You’ve got the strategy deck. You’ve hired consultants. You’ve implemented new processes. Your roadmap is clear, your metrics are defined, and your team knows what’s expected.
So why are you still stuck?
I recently spoke with Ann Gurnell about a turnaround that defied the odds. She stepped into leadership at Continuum Attractions at the worst possible moment: funding priorities had just shifted from the Heritage Lottery Fund to the London Olympics. The company faced dramatic restructuring – closing half the business, making difficult redundancies, and trying to unite 400 employees across six remaining visitor attractions that had never worked together.
What she did next challenges everything we assume about organisational transformation.
The Situation That Looks Familiar
Six cultural visitor attractions across the UK. Teams that had never met each other. Each site running its own way – some for over 20 years. A “head office that dictates and then leaves them to get on with it.” And this was after closing half the business and making painful redundancies.
The company had just survived a near-death experience. Morale was fragile. Trust was broken. The remaining 400 employees were watching to see if leadership would pull them together or let them drift further apart.
Sound like your post-acquisition integration? Your restructuring aftermath? Your “doing more with less” mandate?
The conventional playbook says: centralise control, standardise processes, cut costs, impose systems from the top.
Ann’s team did something different. Over five years, they doubled profit and tripled turnover. But the interesting part isn’t the numbers – it’s how they got there.
The Foundation Nobody Thinks About
Ann’s team started by doing something counterintuitive. They brought general managers together who’d never met. Not for a one-off team building event, but for ongoing leadership training – headquarters and field operations learning side by side.
‘We were doing our leadership development together, Ann explained, “and making each other human to each other.”
This wasn’t team building after a good quarter. This was rebuilding trust after trauma. They were creating what you might call real interdependence – not just reporting lines on an org chart, but genuine connections where people needed each other.
They also changed how they hired. At York’s Chocolate Story, they recruited students passionate about tourism and storytelling – not just warm bodies. At Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth, they hired ex-Navy personnel who could share personal stories about the naval dockyard below.
Tour guides were auditioned like actors because that’s essentially what they were. The question wasn’t “Can they do the job?” It was “Do they have the passion and creative problem-solving ability to make this work when things go sideways?”
Because things always go sideways.
The Investment That Paid Off
Here’s where it gets interesting. Ann’s team invested in things that don’t show up on typical transformation roadmaps.
They created training budgets that didn’t exist before. HR spent time on-site with management teams – not auditing, but understanding and supporting. They developed apprenticeship schemes tailored to each location.
But watch this carefully: they didn’t just give general managers freedom – they gave them tools, data, and support first. Within a few years, general managers were writing their own business plans and bidding for capital expenditure.
They built autonomy with scaffolding. Not permission without capability, but genuine empowerment.
The executive team evolved too. They “did a lot of miles” – visiting sites regularly, but not to micromanage. They focused on red flags, not celebrating green lights. What’s not working? Where do you need help? What are we learning?
Ann emphasised something that stopped me: they needed leaders with “a fair degree of what we would call high EQ – emotionally mature as people taking on this role.”
Not everyone on the leadership team started there. ‘Being compassionate about [the difficult parts] was easier for some than others,’ Ann admitted. But they recognised that emotional maturity in leadership wasn’t optional – it was the operating system for everything else.
The Communication Pattern That Emerged
They created multiple channels for real communication – not just status updates. Pizza and beer nights at attractions. Away days where teams visited competitors together. Regular general manager meetings to share knowledge.
They also tried to normalise asking for help – though Ann admitted they struggled with the language. “Support function” implied asking for help meant failure. But they kept working to create a culture where “I need help” wasn’t weakness – it was smart.
The commitment became visible over time: students on zero-hour contracts working unusual hours because they believed in the mission. Staff staying “for years and years” because they felt connected to something meaningful.
The Result Nobody Expected
Customers described staff as “wonderfully welcoming and so knowledgeable.” Teams became “passionate about the place they worked.” Over five years with 400 employees across six sites, they not only returned to significant profitability but expanded with new attractions like York’s Chocolate Story and the Coronation Street tour.
But here’s what fascinated me most. Ann said something that cuts through all the transformation rhetoric: ‘Decision-making processes for human beings… they gather information, but they decide with emotion.’
Your executives are gathering data. But they’re deciding based on how they feel about the direction, the leadership, and their place in the transformation.
This isn’t soft and fluffy. This is how humans actually work. You can get to “good enough” performance with process alone. But exceptional performance? That requires something more – the emotional atmosphere, the sense of purpose, the quality of relationships that make people willing to go above and beyond.
Ann put it perfectly: ‘For all the strategy, for all the spreadsheets… it’s human to human everything.’
The Part Most Leaders Miss
Some people struggled with the transformation. Some left. “There were people who struggled with it,” Ann acknowledged. “There’s pain. There’s things that are difficult.”
This is the reality every transformation faces – but it’s especially acute after restructuring and redundancies. The question isn’t how to avoid the pain – it’s whether you have the emotional maturity and systematic approach to navigate it when trust is already damaged.
Ann’s team succeeded because they never chose between business rigour and human connection. They demanded both. They measured both. They invested in both.
Risk registers AND emotional engagement. Daily performance data AND leadership development. Strategic planning AND making people human to each other.
Over five years with 400 people across six sites, they proved you can turn around performance AND rebuild culture simultaneously.
What This Means Monday Morning
You don’t need six business units to learn from this. Start with observation:
Look at your foundations. Do you have genuine interdependence, or just people who happen to report to the same manager? Are your teams stable enough to build trust? Do team members actually need each other to succeed?
Examine your investments. Have you built autonomy with proper scaffolding – tools, training, support? Or just handed over responsibility without capability?
Check your leadership. How emotionally mature is your leadership team? Can they navigate difficulty with compassion while still driving results? Are they available, helpful, genuinely coaching?
Watch your communication. Is information flowing naturally, or do you need to pull it? Have you normalised asking for help, or does vulnerability still feel dangerous?
Assess what you’re getting. What’s your team climate actually like? Are people passionate about the work, or just compliant? What are your relationships like? What results are you achieving?
Ann’s transformation succeeded because leadership understood something fundamental: you cannot compensate for poor foundations with better processes. You cannot replace genuine coaching with systems. You cannot skip the human dimension and expect exceptional results.
They took a systematic approach to the emotional side of performance. They hired for passion and creative problem-solving. They invested in making people human to each other. They built capability before granting autonomy. They normalised learning and failure. They created engagement, not just compliance.
The result? A dramatic turnaround that’s sustainable because it’s built on foundations that actually matter.
Your next quarter’s results aren’t just waiting in your strategic plan. They’re sitting in the human dynamics you may not be measuring at all.
At CGA Management, we help technical leaders understand team dynamics using frameworks developed through over 20 years of research with Birkbeck University and real-world experience across organisations from XL Catlin and Capgemini to start-ups. Because exceptional performance requires both the spreadsheets and the stories.
What foundation feels shakiest in your transformation right now?
This post is part of a three-part series exploring the same transformation story from different perspectives: executive leadership, technical management, and team experience.\nTo hear the original interview with Ann Gurnell, listen here.
