Change is a team sport — so every player needs to own it. Here's how to get everyone involved.
Becoming change-ready requires the whole team, not just a select few leaders.
This column was originally published on Entrepreneur.com on MAR 3, 2023.
Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher, said that change is natural and constant. Nowhere is this adage more alive than in the business world; the entrepreneur's origin story is built on change.
Recently, Frontier Airlines enacted a change by removing its customer service phone number. This leaves customers to find solutions through digital channels. With this change, the customer experience will transform entirely, creating a significant difference in the organization. This approach will allow Frontier Airlines to uncover insights that might inform, validate and challenge its strategy.
Making a bold choice such as this can be difficult, which is why many leaders and founders struggle with change.
Why is change so hard for a growing business?
Many businesses insist on leaving transformational leadership in the hands of a small group of senior leaders or change managers rather than making it part of their team's mission. Maybe because change is so crucial at the beginning of a venture — the scrappy entrepreneur needs to disrupt, innovate, sell their home and live in a basement. Then a company's relationship to change changes.
A familiar disappointment for company leaders is the feeling of getting slower as they grow. The profile of people who start and join a small company is vastly different from those who join as the company grows and becomes more stable. Stability becomes the preference and inertia the enemy.
The demands of a company's growth stage can reveal individuals' unproductive relationships to change. These relationships can be put into three categories. Receivers of change believe change is being done to them. Resistors to change believe they can wait out the change, and controllers of change ultimately believe they can plan and manage their way through it. Being big doesn't have to mean being slow or putting change on the back burner, and entrepreneurs can overcome these unproductive attitudes.
Organizations growing most sustainably continue to disrupt at all stages of growth. The ability to continue to adapt and outpace the changes of the external environment requires change-ready leaders at all levels.
What are the benefits of a change-ready organization?
Companies with change-ready teams can tackle and rise above the challenges of their environments more easily than teams that rely on top-down change management. Companies that insist on only entrusting change to a select few leaders are bound to find a lack of change, engagement, diversity and connection with customers. We've already established that change is constant, and leadership needs to reflect that in order to have a change-ready culture.Here's what sets change-ready leaders apart:
- They're more engaged. They understand that emotional agreement precedes strategic alignment, so they seek to bring everyone's voices to the table.
- They're more adaptable. They are open to their teams' conflicting views and assumptions and can adapt to the increasing rate of change in the environment.
- They lead with a mutuality mindset. They know that diverse teams generate even stronger ideas that consider key risks and ensure their teams think from customers' perspectives.
Perhaps the most important benefit of developing change-ready team members is that researchers believe that "employee attitudes to change are key predictors of organizational change success." People who see change as a constant and necessary source of opportunity are best positioned to turn change into positive forces for their organizations.
How can leaders nurture change readiness?
Instead of managing change from the top down, leaders could find that a more sustainable way of staying change-ready is to engage the whole team. How can leaders begin to cultivate a change-ready mindset among team members? Here is a playbook of initial strategies to try:
1. Accept that change isn't linear
Change is messy. It progresses one day and falls back the next. Many leaders operate under the notion that periods of change in their companies will be followed by periods of calm or that change will eventually end. This is a misconception; business is change, and creating conditions of change readiness will be more enduring than making temporary preparations to handle a specific change.
Therefore, leaders should adapt their mindset around change in their companies. At BTS, we know that change is no longer an individual sport but a team sport. Rather than a few elite surfers trying to conquer the waves, we see change more like white water rafting, where everyone must work together to make it through the waves.
2. Build awareness of your own relationship to change
Before you can successfully lead anyone through change, you need to heighten your own self-awareness of your productive and less productive responses. This starts with a biological reality: Although change is coming at us faster and more frequently than ever before in human history, biologically, we are wired to respond to change as a threat. In the past, threats to our existence were lions, tigers and bears; in the modern change-filled world, threats are things such as looking bad, being wrong or losing control.
The first step any organization can take to build more change readiness is to help every leader understand their beliefs around change and offer them new tools and approaches to be more effective. This is the approach we took with a Fortune 200 company that, in anticipation of significant structural shifts for the organization, equipped all 50,000 employees with new tools and techniques to build resilience and change readiness.
3. Engage your team to take ownership of change
Identify the pivotal moments your organization faces in leading change and align on what change-ready behaviors look like in each moment. Cultivating a team of change-ready leaders will mean engaging team members in what change means. Share the targets and outcomes of strategic direction meetings, allowing time to hear all perspectives and test different ideas on the front line. Invite people to tackle those challenges themselves in their roles so that they feel ownership over the pivotal moments where change occurs in a day.
To support this team-level ownership, shift behavior in the smaller moments that matter most. Back this up by creating the social networks and support structures that enable a wholescale mindset, giving each level and department a chance to own its change readiness.
Change is constant, and it is a team sport. No one leader or manager can author change by themselves and expect it to serve the whole organization and a whole world of customers. Sustainable, successful change comes from a collective of people who feel positively about change: a team of change-ready leaders.
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From top-down to judgment all around: The AI imperative for organizations
Each business revolution has reshaped not only how businesses operate, but how they organize themselves and empower their people. From the industrial age to the information era, and now into the age of artificial intelligence, technology has always brought with it a reconfiguration of authority, capability, and judgment.
In the 19th century, industrialization centralized work and knowledge. The factory system required hierarchical structures where strategy, information, and decision-making were concentrated at the top. Managers at the apex made tradeoffs for the greater good of the enterprise because they were the only ones with access to the full picture.
Then came the information economy. With it came the distribution of information and a need for more agile, team-based structures. Cross-functional collaboration and customer proximity became competitive necessities. Organizations flattened, experimented with matrix models, and pushed decision-making closer to where problems were being solved. What had once been the purview of a select few, judgment, strategic tradeoffs, and insight became expected competencies for managers and team leads across the enterprise.
Now, AI is changing the game again. But this time, it’s not just about access to data. It’s about access to intelligence.
Generative AI democratizes access not only to information, but to intelligent output. That shifts the burden for humans from producing insights to evaluating them. Judgment, which was long the domain of a few executives, must now become a baseline competency for the many across the organization.
But here’s the paradox: while AI extends our capacity for intelligence, discernment, the human ability to weigh context, values, and consequence, is still best left in the hands of human leaders. As organizations begin to automate early-career work, they may inadvertently erase the very pathways and opportunities by which judgment was built.
Why judgment matters more than ever
Deloitte’s 2023 Human Capital Trends survey found that 85% of leaders believe independent decision-making is more important than ever, but only 26% say they’re ready to support it. That shortfall threatens to neutralize the very productivity gains AI promises.
If employees can’t question, challenge, or contextualize AI’s output, then intelligent tools become dangerous shortcuts. The organization stalls, not from a lack of answers, but from a lack of sense-making.
What organizations must do
To stay competitive, organizations must shift from simply adopting AI to designing AI-aware ways of working:
- Build new learning paths for judgment development. As AI replaces easily systematized tasks, companies must replace lost learning experiences with mentorship, simulations, and intentional development planning.
- Design workflows that require human input. Treat AI as a co-pilot, not an autopilot. Embed review checkpoints and tradeoff discussions. Just as innovation processes have stage gates, so should AI analyses.
- Make judgment measurable. Assess and develop decision-making under ambiguity from entry-level roles onward. Research shows the best learning strategy for this is high-fidelity simulations.
- Start earlier. Leadership development must begin far earlier in career paths, because judgment, not just knowledge, is the new differentiator.
What’s emerging is not just a flatter hierarchy, but a more distributed sense of judgment responsibility. To thrive, organizations must prepare their people not to outthink AI, but to out-judge it.
BTS acquires Nexo to strengthen its position in Brazil and Latin America
P R E S S R E L E A S E
Stockholm, May 5, 2025
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – BTS Group AB (publ), a leading global consultancy specializing in strategy execution, change, and people development, has agreed to acquire Nexo Pesquisa e Consultoria Ltda., Nexo, a boutique consulting firm headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil.
Nexo has been growing continuously since it was founded in 2017. With revenues of approximately 12 million Brazilian Reales (approx. 2.1 million USD) in 2024, and a highly capable team of 21 members, Nexo has built a strong reputation for delivering transformative projects in strategy, innovation, leadership, and culture.
Nexo collaborates with a great portfolio of clients across sectors such as financial services, consumer goods, and technology, assisting both local and global companies in navigating uncertainty, unlocking creativity, and activating strategy through people. Their work encompasses culture transformation, leadership development, employer value proposition, innovation culture, and vision alignment – supported by proprietary methodologies and frameworks.
BTS currently operates in Brazil servicing both local and multinational clients with a team of 13 employees. By acquiring Nexo, BTS not only increases the Group’s footprint in Brazil but also adds significant capabilities in culture and transformation services. Nexo’s client base has limited overlap with BTS, creating strong growth potential and synergy opportunities.
“Nexo is known for helping leaders and organizations tackle some of the most complex, human-centered challenges with creativity, empathy, and strategic clarity and the Nexo team is loved by their clients,” says Philios Andreou, Deputy CEO of BTS Group and President of the Other Markets Unit. “Their products and services complement and elevate our existing offerings, especially in culture transformation, and we are thrilled to welcome the Nexo team to BTS.”
“We’re excited to join BTS. We’ve long admired BTS’s approach and unique portfolio to support large organizations and leaders in connecting strategy with culture across the organization,” says Andreas Auerbach, co founder of Nexo. “Becoming part of BTS, allows us to scale our impact and bring more value to our clients while staying true to our values and culture,” adds Mariana Lage Andrade, co-founder of Nexo.
Upon completion of the transaction, Nexo’s business and organization will merge with BTS Brazil. Nexo’s founders will assume senior management roles in the joint operation.
The acquisition includes a limited initial cash consideration. Additional purchase price considerations will be paid between 2026 and 2028, provided Nexo meets specific performance targets. A limited portion of any such additional purchase price considerations will be paid in newly issued BTS shares. The transaction is effective immediately.
BTS’s acquisition strategy continues to focus on broadening our service portfolio, expanding our geographic reach, and enhancing our capabilities to support future organic growth in a fragmented market.
For more information, please contact:
Philios Andreou
Deputy CEO
BTS Group AB
philios.andreou@bts.com
Michael Wallin
Head of investor relations
BTS Group AB
michael.wallin@bts.com
+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19
High-performing teaming
Work today is too complex for individuals to succeed in isolation. Almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. Leaders rely on their teams to deliver results. Teams, in turn, rely on their leaders to create the conditions where performance is possible. This exchange, what leaders need from their teams, and what teams need from their leaders, sits at the heart of what we call teaming.
When teaming is strong, leaders get what they need from their teams [creativity, resilience, execution] and teams get what they need from leaders [direction, support, and the conditions to thrive]. It’s how strategy becomes action, how uncertainty becomes opportunity, and how businesses stay competitive in a fast-changing world.