Kapil Dua is Associate Director, Change Management and Issues Management at a Fortune 100 company, where he leads enterprise transformation focused on process alignment, operational excellence, and user adoption. He brings more than a decade of experience driving large-scale SaaS implementations and a practical, people-first, data-driven perspective on leading change across complex organizations.
Listen to the Full Episode
PODCAST
Listen to Episode #138 - You Don't Lose Your Worst People, You Lose Your Best
Kapil Dua joins Justin Lake to explain why the real cost of a poor rollout isn't friction at launch, it's the strongest performers who quietly start looking elsewhere. A practical conversation on running change at scale, converting cynics, and designing rollouts that feel seamless on the frontline.
Episode Transcript
Justin Lake: Welcome to the Frontline Innovators podcast. I'm your host Justin Lake, and we have another great guest for today's show. Today's guest is an associate director of change management and issues management at a Fortune 100 company, where he leads enterprise transformation efforts focused on process alignment, operational excellence, and user adoption. With over a decade of experience driving large scale SaaS implementations impacting more than 20,000 stakeholders, He brings a practical people first and data driven perspective on leading change across complex organizations. Please welcome the frontline innovators, Capella Dua. Hello, sir. How are you?
Kapil Dua: Hey Justin, thanks for having me man. I really appreciate the warm welcome and the kind words.
Justin Lake: I'm so glad you're here. Been looking forward to this conversation since we got to meet a few weeks back on our prep call. I want to kick the show off as we often do with kind of a big question right out of the gate, which is what do you see as the biggest operational consequence of poor adoption on the front lines?
Kapil Dua: Yeah, excellent question, man. I think when we think about adoption, I think everyone gets so caught up in the benefit that we're trying to get, right? The upside that we're trying to get. And I don't think we consider the downside enough. think a lot of the times the downside is considered as, well, things will just keep continuing the way that they have been. And in my experience, I think we miss out the people part, the culture and the impact to how people feel once something like that fails. So when you try to accomplish something and it's painful or the adoption isn't there and people don't like the way that it feels, that doesn't, people don't just like roll with it, right? It creates sort of a, an agitation like, man, that was annoying. Like I gotta come to work and I gotta deal with this. and when you have a mess like that, you know, you're not going to lose your worst people. You might lose your best people, right? And you might impact your culture in a way that now when you move forward with a future change, you're going to have to consider that. And, you know, as a part of change management, some of the foundational things that you want to do is evaluate a change assessment across the organization. And part of that is to understand, well, what's the relationship that the company has with change, right? And when we say that it's the relationship the people within the company have with change. And so if they have this relationship that's a taxed relationship, relationship from a previous failure, you better hope that you don't lose your best people who say, you know what? I'm not up for this. I can go somewhere else. I got plenty of options. I was just saying because A, B, and C, right? And I don't think we consider that enough. I don't think we talk about that enough.
Justin Lake: Right. So let me be devil's advocate for a minute. And because I hear you and I think you're spot on about the impact on people, I can see certain leaders in the organization maybe saying this is their job. This is just what they need to do. Like and I feel I love the way that you started off by talking about, you know, what's the downside? I think that's exactly what I want to try to learn more about from your perspective. But if the downside is just positioned as kind of the warm fuzzy side of things, like, people are going to be less happy with their job. I'm not saying that that's not important, but I am saying I think that's perceived sometimes as unimportant. And so how do we put a measurement around that in a way that we can attach a more traditional kind of business metric to that we can speak to kind of the economics of what that downside might cost?
Kapil Dua: Excellent question. I think a lot of companies are actually after that metric and they're trying to understand that metric. think a lot of the times through surveys, right? They want to get directly to the people. They want to get the survey into the hands of the people. And it's always, Hey, this is anonymous. We won't know who you are. Please just tell us how you feel. Tell us what's really going on because there is going to be some sort of a polishing of feedback as it moves up the chain, right? That's natural thing that happens within hierarchies and nobody wants to deliver any sort of bad news. It's you want to believe You want to believe that it's not so bad and and I think that that's a super important part where I see a lot of optimism when it comes to difficult things and I see a lot of pessimism when it comes to This feedback that people provide that something isn't right, right? And it's sort of seen as, you're being difficult or you're being a Debbie Downer or you're over-exaggerating it. And I think in leadership, it's really easy to have that thought of, that's your job. Like, what's the big deal? Just deal with it. I deal with problems all day. You can say that, but you can't say that to people, right? To some degree, that's how they feel. And it's of incorrect in a way. to just say, well, it's not that big a deal because that's a big deal to me. Right. And in some cases we can argue all day and we're seeing the generational shifts happen now where you're seeing the younger generations have less patience for challenges and have sort of, check out quicker and they want to move quicker and they're, sort of. I think we're labeling it as laziness or impatience in some instances. I don't know if that's entirely true. think there's some real opportunities there for us to examine, like how do we manage and how do we look at people? And then I think there's a gradient there, right? I think we try to make everything a black or white thing. And then there's some gradient there to think about what we're doing.
Justin Lake: Yeah, I do think that there might be a little bit of a generational component to this. You know, I think the younger generation has perhaps been raised with happiness as a higher value for them. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. There's probably some lessons that some of us older people on the journey can appreciate with that. think maybe the challenge is
Kapil Dua: No.
Justin Lake: the disconnect between maybe some of the younger workforce and some of the senior leaders who are making big economic decisions. And maybe there is a disconnect there between, you know, if we invited the CFO of your organization to come and participate in this conversation, would he or she say, yeah, that's great. I'm sure they want to be happy. But at the end of the day, how do we make the economics of that work?
Kapil Dua: Yeah, I I think understanding the economics of keeping people happy is looking at when people are happy, they work their best, right? When people are at work and they're enjoying their work and they're in an environment and an atmosphere where they feel appreciated and they feel like they belong and they feel like this is the right place for me, what you'll end up seeing is people take ownership. And once people take ownership, they show up differently. Right? It becomes a part of their identity. It's this is, this company is a part of me and I'm a part of it. And I'm going to come up here and I'm going to pick up that piece of trash that I see on the floor, or I'm going to help my teammate or, I'm going to tell somebody that I saw this one thing. And I mean, we've seen this happen time and time again in companies that create that kind of a culture. And what you end up happening is people work a lot harder. just naturally because they want to be there. And when they do that, you just create value and they have an ownership stake and that creates not just that additional value there, then they're looking forward to how can I make this better? How can I provide that feedback? And so when we think about wanting to create a continuous improvement culture, right? I think leaders want to look at that and say, well, just tell me where I can save money. And it's like, that's not how people think. in the trenches and in the front lines, they're looking at it and saying, how can I make my day easier? Because if I can make my day easier, that should translate into value for the company because now I can work faster. I can work smoother. I make less mistakes. Right. And I think we miss that disconnect as we're looking for dollars and they're looking for a better atmosphere. And something that I do want to touch on that you mentioned of people making large financial decisions. I think we forget that. We come to work for money. And when we look at the scale of the economics of living and existing today, and when you think about your frontline workers or your lower level workers, which is the vast majority of the workforce in a company, they're also on the lower end of the economic pay, right? And so when you're coming to work,
Justin Lake: Yep.
Kapil Dua: the problems that they're dealing with at home and in their normal life look very different than an executive, right? Than a VP. And maybe not, right? I know that executives and VPs can overspend and go outside of those, but to some degree, your life is a little bit more comfortable economically, right? You're not worried about your mortgage. You're not worried about your meal that's gonna be next month, whatever that might be, or daycare. So I think we miss out on that in a big way.
Justin Lake: Yes. So how this is great. Actually, you just took me off track because I was I wanted to ask something else. No, but this is actually this is a better path that I want to pull on this thread a little bit. How do we I mean, at end of the day, what's interesting about what you came back with was we were talking about the economics at kind of the macro level inside an organization about making big financial decisions about systems implementations and overall operational efficiency in the company.
Kapil Dua: Sorry.
Justin Lake: you came back and talked about kind of the microeconomic side of things, which is that at the end of the day, we're asking people on the front lines of the business to make change and they have personal change to deal with and just they're trying to live their life. You know, sometimes paycheck to paycheck one, one week or one month at a time. And so that actually is, it's a bit of an imbalance, but I guess the part that I always feel is missing somehow is For that senior leader who is trying to address topics at a big macroeconomic level, how come we can't do a better job of positioning what you just described as the means to their end? If we support the men and women on the front lines better and help them get what they need, then we too, at the macroeconomic, the bigger picture, we can also get what we need. And I think... We haven't quite figured out like how to make this less confrontational. It actually shouldn't be confrontational. It should be a win-win on both sides. I feel like that's what's missing.
Kapil Dua: Nice one. A hundred percent. I think about this so much. You have no idea. And cause I'm just a fan of business and a business nerd to some degree. And I just enjoy the topic in general. I have a two pronged response. I think when we look at public companies, there is a massive pressure to deliver on a year over year basis. And that massive pressure creates, a really difficult, curates a much shorter runway for decisions and change. And when you think about having a super short runway for change, and if I was to give you five years to do something or one year to do something and it's something big, well, on the one year scale, that sounds really scary and you really could break something. Maybe on a five year scale, it sounds fantastic. And finding a way to position yourself to do a multi-year change and deliver year over year is extremely difficult. So I think from a public company perspective, I think the pressures of stock, the stock market shareholders, the returns that everyone requests every year. And I, and I think to some degree it's toxic because it's this perpetual growth forever and ever is what's expected. Right. That's not realistic, but That's what is the charge. And so I get it from an executive's perspective, right? It's not the Montgomery Burns sitting at the top of the gold tower, you know, saying excellent, you know, they're sort of sitting up there going, my gosh, we got to make these numbers or we're all going to be, you know, in a bigger challenge. And so how do we do that? And how do we optimize and how do we get value now? And so from a public company, think it's that from a private company perspective, from my own personal experiences, right? Can't speak for every company in the world. A lot of the times those companies are developed and created by really smart, amazing visionaries. And to some degree, it's really hard to break out of that mold and pull yourself out of that and put the business at the center of it and, let it go. And by let it go, mean, Are you going to let everyone work on this group project or is this yours? Right? Is the C-suite in the leadership going to say, well, we know best, this is what should happen. Or are you truly going to make the business at the center of it and let others provide their feedback and input and know that that doesn't mean that you lose control. It means that you get to get.
Justin Lake: in this.
Kapil Dua: others on the bus to participate and to provide you valuable insight and feedback from portions of the company that you've never seen. And I'll use a really easy example. If you've seen the TV show, Undercover CEO, I love it. It's excellent, right? You have this CEO who goes and works like the lowest job in the company and all of them.
Justin Lake: I have.
Kapil Dua: all of them have revelations and they're just like, my gosh, I never knew, I never understood, I never saw. And I remember this one that always sticks out to me of a lady who was running from her shift to her time clock so that she had enough time to eat.
Justin Lake: Totally.
Kapil Dua: and she would run to the time clock to check out to have 15 or 20 minutes to eat and then had to hurry up and put her lunchbox back and run back to the clock to check back in. He's like, what are you doing? She's like, this is what I have to do. He's like, why? She's like, this is the rules. This is how much time I have. This is what my lunch looks like every day. And it was heartbreaking for him, right? It's just like, oh my God, I sit in my office and eat whatever I want for however long I want. I think it's some of that. know I went off on a tangent for a moment there, but that's how I sort of see it interconnect. And I know from my own personal experiences within my family. So my family's in the restaurant business and they've been in the restaurant business for a long time. It's not something that I aspire to be a restaurateur, not for me. I've worked in it for years. Excellent business for those that love it. My father loves it. And I've learned from my father over the years of
Justin Lake: Yeah.
Kapil Dua: He's had employees and you'll be surprised to hear this in his restaurants. He's had employees for 15 or 20 years that are the same, same people. And he does that because he's just like, I treat them right. said, I treat them like humans. pay them well. They treat me well. They treat my business well. He's like, does that mean that sometimes I have to correct people? Sure. Does that mean that sometimes people are revolving in and out? Sure. He has turnover, but it's not.
Justin Lake: Wow. Of course.
Kapil Dua: It's not 70 30, right? It's the 70 30 in the opposite direction where seven out of 10 employees have been with him for over a decade and they help him weed out the people that aren't going to fit. And so it's a really, really wonderful thing that you can, if you can build it, it's a little bit of a slower ramp up to profit, but it's, it's an extended period of profit once you get to that level. And I wish people just had a little bit more patience in their business to build something great like that.
Justin Lake: Yeah.
Kapil Dua: with the people that are there and let them ride the journey too.
Justin Lake: Yeah, I think that's a really important point. And it's so interesting that you mentioned your dad in the restaurant business, because I wanted to share an example of some of the leaders that I've been most impressed with that I think lead the most amazing teams have this priority. in check and we've heard very public stories about companies like Southwest Airlines and Disney and things like that. But the sequence goes associate experience, customer experience, and then profitability. And if you focus on the first, that leads to the second, which ultimately leads to the third. As I even just say that out loud, and I listened to you tell the story about your dad's business and what you've witnessed over time and how he's led, that doesn't mean that you never have turnover. That doesn't mean that you don't ever discipline an employee and all of those other things are still important to the business. But how you stack rank the priorities so that they're not competing with each other. You're not in this is really I think, as I as I think this through with you here, it's the whole point of this podcast is to say, these things profitability, and associate experience are not in tension with each other. They actually serve each other. But if we put the associates first, and we help them navigate through change, and we enable them to be successful in their role, then all the other things happen. And we actually, it truly becomes the cliche win win scenario for everyone. But for some reason, I feel
Kapil Dua: 100.
Justin Lake: that we have a hard time with for leaders who don't automatically see that connection and maybe just don't buy into that religion or see it as such, right? It's hard to then come back to make a case if we were sitting down with the CFO, how do we make that case for this? And I haven't heard, you know, a consistent set of of metrics and maybe what I'm asking for, maybe it just takes a confident leader to say, I really don't care what the spreadsheet says. This is how we're going to run this business.
Kapil Dua: Right.
Justin Lake: because I think it's the right thing to do and then let the numbers speak themselves as part of the results.
Kapil Dua: All right. And I think what's interesting about what you just said is when we look at spreadsheets, we're looking at lagging indicators. We're looking at what happened. Now, if you have forward facing projections, right? Here's my, here's my challenge of projections. They don't account for change. They don't account for change. They assume everything will maintain and be the same. And so when you look at something and you say, well, this doesn't operationally make sense. And it's like,
Justin Lake: Mm-hmm.
Kapil Dua: I can show you that this will net improve everyone's experience at work in these ways. And I can quantify that. But what I can't quantify is what they'll do after. Once I've improved how you do this, I can't quantify how you'll feel now and what that'll lead you to after that and what that will. In turn what additional value that'll create because like I'm a big proponent of this and I don't know if this is on topic or not We sort of have two sides of our minds, right? Like we have emotions that are found in fear anger resentment, right all the all the frustrating things and then we have all the wonderful things right love harmony peace Proactiveness, you know all the all positive things and whichever one of those people are feeling changes how they do everything, how they interact with one another, how they speak to their manager, how they speak to your customers. And I can give you examples of that and I'll tell you a really great story. And this is just, this is a story I heard and this is like from a really old job when I was in sales and it was from a gentleman who has now passed away. But he was an amazing, very charismatic leader and he told us a story of two wolves. Have you heard this?
Justin Lake: Mm-hmm. I haven't.
Kapil Dua: Excellent, so this is a very well-known, he didn't come up with this, but it's just a very old story that people tell, is there's this grandfather, and he's talking to his grandson, and he was explaining to his grandson, said, inside of you there's two wolves. One wolf represents everything that's dark. Right? The deceitfulness and fear and hate and all those things. And then you have another wolf who represents light and goodness and all love and all these wonderful things. And he said, they're constantly fighting with one another. and he goes, you know, the kid is intrigued. He's like, what do you mean? He's like, they're inside of you and they're constantly in this battle. And he's like, well, who, wins the battle? Who wins? And the grandfather leans in and he said, whichever one you feed and I know that's super deep to me because it's super real. mean, that's what we go through as people, right? When you start your morning and you're driving to work, you have a flat tire. How do you feel now? How is the rest of your day going to go? And it takes a moment if you don't have the emotional fortitude. to sit there and say, know what, things happen, I'll be okay, let me enjoy the rest of my day, let me not ruin anybody else's day. It takes a lot to do that. And as we go through challenges, any sort of deviation from what we expect creates that emotion. And so when we think about change, and I explain this to people in my team and people that I work with, when we think about change, Change creates that emotion. Change doesn't create happy emotions. Change creates a sense of loss of control, a sense of unknown. And when we do that, our mind wants to fill that gap. And typically it fills that gap with negative thoughts, right? It's rare that our imagination goes, well, hit, you know, I got a flat tire. Maybe I'll hit the lottery later. You know, no one's thinking that. And so the same thing happens with change at work. And it's like,
Justin Lake: Yes. Yes.
Kapil Dua: You expect people to show up to work and turn off being human. It's like, man, it doesn't work that way. Like we're, we're human. That's what we are all the time. We're super emotional creatures. and so part of leadership is managing how are your people feeling that day? And not because you want them to work well, as good as you really care about them as people. And I know that the people that I work with know that about me. and I wish people really saw people that way, but it's difficult, right? Like we're all human. And it's like I said, the pressures, the pressures of having a great profit. Force you to sort of put yourself in that boat, but. I've seen examples of companies, I know businesses that when you balance that formula right and you care about people and you have enough cash to withstand tough times, you'll eventually find your way to profit and you'll keep on growing because the team there will for certain take ownership and then provide back to the business because they feel like they belong there, like they were cared about. so.
Justin Lake: Yeah. Well, let me go back to one of the things that you said, because I agree with you and I'd like to pull on this thread a little bit further. You mentioned that when there's a gap in understanding that people tend to think about kind of the dark side, right? Maybe the dark wolf takes over a little bit. And I think you're absolutely right. And so I think about this not to take away from the human context, but to keep it front and center in the context of an enterprise massive change initiative, right? If we don't communicate thoroughly and we leave gaps in understanding with the teams who are going to be impacted by this change. I don't know why this is. I'm not educated in this in psychology, but I do think people tend to drift into, this is going to affect me negatively. It feels to me there's an opportunity to just
Kapil Dua: Mm-hmm.
Justin Lake: communicate and fill that gap with an explanation, right? We're still going to have naysayers. We're still going to have cynical people in the process with some of the massive scale that you've been part of. I want to explore that a little bit more. You're never going to have tens of thousands of people who are all biased towards positivity and optimism, right? I get that. But we do need to look for ways to maybe level up some of those people who are impressionable.
Kapil Dua: Yep.
Justin Lake: to say, no, yeah, this is gonna be difficult, but here are some of the gaps to fill in your lack of understanding so that you don't fill that with negativity. First of all, do you agree with that? And if you do, then how do you go about actually executing on that? Like, what would you advise?
Kapil Dua: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And what I would advise is, and I'll just tell you the approach that I take, I want the cynics. I want to know who are the people that believe it cannot get better and why, and why the change will fail. And more often than not, those become your biggest champions. And it's surprising because a lot of the times I feel like those people aren't listened to. and because of the way that they say it. And I try to detach what someone is saying from how they're saying it. And I think that becomes people's challenge. And so in most cases, I try to uncover what is the current state. And this is sort of like, have my own list that I create of like,
Justin Lake: Yeah.
Kapil Dua: what I look for and how I approach it. And it's figuring out what's real, whether real or perceived. And I think that's some of the challenge that happens is some people who lean towards pessimism sort of have this perceived negativity or there's this perception that it's going to be this or it's going to be that. And I want to talk to that person because one, they might be right, but two, let's find out because if I can convince this person, And I can understand how should I best message this. And that's more often than not, the people that speak up are the skeptics. And I really appreciate that because I think what's harder for me is when someone doesn't talk at all and they're just like, okay. And it's like, I don't want you to be apathetic. I want you to care. I want you to care so much that you tell me that this sucks and it's going to fail. And it's like, man, tell me why let's talk about it. And they get surprised because I approach them with this like golden retriever energy. And I'm what is this dude's problem? Like now he just wants to know all my stuff.
Justin Lake: Yes.
Kapil Dua: I'll just unload all my complaints and then it becomes man. Thank you so much for sharing this I Really want to get to the bottom of it. Why do you believe that this is gonna be this? Why do you believe this is that and you start to understand the reality that people are seeing because even though the apathetic person What person what is perceived as an apathetic person? It's just someone who doesn't feel comfortable speaking up, right? I don't want to share because I might get in trouble or I don't want to share it because I'm afraid of public speaking or I don't want to share it because what if I'm the only one and I look dumb? So I love the people that speak up and that even if they're negative, I'm okay with that because I try to separate that and you get the golden nuggets from them of how can I pitch this? How can I sell it now? And now that you've shared with me, Hey, can I get back in touch with you? Right? And then you run it by them. And then when they're on board, it's great. Cause then you know that if I convinced you, others are going to be on board as well. And I think that goes to a whole nother part that people miss in the change is I genuinely try to figure out the right thing to do. And I tell my team and it's a, it's a thing that we say and I forget who I didn't, someone quoted this. forgot the person. It's the right things. for the right reasons in the right ways. And that's super important because when you're there and you're genuine about wanting to make people's lives better, they feel that. And they feel that because your words and your actions align, right? I'm not just there to optimize and make the company some more money. Of course, that has to be a conversation. There has to be a business case. We have to discuss how this is gonna be profitable. But like we discussed earlier, I genuinely believe that all of our interests are common. There's a common alignment. If I make your life easier, that should mean a more optimized process. And that should be more profit for the company too, as well as a better experience for you. And so I love the skeptics. I think they're super helpful in helping find out what's wrong.
Justin Lake: What if the change isn't actually going to make everyone's life easier? Have you been through... Well, I can give you an example of this and maybe you've been fortunate to not seeing this example, but I've seen a lot of field-based applications where we're asking the field to collect more data as an example. And the...
Kapil Dua: than what's the point. Yeah, pretty sure. Mmm, got it. I know this one. I have a great response whenever you're ready.
Justin Lake: The payoff is to the organization, we have to have better data, we need to have more information about the assets or more details about the customer that we're visiting and stuff like that. And so in that if we bring it down to that micro unit of activity in the field, it might take that person five or 10 minutes more to do that work. But there's a massive payoff back to the business and the overall customer experience, the overall efficiency of the business. And so that individual who are asking to change may actually be paying a slight time penalty. themselves and so the message of saying hey, it's just gonna be easier make your life better may not actually be truthful I and the reason that I'm so sensitive to this is in part because I think a lot of times this is the the reality of the change but it's communicated the way that we just talked about right where hey This is gonna make your life better and the skeptics are like no, it's actually probably not gonna make my life better Like why are you lying to me? You know, what are your thoughts?
Kapil Dua: No, it's an excellent question. I've been through this. So let me, let me, let me pivot to this, this sort of experience. Right. And the way that this gets approached is we really have to quantify when we get more data, what will that mean? All right. Will that, will that mean better for the company? Will that mean that we now have the ability to figure out what else we can sell the customer, whether it's cross sell, upsell, whatever that might be. Right.
Justin Lake: Mm-hmm. Right.
Kapil Dua: I think once you've created a culture where people have ownership, although it may not be exactly right for you in this moment, and it requires more time for you, understand on the back end what that means for all of us, right? And connecting it back to that. And I think we fail at that. And you're right. If you're going to approach that conversation with, Hey, this is going to be better and easier for you. like, wait, I didn't have to write any of this crap before. Now I got to put in 20 pieces of information. I got to do this on this little iPad.
Justin Lake: Right.
Kapil Dua: And I had this exact experience happen. If I can share a short story, um, once I get to it of how this change was rolled out, but in the way that I've always approached that is, Hey, you have to be honest. You have to be honest with people. mean, people aren't, people are smart. People are not, well, you're just going to trick them. Like, I mean, they're going to know. Right. And so being honest to say, Hey, I know this a little bit more work up front for you, but I want you to understand how you're enabling the company.
Justin Lake: Please,
Kapil Dua: and what this could mean on the back end, right? And it has to be real. And you're enabling us to understand our customers better than we ever have. And from that, hopefully we create new lines of business. We create new opportunities for sales. We create additional programs where you can then earn more money. I don't know what that looks like. I don't know when and how that can happen. But at the moment, we don't have visibility into our customers. Don't you feel that that's an issue? make them a part of the problem and understand it, right? And I think so often we don't want to go through the hassle of explaining ourselves and we have to. I don't mean this any kind of weird way. I feel like in companies, people start to treat people like children. You infantize people and it's like, people are adults. Like they'll understand if you explain it and they'll get it. Now, if they don't agree,
Justin Lake: Yes.
Kapil Dua: and they don't want to be a part of that journey, maybe they shouldn't be on the bus. That's a whole different conversation. But if you're genuinely doing the right thing in trying to enable your company to do it better, I think there's also an opportunity to say, hey, I know this is frustrating upfront to collect all this information. If you have an idea of how we can do this better, please let us know. But for the time being, this is how we're going to have to approach it. to start moving us in the right direction so we can get some transparency.
Justin Lake: I think your point too about bringing some of the skeptics into that discussion is a great idea and something that I would encourage everyone to do. And it's difficult. It's difficult, especially for those of us. I think you and I are similar in that we probably lean towards the optimist positivity side of things, so I will admit, I find it draining at times to work with people who are natural cynics and and pessimists. can understand intellectually the value of doing it. And so I but I have to force myself into that conversation because it immediately drains my energy. My energy is largely driven on positivity and ambition of moving forward, right? However, is something else you said I agree with, which is sometimes maybe even often, those cynical folks are actually right. They are pointing out some inherent flaws that we may have missed. Maybe that's the part that's frustrating. Yes. Yes. And so to avoid their input is to our own peril. Right. And so I think is difficult and maybe as frustrating as it is, if we can turn that into a learning exercise for ourselves, listen to them with intent.
Kapil Dua: Yeah, yeah, but they're speaking up because other people are just like, I guess it's fine, you know, and you don't really know.
Justin Lake: and being genuine and authentic about truly listening, not to just check the box, but to actually understand from their perspective, I bet we'll learn some things that we may have otherwise missed. And I agree with another point that you made. If we can, I don't remember the exact word you said, if we can convert them, if we can bring them on, if we can take their cynicism and use that energy and turn it into something favorable, I think that comes down to how we communicate back to them, right? To say, Pell, you mentioned this the last time I was out here, you mentioned this thing and at first I didn't understand it, but I've actually taken the last couple of weeks to really dig into that and you know what, you were right. And so here's what we did. Here's what we're changing. Here's the impact that your feedback had. Now I need your help to take this out to your other colleagues at your facility, right? Or your site or whatever the opportunity is there.
Kapil Dua: Yep, yep, I agree. I have converted every cynic, I can say that, in that exact way. And it's been very helpful. And I'll tell you, that initial pessimism, it drops away pretty quick. Because when they really start to feel heard, the shield goes down, and now it's not approached with this sort of crass, negative sort of tone. It's like,
Justin Lake: Yeah, I think Yeah.
Kapil Dua: wow, you're really listening to me. All right, let me tell you what I think is really happening. And I've said this to others, but they have not listened and they don't always realize, right? Like the tone and the way your message comes across isn't always fun to hear.
Justin Lake: Yes, I think I as you're describing this, I'm thinking of a story. I won't share too much detail, but there was a team member that was didn't fit the rest of the core values. And I think the cynicism came with that. And to the point you made before, they were just not right. They didn't earn a seat on our bus. Right. So that person wasn't worthy. they were going to be better suited in an environment that was a better fit for them with better core value alignment. I think those are the exceptions. If we're hiring, if we're building teams with the right types of people against our core values, most of the people should not fit that scenario. And I would say, I agree with something else you just said about the cynicism and them being very vocal with that cynicism, I think often comes from them feeling like they're not being heard. so if we can... open our ears to what they have to say, not only can we use it as information, but we can probably solve part of the problem at the same time with that individual, right?
Kapil Dua: Right. And just one thing real quick. I want to hit this because it's important. You mentioned core values in my experiences, and I don't think this is always the case, just in my experiences with the cynics that I've dealt with. It's never been a question of core value. It's always been a communication style. And I think, I think that's, have to differentiate that is, do you just communicate that way or are you, are you genuinely not aligned with the core values? And I think I think that's an important distinction and it's important. And I agree with what you're saying that you have to recognize that too, because you can't just be naive and say, well, that's just how they talk. It's like, no, they genuinely don't believe and they're not aligned to what we're genuinely trying to accomplish. And, you know, maybe this just isn't the right fit, right? And that's okay too. Like there's nothing wrong with that.
Justin Lake: So what we've talked about, I feel like as we're kind of navigating through these examples here, we're thinking in terms of individual people, right? But one of the things that I was so excited to have you on the show to discuss is the challenge of doing these things at scale. And one of the things you and I have discussed in our notes together, you've led change from 20 people all the way up to tens of thousands of people. And I think a lot of the things that we can talk about can sound a little bit idealistic if we were talking about 20 people, I run a small company with less than two dozen people. And so change, you know, implementing change in my organization, it's tough enough as it is. But at end of the day, I'm talking about a couple dozen people, right? In large organizations where that change affects 1000s or 10s of 1000s, or maybe even more than that. We can't go out and like, have a one on one conversation with every skeptic in the org. So What are the methods, how we kind of take these ideas and then bring them in at scale so that we can have the same goals and maybe some of the same tactics, but figure out we can't be everywhere all the time.
Kapil Dua: Thanks. Yeah, really excellent question. And I'll share, be candid about how I've accomplished this. And, you know, I'm in the middle of a really large implementation at the moment and part of it has already been completed at three to 5,000 people impacted. Now we're onto the bigger portion. That's 20,000 plus people. it's, and the initial release was international as well as domestic. was global implementation. This one is just domestic, but it's just a massive scale. And part of what you have to do is you have to understand who are the people in between. And I say that to say this is if you're in a large scale company, right? So in the small company that you mentioned, you have 20 something people. If you had a thousand people, would it just be you and a thousand people? No, you would introduce new layers and there would be a lot more layers in between you and them. Not because you desire to be the king on the hill, but because that's the reality of how you manage businesses. And so when you think about a massive skill like this, what I focus a lot on is what is my network? Who are the people that can connect me from where I am to where they are? And how do I engage with them and align with them? And I'm going to be really honest, hundreds and hundreds of conversations. It is a lot. It's extremely taxing. And I very much believe in alignment. I very much believe in preparedness. And it takes a lot of that.
Justin Lake: Mm-hmm.
Kapil Dua: a long time to ensure that you are prepared for something of that scale. so hundreds of conversations initially, I try to break up stakeholder groups into layers. And when you look at your stakeholder groups and layers, you start to understand that every layer has a purpose within the business and has a perspective and an experience in the business. And layer after layer, you can connect yourself from the layer that you are to the layer that you're impacting. And Part of that also allows you to have that support system. That support system can pull up the front line as you need them. And because they're the best ones to know. So can I talk to all 20,000 impacted users? Absolutely not. Can I lean on my network of 100 or 200 people? that can pull up the people that can give me those best experiences? Absolutely. Can I engage with them in really meaningful one-on-one conversations and ensure that the people that they've pulled in are the people who have well-rounded experience, people who are business-minded, people who get the stuff that we're talking about, right? The people who can help connect those dots to say, we've heard this and this and this and that. I need to know how real that is. I need to know how real each one of these things are. And you're always going to start with a million assumptions and you have to pressure test every single one of those to ensure and you hone and you hone and you hone. And over a course of time, you end up having a really solid executable strategy and it really ends up working well. And, and, you have to create that network of people. And you have to engage with them and that's where you're going to find your cynics. And so you might not get cynics from the frontline, but you'll get cynics in your layers. And there's been many times where I go, Hey, Justin, you have a lot of great feedback. Why don't we table this for now with this large audience? I would love to give you some one-on-one time. Let's get together. And I really want to know what you have to say.
Justin Lake: Is that your signal that hey, you're bringing up a lot of negative stuff that I'd rather tackle one on one?
Kapil Dua: Yeah, it's sort of the signal and it's not always negative. It's, you are capitalizing everyone's time, right? And there's nothing wrong with that. It's, Hey, you need some more attention and I'm more than happy to give you that. But this meeting is for this entire audience and it's unfair to everyone else. And I don't say that either. They sort of pick up on it pretty quick. Like, Hey,
Justin Lake: Yep. Yep.
Kapil Dua: I really appreciate the conversations we're having. think it's super valuable. I would love to step aside and have a direct one on one to make sure I hear you out fully. And I want to give you the time. And I really mean that because I really want to know, because that's the feedback that I gain to then say, hey, this is what we uncovered. And so I love, and I try to pass this on to everybody. It's not just me being optimistic. It's the reality that
Justin Lake: to give you the time that you deserve. Yeah.
Kapil Dua: Every time I come across a challenge or a difficult conversation, I can't get upset about that. I get excited about it because I'm like, great, I'm getting making progress. If it was easy and no one said anything, that's terrifying. I want to know that something was wrong and I can fix it. And I, but you have to be vulnerable. And I think that's some of the difficult part for change agents or for any leader for that matter is. You don't want to be vulnerable and say you don't know something because you're supposed to be the one that knows something. You're supposed to be the one that knows everything, but you're not. You're human too. And so it's stepping in and saying, Hey, this is what I know for certain, but this is where I need your help. So it's not an admittance of I don't know or I'm confused or I'm scared. You don't need to say any of that, but it's more so the, I need your help. Right? These are the things that I'm certain about. These are the places where I need your feedback to make sure that this is going to be the best implementation it can be in order for us to achieve these goals. And these are the goals we're going for. Do you agree with those? Does that make sense to you? How do we frame that right? So that all of our users understand. And I mean, I'll give you a super silly, funny example, right? When we're going on a vacation, the selling point for me, is different than the selling point for my wife and is a different selling point for my kids. Right? My kids want to know that there's an ice cream machine that they can get unlimited ice cream. My wife wants to know that there's going to be times where she can relax and maybe hit the spa, maybe grab a drink. And I want to know that I'm going to get an opportunity to jump in the ocean and, you know, swim and do whatever I like to do. So I think it's the same thing as we end up putting on a specific hat or a specific lens. And we have to understand that everyone has their own lens. Right? And it's not just the role that they sit in, it's the experience they've had in the company. It's the experiences they've had before then. And you'd be, you'd be so shocked to understand, their viewpoint and what they can add to what you're trying to create. And it's not to defer it, it's to build it. And I think you have to have that attitude that we're all going to build this together and we're doing it together.
Justin Lake: Yeah. I hear so much coming through and this is true in our previous call as well as today. So much comes through about your deep empathy and compassion for the people at the individual level. And that's the thing that always kind of makes my head spin a little bit. It makes perfect sense on a one-on-one basis. But then when we start to talk about thousands or tens of thousands of people, It just seems so difficult to maintain that personalization at scale. And so when you talk about this network, this change network, do you have terminology? Do you refer to that as change champions or are there other terms? I'm not a change management professional, so I probably get these terms all wrong. But like, what do you call that network of people? And how do you kind of herd the cats to make sure that you're able to move the needle at scale through essentially representatives of sorts.
Kapil Dua: Excuse me. Well, from a formal change management perspective, they're called change agents or change champions. But here's the thing. People don't know what that means. And so I don't approach it from like, hey, you're my change agent. You're my like, hey, you're here to help.
Justin Lake: Okay. Yeah. your terminology, not for them, right? So you're already you're already demonstrating empathy, you're putting yourself in their shoes and saying how would they want to hear this message, right?
Kapil Dua: That's my terminology, right? They don't know that. Right. Right. Right. And it's like, Hey, we all support, and this is the real conversations we have. We all support the frontline. We support them from this perspective. You support them from that perspective. I need your help to understand your perspective so that we can all do this together and we can make this happen for the frontline. Because that's what's most important. If this is successful for the frontline, we will all be successful. We will all be on the stage. We will all be a part of that. And that's where I think it's important is I love to share the glory. I'm not a one man army. Come on, I can't do everything. I can only do what I can do. I love to have everybody on the stage with me and say, look, we're all going to be holding hands celebrating this. And I tell them that. And I make that very clear that, look, when this is done, this will be a success that we all made happen. And as far as getting it to the front lines, I really want to mention this because this is, actually took some of these notes to share. Cause I think this is where people miss it is how do I still get the front line to get it? And this applies to frontline. It applies to anybody who's actually doing the work is You need to make it easy enough that it doesn't need explanation. And the way that you accomplish that is language. Language is extremely important. That's how we communicate. It's how we understand how I say a word and the word that I choose to say gives you a completely different meaning and a completely different understanding. And I touch on that a lot. I'm 100 % I was beating that drum of, how are we saying that? What exact words are we using? And when you use the right language and you format it and you make it look nice in the right ways, that's most of what it takes to create that change and for people to take ownership. Because when they see it and there's an immediate understanding, I don't have to, I don't have to convince you. You see it and you get it. And I think this is where that Amazons of the world get it right is, well, every time I go to their site, I know exactly what everything is and what it means. There's zero confusion anywhere. It's unbelievably intuitive. And so you have to meet people where they are. So when people start to use language, I go, well, that's a great word, but are they gonna understand what that means? I well, what do you mean? I'm like, well, we call them change agents. What the hell does that mean? What do they know what that means?
Justin Lake: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kapil Dua: And so that's sort of the conversation that I try to have with everything is, so what will the reports look like? What will the communications look like? And I really want to hit this because super important is, yes, if I put it that way, it can be understood. But did you look at it to see if it can be misunderstood?
Justin Lake: Hmm.
Kapil Dua: read it through that lens is can I accidentally understand it some other way? If so, it needs homing. And that's a super important thing that I push for everybody for every email that I write, for every slide deck that I create, for every communication we have, with not only should they understand, is there should be zero room for misinterpretation. And that is super important when you want adoption, is it has to be that easy.
Justin Lake: I think that is probably going to be my favorite insight from our conversation today because I think, you know, you're you're challenging my bias. I probably when I write and when I speak, I am trying I always say the responsibility of communication is with the communicator or not the communicative. Right. So if I'm the one
Kapil Dua: Mm-hmm.
Justin Lake: delivering a message, it's up to me to make sure that it gets delivered not for the person that received. So on that, think we are in agreement. I think I probably don't apply the test to my communication exactly the way that you just talked about. I think that's a really, really interesting way. That's not a QA of grammar necessarily, but like, how is this message going to potentially be misconstrued on the other side? Are there ways that maybe I could tweak this to make sure that we can eliminate some of those? know, potential misunderstandings. I think that's a really, really good test to apply to our communications.
Kapil Dua: Yeah, absolutely, man. I love it. I love this stuff. It's so much fun. There's nothing more exciting than seeing people adopt something and then they're genuinely like, okay, cool. I got it. And that happened with one of our, first implementation we had, it was almost 5,000 people. And like we shut down our support channel two weeks early because we didn't get any questions. And people were just like, they're like, no, we got it. It makes sense. Thanks. They were just moved, went about their day. And that was the interesting thing is,
Justin Lake: Yeah. That's.
Kapil Dua: A great change isn't celebrated, it's just thanks and they just keep it moving. It's no disruption, it's seamless. that's the thing, people want it to be, I didn't want it to be anything. It was seamless and people came to work on Monday the same way they did Friday and there was no interruption to what they needed to do for their core work. That's the most successful change you can have.
Justin Lake: That's a really, all right, maybe I'm gonna get two insights out of this one. That's actually a really interesting point you're making. And I think because I'm a problem solver kind of mindset, you know, my, am naturally attracted to the things that are going wrong so that there's something there for me to fix. But you raised a really interesting point that the best examples of change didn't feel disruptive, right? That's the whole point.
Kapil Dua: Ha ha.
Justin Lake: And that's a really good example. how do you then take that and apply that positive experience to the next change? Right? Like it's almost harder to make a case for doing something in the future when the past didn't feel like it was painful. If it was painful in the past, to say this the other way around, if it was painful in the past and you're approaching another similar initiative, you could say, Hey guys, remember eight months ago when we did that other thing and remember how uncomfortable that was? We're going to do things differently now because of that. It's almost harder to do that when it was successful in the past. So have you found ways to communicate the opposite of that, which is to say, remember when we did that last implementation and it felt like just another day at the office? That's what we're gonna do here.
Kapil Dua: Yeah, I mean, that's the communication that we've had. So since we've had release one go really well, as we work on this next release, I remind everyone of that. go, Hey, it went great. I said, it went so good that no one even said anything. I said, there was no questions. was no problems. I said, was there hiccups here and there? I mean, I'm sure a couple of people were confused, but by and large, We went about our day. We literally resumed VAU after a week, right? And we were ready with this, like we had the war room and we had all the support channels going and we had our partner standing by and ready for the fire that didn't happen. And it was a really wonderful experience. And so I do talk about that often. And I say, you know, I said, the intention of this is to create a situation where it's such a seamless cut over. that people come to work and they just keep doing what they're supposed to do. And I think we get so excited about the change that we want everyone to get so elated about the change. And they're just not gonna, know, they're just to them, it's like if I'm a sales rep and I come in and now I have a new thing to use or a new tool to use, and it looks a little different, but I can still understand the words and the buttons and it's easy to use. So I'm like, all right, cool.
Justin Lake: Yeah. No.
Kapil Dua: Right? Like, are you going to have those? Yeah. You might have two or three people that are like, this is really neat. I like the new interface. It's really exciting. But for the most part, people are going to be like, all right, thanks. And that's what you want. And that's sort of what we've shared with people is this is a net new experience, not because it's going to be a better experience and it should be seamless, but there's going to be a removal of some activities that are. distracting people from doing their work today. So in this case, it is gonna be a better experience. And that's what we've shared with people is some of the concerns people have is, and this is a great topic to talk about is they're like, well, you're cutting over at a really busy time of the year. And it's like, well, look, it's busy all year, but let's say that you're right. What we are trying to put in place is gonna be an application that should bolster that.
Justin Lake: Yeah.
Kapil Dua: The intention is not to make it disruptive. The intention is to be so seamless that now I am even more focused on my core responsibilities and I'm not distracted with, well, let me take these notes here and let me go check that there because now we're in a new world with new experience that is supposed to be better. And those other distractful activities are no longer necessary, right? That's the intention. And so, I love that we had that experience because we can then draw from it. Because the worst part is the added pressure of, hey, we know it didn't go well the first time, but we're really trying our best to make it go well this time. That's not the energy I want to have. I want to be able to stand up there and say, we did a great job the first time, and this is how we did it, and we're going to do it again. But also, we're talking about what we didn't do right.
Justin Lake: Right.
Kapil Dua: Right? So as seamless as it was, you always have to have a post-mortem, right? You can't be so egotistical and full of yourself that there wasn't opportunities to do it better. And so there were things that we could have did better and we're doing that now. And so you have to be a student of what you do and continuously try to hone the way that you approach things, not only in the way that you communicate, but in the way that you work, right? We can't. believe in change, if we're not also constantly looking for ways to change and do things differently. And I think that's super important.
Justin Lake: Yeah. We've got to wrap this up. Is there one more or two more pieces of advice you would leave to folks? And I'd love to kind of orient you toward the challenge of change at scale. You're such an experienced guy in that realm of really dealing with this across pretty massive scale in terms of number of people and locations. And I'm just curious if you have any final words of wisdom to share with our audience.
Kapil Dua: Um, I would say, um, I'm the how guy. How is it really going to happen? How is it really going to look? And most importantly, how is it going to feel? And I think that's super important because I think you can have all the parts and pieces, but if it doesn't land, then you don't, it doesn't work. It's not right. And you only get, you only get one shot at a first experience. And I don't know if you've known the statistic and I, and I know it because I used to be in sales. It takes 10 good experiences to erase one bad one. It's a lot. Man, it's tough. Right. Think about it.
Justin Lake: Hmm. I'm not heard that's that. That's really interesting. Is that oriented toward external like customers or is that also true of employees? It's just humans. Humans. Yeah.
Kapil Dua: Yeah. Humans in general. So if I have a negative experience, like if I meet somebody new and it's not a pleasant experience, it would take a lot for you to convince me that that first experience wasn't right. Right. It's just how humans learn is whatever is cemented the first time is sort of, takes foot. takes, it takes hold really strongly. And that's what most beliefs, right. Which is why change in general is difficult. Right. And you have. generational change that has to happen because generations believe a certain thing, right? You have a really good idea of what good music sounds like, what good movies look like, what beauty looks like, what a nice car looks like, right? We all have those from the point in time when we first established those beliefs. And the beliefs about work are no different, and because we're human. And so... I would really push people to get into the details of how are you actually going to do it? What are you actually going to say? What will it actually, what will the buttons look like? Like I've had to sit there and ask people. If you had to sit there, said, let's walk through it. I said, first I'm gonna click that button. And they go, yeah. I go, and then I gotta do this. And then I gotta type this 20 times. And then I have to click seven more buttons. I'm like, have you done this? Have you experienced this? I'm like, this isn't easy. I'm like, this is a really long, difficult process. People don't tend to see that. They see it as, well, it's working. It's accomplishing the task. Which might be true, it might very well be true, but this is where technology and system design falls short. And I'm gonna use sort of a crass example that I tell people. I hope it's not a problem. I explain to people, you don't remember the human part of it, you would design toilet paper made out of sandpaper because it'll get the job done.
Justin Lake: Yep.
Kapil Dua: but it's gonna hurt, right? And so it's the same goes with systems is what are you designing? How will it feel and how will it look for people? You have to get to that level. And if you don't get it to that level, you're gonna miss something. And that's super important.
Justin Lake: think that's great. It's a great way to wrap it up. Kapel, thank you so very much for joining the show and for sharing your wisdom. I've learned a bunch today. We've been going back through and interviewing some of our previous guests on Frontline Innovators from years ago. I have a feeling we're going to see you again on the show at some point in the future. So I'm already looking forward to that.
Kapil Dua: Yeah, absolutely man. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure and I hope everyone has a great, great day listening to this. Have a good one. Bye bye.
Justin Lake: Thank you. Appreciate it.
More episodes are available at https://skyllful.com/podcast.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the biggest hidden cost of a failed rollout?
The cost most leaders miss is the loss of their strongest performers. People with the most options leave first when they decide a workplace has a strained relationship with change, which makes the cultural residue of a bad rollout more expensive than the launch itself.
Why seek out cynics during a change initiative?
Cynics are usually telling you something real. They surface objections early, they pressure-test the plan, and once they feel heard, they often become the most credible voices for the change. Apathetic stakeholders, by contrast, leave you with no signal at all.
How do you maintain empathy when leading change for tens of thousands of people?
You build a layered network of stakeholders who sit between you and the frontline, invest in hundreds of one-on-one conversations, and use that network to pull frontline voices into the design. You can't talk to 20,000 people directly, but you can build a system that hears them.
What does a successful change rollout actually look like?
A great change isn't celebrated, it's seamless. Support questions don't spike, work doesn't stop, and the team comes in Monday the same way they came in Friday. The absence of disruption is the measure of success.
What is the most important question to ask before launching a change?
How will it feel for the people doing the work? Kapil's point is that systems and rollouts that ignore how something feels for the user can technically work and still fail. The first experience sets the tone for everything that follows, and it takes ten good experiences to erase one bad one.