Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
Sun, 24 Nov 2024
Part Two. I’m joined by Nellie Wartoft, someone I like to call the chief change officer behind change leaders. Originally from Europe, she’s spent years in Asia—especially Singapore—working across cultures. Now based in the U.S., Nellie is the founder and CEO of Tiger Hall, a tech-driven platform helping organizations navigate change more effectively. This is part two of a two-part series. In these episodes, we’ll dive into navigating cultural differences across three regions, why most change initiatives fail, and how to set up for success. If you’ve ever struggled with change—whether in your career, company, or life—this series is for you. Key Highlights of Our Interview: Hating SharePoint and Finding a Better Way “The inefficiency of tools like SharePoint highlighted a fundamental gap: employees struggling to align with HQ’s vision. Miscommunication bred resistance and fatigue, even when both sides had good intentions. The question arose—why can’t change communication be as engaging as social media or Spotify?” The Universal Human Side of Change “No matter where you are in the world, the human psyche reacts similarly to change—fear, chaos, uncertainty, and emotion are universal experiences. Change fatigue and resistance aren’t cultural anomalies; they’re deeply human responses shared across geographies.” The Ego Factor: A Leadership Killer “High-ego, high-fear leaders stifle transformation. They resist feedback, take criticism personally, and foster a top-down, do-as-I-say culture. Modern transformation demands collaborative leadership that embraces input, fosters trust, and thrives on dialogue—not outdated command-and-control styles.” “Short-Term Results vs. Long-Term Vision” “U.S. organizations prioritize quarterly results and trend-driven decisions, like the AI boom. Meanwhile, Asian companies often take a more measured, long-term approach, rooted in heritage and identity. Both approaches have their strengths but lead to vastly different paces of execution.” _________________________ Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Nellie Wartoft Chief Change Officer: Make Change Ambitiously. Experiential Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives Global Top 3% Podcast on Listen Notes World's #1 Career Podcast on Apple Top 1: US, CA, MX, IE, HU, AT, CH, FI, JP 2 Millions+ Downloads 50+ Countries --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: What inspired Nellie Wartoft to start her company?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, I'm joined by Nellie Wartoff, someone I'd like to call the chief change officer behind Change Leaders.
Originally from Europe, she spent years in Asia, especially in Singapore, working across cultures. Now based in US, Nellie is the founder and CEO of Tiger Hall, a tech-driven platform helping organizations navigate change more effectively. This is part one of a two-part series.
In these episodes, we'll dive into navigating cultural differences across three regions, why most change initiatives fail, and how to set up for success. If you've ever struggled with change, whether in your career, company, or life, this series is for you. Let's get started. What triggered you to start this company in the very first place?
Chapter 2: Why do employees struggle with traditional communication tools?
I hate SharePoint. I think it's the most awful way of communicating. No, it was more like I was seeing how hard it was for employees on the ground to grasp what HQ wanted out of them and what they should be doing. And I saw this disconnect and how it was like both parties have really good intentions. People are trying to drive change and transformation and make their companies become better.
But all it does is that it increases this change fatigue and resistance and fear in employees. And I was like, this is not necessary. And then employees also have good intentions. They really want to help. They want to support. They want to do a good job, right? No one shows up to work and thinks I'm going to do a really shit job today. Let me see how bad I can do this job.
People generally have good intentions. So it's good intentions on both sides, but it's the in-between that makes it get lost, right? And that's the complexity of the size of these companies, the communications and the lack of the availability of these tools. Like you can't target very well with email or SharePoint and it's hard to create high quality engaging content with these tools.
Like it's mostly just written documents. So I was looking around and I saw what are people engaged with? They're really engaged with their TikToks and Instagrams and Spotify's and all of the consumer-grade technology and things that are social, things that have engaging content. It's like, why isn't change communications more like this?
Why can't we communicate change and transformation to employees? the way an influencer communicates about the latest fashion trend or whatever to their followers, right? So that was a big inspiration for it as well. And just how do we bring that content consumption, engagement and social aspects into change and transformation?
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Chapter 3: How do cultural differences affect reactions to change?
When it comes to change, a lot of it goes beyond technology. It's ultimately rooted in human behavior and cultural nuances. you've had the unique experience of living and working across Europe, Asia, and now the US, which brings with it an incredible range of perspectives.
Given your background and your exposure to diverse clients, I'm curious, how do you see cultural differences play out when it comes to people's reactions to change, Even the concept of change itself, whether it is a mindset shift or a full-scale transformation, can vary dramatically across regions.
Have you noticed any significant differences or similarities in how these cultures approach and perceive change? And how do you adapt your solutions to help clients tackle those cultural nuances more effectively?
I think there are a lot more similarities than differences, actually. At the end of the day, we're all pretty similar as humans, and the human psyche and human emotions, they don't differ that much across geographies, from my experience. And things like the fear, the chaos, the uncertainty, politics, emotions, all of these are in all of these cultures, right?
So the human experience of change and including change resistance and fatigue and all of those are very natural and very human regardless of where you're from. I think the difference is that more than the cultural differences shows up in organizations more from A couple of ways, right?
So one is the role of talent and how it's viewed and the kind of like how you view talent as a resource versus an investment, for example. And that also influences the leadership culture. So if we take Asia, where it's more... generally more top-down work cultures. You don't really question your boss. You don't really speak up to authority.
There are other cultural nuances that drive other kinds of behaviors. Whereas in the US, it's very common to challenge authority and speak up against your manager and say what you think and voice your concerns. So that's leading to differences in communication. And we also see that because we have clients across 32 countries work with
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Chapter 4: What are common reasons for change initiatives to fail?
around half a million employees worldwide that are using the platform. So across those differences in geography, you can see that leadership style and the hierarchical nature of organizations differ than in the two-way feedback loops, for example, and the kind of feedback that people share and how they share that. And you also see it in things like trust in leaders.
So in Asia, people are much more prone to trusting their leaders. I would say maybe not blind, but he's the boss, so he knows best. Because of someone's level of seniority, that person automatically has power and authority and knowledge.
Chapter 5: How can organizations successfully involve employees in change?
Whereas that's not the case in the US where people are more like, yeah, just because he's the chief whatever or she's the senior something, it doesn't matter that they always know best. I also have my opinion and they matter as much as theirs. So that's a big difference in how communication is handled and how people trust and follow and view their leaders.
And then I think the other difference is the long-term versus short-term thinking. So leaders in Asia are much more long-term thinking and the U.S. is much more short-term. So the U.S. is much more around quality results for Wall Street and showing earnings and all of the numbers every three months. So they don't really have long-term visions when it comes to thinking about change.
It's more like trend hopping, like AI, for example. Everyone is on AI and everyone needs to implement it now and everyone wants to show it to Wall Street next quarter. Whereas in Asia, it's a little bit more, let's see what we're going to do in the next 10 years. And especially the Asia headquarter companies are very much focused.
More long term vision and like how does this play into our heritage and the longer term view of who we are as a company and our identity. So that's also another approach to change, which I've noticed where changes happen slower in Asia, but perhaps more intentional, I would say, like it's a bit more intentional.
visionary and like thinking through more instead of just like jumping into execution right away and all of those sides have both pros and cons it depends on how you want to do it right like i think for example asia could be much more faster in execution given the top-down hierarchical culture it has But then this long-term vision, which is great in my view, that kind of makes it not as fast.
But if you had, for example, the short-term vision of the US with the top-down hierarchy of Asia, that could potentially be extremely intense and fast execution, right? But I think both of them balance themselves out in interesting ways. But those are some of the differences that I've noticed in just the work that we've done.
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Chapter 6: What role does leadership play in successful transformations?
When we first met, you told me some intriguing insights from your experiences, specifically why certain change initiatives fail while others succeed. You pointed out that there are common pitfalls that lead to failure and that understanding can uncover valuable opportunities to set the stage for success. Could you share with us some of those common reasons for failure?
Maybe you've seen recurring patterns or perhaps you can recall specific examples without naming names of how these failures played out. And on the flip side, what approaches have you found to be especially effective in laying the groundwork for a successful change initiative?
Yeah, I don't think some fail. I think most fail, depending on how you define failure. There's a very well-known statistic that 70 or even 80% of transformations fail, right?
And the definition of failure in most of those studies is not achieving the intended outcome, so not delivering the value that it was supposed to deliver, not reaching the milestones on time, so getting dragged and dragged for time and budget, or just being abandoned, like it didn't work and we have to stop and go another way. Which I also wouldn't necessarily call failure. We live and we learn.
And I think that's completely fine. And to just say, this didn't work, we're going to try something else. So I don't think there should be any fear around failing. But if you want a transformation initiative to really succeed, there are a couple of things that I notice between the customers that we work with and just like what makes them successful versus the ones who are less successful.
What do they do instead? The number one thing, or the number one, but like the first thing to think about in the journey of a transformation is when do you start involving people? That's a big difference I see. There are some companies that are really good with involving people early, you know, instead of having three people in the ivory tower deciding everything and then starting to roll it out.
And then at the very last minute, when it comes to execution, that's when they go, hey, like, Tom, Dick and Harry, like, why don't you need to do this differently now? So go ahead and do it differently and change your workflows. That's usually not received very well. And on the other side of that, I see companies involving employees early, like at the formation stage.
And even if you can decide the strategy and what the change is going to be, let's say you're going to have all renewable energy by 2030. Okay, that's your plan. But then how do you start involving people in the thinking, in the formation, in the how-to, in shaping the transformation? And I see companies are really successful, have involved more people earlier.
And there's a study from McKinsey on this as well, where most organizations involve and engage on average 2% of their organization. McKinsey argues that's equivalent to around a 20% success rate of change and transformation initiatives. Whereas if you have just 7% engaged, that's already 50% success rate.
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Chapter 7: How do short-term and long-term thinking differ across cultures?
So high ego and high fear in leaders is usually a very bad combination because it stifles any and all conversation and feedback that you can have around it. And that is what creates these top down, do as I say, and if you say anything, I'm going to punish you or I get very scared or I take it personally.
Chapter 8: What are the benefits of engaging a larger percentage of employees in change?
And that kind of approach in leaders is just not beneficial at all for a transformation type of environment. So that might have worked in the old days where you needed a leader to just tell people what to do and then they go execute it. But in 2024 and beyond, it's not going to be that type of leadership that succeeds.
So that's another reason I see companies fail is when senior leaders have that high ego or very sensitive to feedback or don't even want to hear any feedback at all or not interested in what people think on the ground. That's another big challenge. So those are some differences that I've seen, and both of these hold true both across Asia and the US.
Yeah, like you said, human nature is universal. Fear, ego, emotions, and office politics exist everywhere, regardless of culture, gender, or age. My friend's story about working in a big bank in Asia captures a common sentiment that is frustration about change management tools or processes that feel imposed rather than embraced.
She mentioned how the software forced employees to fit into its framework rather than adapting to their needs. And the feedback process? She described it as a formality where no one feels safe or motivated to speak the truth, just filling in responses for the sake of it. that sense of disengagement is palpable.
I'm curious, from your perspective, have you encountered similar resistance in your work? How do you ensure that tools or processes don't just check the box for change, but actually engage and empower the people they are meant to serve?
Yeah, I'm sure that happens in a lot of places and that's not good. I think for us, it's very different because employees like it. And we actually started B2C. So we actually started as a consumer platform to ensure that engagement was high, people liked it, it was an experience that suited them, which I think many platforms don't do.
So that's, of course, one differentiator when it comes to how we've approached it. But then I think also it's, Like people tend to, it's not helpful to have generalizations like a piece of software is bad. It's not about the software. It's not about the technology. It's not about the platforms. It's about what problem are you trying to solve and how are you solving it?
And that's actually on the leaders in the organization to decide that. So in your friend's case, I would challenge the CHRO and say, what problems are you trying to solve by bringing in all of these different software platforms? Like it's clearly not delivering the value or delivering the results that they had intended for it to do. So it's never about the platform.
It's about what does that platform, software, technology, whatever you're bringing in, what is that intended to solve? And that's up to the business leaders to decide. Because it's not about the amount of technology is never a problem, right? Think of our phones. Like how many apps do we have? I think the average is like 400 or 450 apps in your phone.
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