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Hace unos meses terminé una sesión con un equipo de ejecutivos comerciales de una institución financiera mediana. Dos días intensos: cómo prospectar, cómo estructurar conversaciones centradas en el cliente, cómo crear valor en cada interacción. El grupo salió inspirado del taller.

Tres semanas después le pregunté a uno de los mejores participantes sobre cómo le había ido aplicando las nuevas herramientas. Me miró un segundo y me dijo, con total honestidad:

“La verdad... la semana siguiente fue igual que siempre, volví al viejo sistema”

El entrenamiento de capacidades es  necesario. Pero sin una cultura comercial que lo sostenga, es un esfuerzo poco  rentable para las empresas.

1.   Las capacidades sin contexto no sobreviven al día a día

Un ejecutivo de ventas puede salir de un taller sabiendo exactamente qué preguntar, cómo estructurar una conversación de valor, cómo posicionarse como asesor estratégico en lugar de vendedor de productos. La semana siguiente, el peso de las métricas de corto plazo, la presión por resultados y las urgencias del día a día terminan arrastrándolos de vuelta a la rutina de siempre.

McKinsey (2024) encontró que más del 70% de las iniciativas de transformación comercial no logran sus objetivos — y la principal causa no es el diseño del programa, sino la falta de condiciones organizacionales para sostener los nuevos comportamientos.

El problema no es el taller. Es lo que existe o no existe en la realidad de la estructura comercial.

2.   El cambio requiere alinear seis pilares

Lo que diferencia a las empresas que realmente transforman su modelo comercial de las que solo capacitan, está relacionado con seis pilares que operan simultáneamente.

1.    Patrocinio de la alta dirección que empodera en lugar de solo exigir

2.    Disciplina en gestión de cuentas/clientes estratégicos, con metodología y seguimiento

3.    Conversaciones centradas en el cliente, no en el portafolio de productos

4.    Cada interacción con relevancia estratégica, preparadapara crear valor medible

5.    Nuevos comportamientos integrados al ritmo operativodiario y la cadencia del negocio

6.    Líderes comerciales presentes que sostienen la cultura, no solo la expresan

Cuando falta uno, los demás no escalan y terminan provocando un círculo vicioso.

3.   El liderazgo que sostiene vale más que el que exige

El patrocinio de la alta dirección y la presencia de los líderes comerciales sonlos pilares que más frecuentemente fallan. No porque los líderes no crean en el cambio, sino porque el día a día los jala de vuelta a revisar resultados, no a construir comportamientos.

Gartner (2024) señala que los equipos comerciales cuyos líderes hacen coaching activo y visible tienen hasta un 28% mayor probabilidad de adoptar nuevos comportamientos de manera sostenida.

El entrenamiento define el rumbo y entrega el mapa; el liderazgo es lo que realmente ayuda a navegar y sostener el cambio.

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Conclusión

Si tu empresa está invirtiendo en transformar la forma en que sus equipos comerciales se relacionan con los clientes, la pregunta ya no es si el entrenamiento funciona. La verdadera pregunta es: ¿qué tan preparada está la organización para sostener el cambio?

Porque el talento existe. Las habilidades se desarrollan. Pero la cultura no se improvisa; se construye todos los días, con liderazgo, alineación y consistencia.

¿Cuál de estos seis pilares es hoy el más débil en tu organización?

At BTS, we’re constantly challenging ourselves to innovate at speed. And right now, it feels like we’re standing at the edge of something massive. The energy? Electric. The velocity? Unprecedented. For many of us, the current pace feels a lot like the early days of the pandemic: disorienting, high-stakes, and somehow exhilarating. And honestly—it should feel that way. Our teams have been tinkering with AI, specifically LLMs, for the past 2.5 years and it has really been in the last eight months that I can see the profound impact it is going to have for our clients, for our services and our operating model.

The opportunity isn’t about the technology. The world has it and it’s getting better by the minute. The issue is people and people’s readiness to adopt it and be re-tooled and re-skilled. It’s about leadership. AI is deeply personal, it’s surgical. In fact, that’s its genius. So, getting full scale adoption of AI, re-tooling everyone in the company by workflow, so that they can invent new services, unlock new customer value, unlock new levels of productivity, even use it for a better life, is the current race. The central question I’ve been wrestling with, alongside our clients and our own teams, is this:

What does AI actually mean for leadership and culture?

And the answer is clearer by the day: AI isn’t just a new toolset. It’s a new mindset. It demands that we rethink how we lead, how we learn, and how we build thriving organizations that can compete, adapt, and grow.

The productivity paradox revisited

Let’s start with the elephant in the boardroom. There’s been a lot of buzz around AI and its promises. But many leaders have quietly wondered: Will any of this actually move the needle? A year ago, we were asking the same thing. We had licenses. We had curiosity. We had early experiments. But the results were modest, a 1% productivity gain here or there. But by April, we were seeing:

• 30–80% productivity gains in software engineering
• 9–12% gains in consulting teams
• 5%-20% improvements in client success and operations

Just as importantly, the innovation unlock and creativity across our platforms due to vibe coding along with new simulation layers, is leading to new value streams for our clients. This isn’t theoretical. It’s not hype. It’s real. The difference? Adoption, ownership, and a shift in how we lead in order to energize the AI innovation within our teams. The challenge now isn’t whether AI creates value. It’s how to unlock and scale that value across teams, geographies, and business units—and do it fast.

Two Superpowers of the Agentic AI Era

In working with leaders across industries, I’ve come to believe in two superpowers (there are more as well) that will unlock the potential of this AI era: Jazz Leadership and a Simulation Culture.

1. Jazz Leadership

Forget the orchestra (although personally I am a big fan.) The successful team cultures that are innovating with AI feel more like jazz. In jazz, there’s no conductor. There’s no fixed sheet music. There are core bars and then musicians make up music on the spot based on each other’s creativity, building off of each other’s trials, riffs and mistakes, build something extraordinary together. This is how experimenting with AI today, in the flow of work, feels like.

For each activity across a workflow, how can new AI prompts, agents, and GPTs make it better, codify high performance, drive speed and quality simultaneously? How can we try something totally different and still get the job done? How might we re-invent how we work? That’s how high-performing teams operate in the AI era. The world is moving too fast for command-and-control leadership, a perfect sheet of music with one leader who is interpreting the sheet music and directing. What we need instead is improvisation, trust, shared authorship, courage and a playful spirit because there are just as many fails as breakthroughs.Jazz leadership is about creating the conditions where:

• Ideas can come from anywhere
• People see tinkering and testing as key to survival and AI failures mean your team is at the edge of what’s possible for your services and ways of working
• Leaders say, “I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll go first, with you”
• People feel “I’m behind relative to my peers in the company” and the company sees this as a good sign because the pace of learning with AI means higher chance of success in the new era

At BTS, we recently promoted five new partners who embody this mindset. They weren’t the most traditional leaders. But they were the most generative. They coached others. They experimented and are constantly re-tooling themselves and others. They inspired movement. They are keeping us ahead, keeping our clients ahead and driving our re-invention. Jazz leaders make teams better, not by directing every note—but by setting the stage for breakthroughs. It is similar to the agile movement, similar to how it felt in Covid as companies had to reinvent themselves. It’s entrepreneurial, chaotic and fun.

2. Simulation Culture

The ability to simulate is a super-power in this next agentic, AI era. Simulation has always been part of creating organizational agility, high performance and leadership excellence. But AI and high-performance computing have transformed it into something bigger, faster, and infinitely more powerful. It means that building a simulation culture is within all of our grasp, if we tap its power.Today, companies simulate:

• Strategic alternatives - from market impact all they way to detailed frontline execution
• New business, new markets and operating models
• Major capital deployment e.g. build a digital twin of a factory before breaking ground
• Initiative implementation
• Workflows current and future
• Jobs to assess for talent and critical role readiness
• Customer conversations and sales enablement motions

With a simulation culture, where you regularly engage in scenario planning and expect preparation and practice as a way of working, billions in capital is saved, cross-functional teams are strengthened, high performance gets institutionalized, win rates increase, earnings and cash flow improves.

Where to get started

Below are a few examples of what leading organizations are doing. Consider testing these in your own organization:

• Conversational AI bot platforms used to scale performance expectations and the company’s unique culture.
• Agentic simulations built into tools so people can prepare and practice with 100% perfect context and not a wasted moment.
• Digital twins of the job created so that certifications and hiring decisions are valid.
• Micro-simulations spun up in hours to align 50,000 people to a shift in the market or a new operational practice.

Final Thoughts

• Lead like a jazz musician. Embrace improvisation, courage and shared creativity.
• Build a simulation culture. Because in a world that’s moving this fast, practice isn’t optional—it’s how we win.

This is a brave new world. Not five years from now. Right now.Let’s shape it—together.

Safety in the workplace today is different from the past. Today, process improvements, safer designs, systems, and protective equipment are not enough. To create workspaces that are truly safe, companies must cultivate organizational cultures that prioritize safety by focusing on the behaviors and mindsets that enable lasting change.

Part of developing a culture of safety is determining the obstacles that prevent people from moving towards advancement. Beyond the proper physical tools or processes, ‘mind traps,’ or inherent subconscious ideas and beliefs that prevent people from achieving an ideal state, are one of the major barriers preventing organizations from improving their safety levels. Mind traps are difficult to identify and overcome because most people have a logical and rational basis for believing them.

Why is it important to identify mind traps in safety?

It is important to identify mind traps in safety because they have an impact on the way people communicate and behave in their day-to-day lives. If you believe accidents will still happen, no matter how much you try to communicate otherwise, your team will notice this belief and you will be passing on your mind traps to them. For example, if you believe that by sub-contracting an activity, it is normal for the number of incidents to increase, you will lower your guard and your team will do the same and thus increase the likelihood of an accident. In the end, mindsets impact and shape your behaviors and those of the people around you. The sum of these behaviors creates the company's safety culture.

To help you identify mind traps in safety in your organization, this list provides some of the most common mind traps people in safety experience.

Common mind traps in safety

Skepticism: This is usually one of the most difficult mind traps to overcome because people can use data to justify their beliefs. For example, if history shows that on average, one accident happens every year, it is reasonable to expect that it will continue, right? However, it is actually possible to eliminate accidents, but before this is possible, people must overcome their skepticism. Skepticism can sound like: "it is impossible not to expect any accidents over time – the data backs me up."

Complacency: This mind trap typically occurs when companies have experienced periods of significant progress, with indicators showing an absence of serious accidents and therefore improvements in safety. When indicators begin to reach a plateau, it often serves as a justification to make leaders believe statements like: “we have improved a lot in recent years, further progress is going to be very difficult.”

Criticism: This mind trap happens when people focus more on their surroundings rather than on how to actually improve themselves. This is normal when there are many things to improve and people don’t know where to start, when the job relies largely on third parties (collaborating companies, contractors), or when superiors do not always show coherence between what they do and say. Statements exhibiting criticism look like: “how do you expect me to set an example if my bosses don’t?”

Short-Termism: One of the main dilemmas in productive and industrial environments is the perceived tension between results and safety. The tension is only perceived because in more mature and advanced safety cultures, the two terms (results and safety) are not separated, nor do they contradict each other. This mind trap becomes accentuated in market environments that negatively affect income and margins, where naturally, the pressure for results makes the rest of the elements take a back seat. This thinking impacts what kinds of decisions are made, how they are communicated, and how they are executed. An example of the verbalization of this trap is: “safety is important, but sometimes it goes against efficiency.”

It is important to recognize that mind traps vary over time and are highly dependent on the environment in which you find yourself. There may be times when you think you have no mind traps, and then suddenly when facing a change of job or pressure for results, some are automatically activated. The nature of your day-to-day life greatly impacts your mind traps.

So, how do you face and overcome mind traps?

How to face and overcome mind traps

Identify them: Identifying the main safety mind traps and knowing which ones you are more likely to fall into is the first step to overcoming them. Leverage evaluations to easily identify individual mind traps.

Understand their impact: It is important to know the impact safety mind traps have on your behaviors and on the people around you – your team, your peers, your superiors, etc. Explore the impact your safety mindsets could have on the team.

Challenge them: Finally, define mechanisms to challenge yourself, your colleagues, bosses, and teams to break free from the safety mind traps. Become the devil’s advocate who questions the logical reasons behind the mind traps. For example, to combat skepticism, you might reference specific examples of long periods of time without accidents: “if we managed to spend a week, month, or year without any accidents in such an asset, we should be able to do the same with the rest of our assets, and for a much longer time, right?”

The ultimate goal of any business is to make money and therefore efficiency is key. However, to achieve such results in a sustainable way, safety must be integrated into your organization’s culture and way of working. This means identifying the mind traps in your organization and working as a collective to overcome them.

In an ideal state, at the more advanced levels of safety culture, there is a sense of community where everyone cares about each other. While the goal is still safely achieving business results (efficiency, income, margins), safety is not sacrificed.

In summary, to achieve significant improvements in organizational safety and wellbeing, it is fundamental that companies focus on developing a culture of safety. Key to any organization sustainably achieving their goals, a safety culture not only enables success but also ensures that everyone gets home to their loved ones safe and sound. To achieve this goal, it is critical to understand the mind traps within your organization and learn the mechanisms to challenge and overcome them.

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