The automotive industry today is full of disruption. The transformation to electric mobility, tariffs and political unpredictability, software-defined vehicles, humanoid robots and AI is disrupting every process from manufacturing to engineering to retailing vehicles.
Adopting and embracing these emerging technologies is crucial for delivering superior products. Automotive leaders are looking for faster innovation cycles, ongoing transformation and a fundamentally new approach to organizational change – where the ability to seamlessly integrate emerging technologies across the enterprise has become essential.
But the challenge is no longer adopting a single breakthrough technology; it’s managing the rapid pace at which new ones emerge and the impact these efforts have on the workforce. Emergn’s Transformation Fatigue survey, for example, reveals that 50% of employees have considered leaving their jobs due to the exhaustion and burnout caused by an endless state of constant change and transformation.
The Capability Gap
Organizations in the automotive sector that do not lead staff to adapt to inevitable, disruptive change risk creating a widening capability gap, where digital aspirations exceed the organization’s ability to fulfill them. Failing to understand why change management programs falter and how to implement them more effectively can defeat those efforts before they even start. The result will be lost opportunity, lost productivity and lost time that you can never get back.
The emergence of AI represents the latest development in a long line of new technologies that organizations have had to manage and implement, including cloud computing, big data, machine learning and more.
However, as new initiatives, tools and systems are rolled out in rapid succession, employees are often left feeling overwhelmed, undertrained and disconnected from the “why” behind the change. At the same time, employees are in a constant state of insecurity because of the trends for AI displacing headcounts. History is full of failed transformations and mergers because middle managers participated in change from a position of fear rather than opportunity. This presents both challenge and opportunity for the leadership suite.
It should come as no surprise that fatigue sets in when the focus is on processes and technology while employees – the individuals driving transformation – feel out of the loop. This is not a technology problem; it’s a leadership problem. Our research indicates that 25% of employees feel uninformed about the reasons behind transformation efforts, with a lack of clear leadership, communication and training often cited as the primary reasons for employees experiencing transformation fatigue. And now, the wave of AI applications washing over organizations represents another unique challenge because of how it impacts job security.
The mandate for executives is clear: Transformation must be people-centric to be sustainable. Empowering teams with the right skills, resources and clarity of purpose is not a “nice to have” – it’s a strategic necessity.
Overcoming Transformation Fatigue
The good news is that, despite these challenges, 70% of employees recognize the importance of effective transformation to stay competitive. This underscores a clear willingness among employees to embrace change when it’s executed properly, and they feel included and valued. Transformation fatigue doesn’t have to be a given, but automotive leaders must take a different approach to shift from tired to transformative.
Success requires automotive business leaders to consider how they align and integrate transformative efforts with their business goals to form better teams that can fully take ownership of budgets and plans, accounting for the impact of transformation on culture, communication and capabilities. This necessitates a shift from a certainty mindset to an adaptive one that encourages experimentation and continuous learning.
These are some of the core tenets of a product-centric mindset, where companies structure their resources, teams and strategies around delivering distinct products or services – like automotive software and electronics – that directly meet specific customer needs or solve clearly defined problems.
Simply put, a product-centric mindset prioritizes:
- Customer Value
- Cross-functional teams
- Continuous improvement
- End-to-end responsibility
- Measurement of outcomes
By structuring technology adoption and transformation around customer-driven products instead of internal functions or short-term projects, automotive leaders can achieve higher levels of continuous innovation and sustained value delivery for customers, whether they are consumers, suppliers, dealers or others involved in the automotive value chain.
These are all teachable skills that automotive leaders can implement within their workforce through practical, work-based learning initiatives. Whether online, in person or a mix of both, decision-makers should prioritize customized learning journeys that vary for each individual or team depending on roles, responsibilities, current knowledge base and existing skillsets.
Success in the next era of mobility will depend not just on technology adoption but also on the ability of leadership teams to arm their workers to navigate complexity and constant change effectively. This requires leaders who champion cross-functional collaboration, encourage continuous leading and create mechanisms for rapid feedback and iteration.
Transformation cannot live in a silo; it must become a shared, organization-wide capability. It also requires empowering frontline teams to make decisions and act in real time rather than waiting for top-down directives.
