You’ve just announced it in the team meeting. The weekly report one of your analysts has built by hand for four years can now be generated automatically by an in-house tool. You expect relief, maybe a little applause: two hours a week back, eight a month, 96 a year. You worked your ass off together with the engineers to untangle the legacy code of your financial systems. Instead you get a polite nod and a few practical questions. A week later, nobody uses the new tool.

Stephen Bungay describes the alignment gap as the distance between what we want people to do and what they actually do. Instructions never land exactly as intended. And even when they do, people quietly resist anything that feels like a personal loss, like automating part of their own job, or a change to their scope or the way they work.

That second part sounds like Management 101, but too many times I’ve seen leaders oblivious to these mechanics, trying to fix people’s feelings with problem-solving. Or worse, blaming them for being “difficult to work with”. At the end of the day, if you can’t get the best out of your troops, it’s your responsibility to learn how.

The brain keeps a ledger

Kahneman and Tversky showed decades ago that a loss weighs roughly twice as much as a gain of the same size. Later research pointed to the amygdala, the brain’s threat detector. In one study, two patients with damage to the amygdala showed almost no loss aversion. The same structure that flags a snake in the grass flags a threat to what we already have.

At work, what we already have goes well beyond tasks. That report was proof of competence. It was the reason the CFO knew the analyst’s name. It gave shape to every Monday. Automating it takes two hours of work away, and with them a piece of identity, status, and routine.

Small losses, real sorrow

Psychologist Kenneth Doka coined a term for losses the world doesn’t consider worth mourning: disenfranchised grief. A narrower scope, a retired process, a skill that suddenly matters less. Nobody sends flowers, nobody pats you on the back. Quite the contrary: your loss is someone else’s KPI going up.

The reactions still look familiar. Denial: “the tool won’t handle the edge cases.” Anger at whoever made the call. Bargaining for an exception. A quiet drop in energy. Research on social pain adds another layer: being pushed out of a group activates brain regions that overlap with those processing physical pain. Losing standing at work registers in the body.

So the person dragging their feet on a change that’s obviously good for them is grieving. Usually without realizing it, and almost never with permission to say so.

What helps

A better business case won’t reach it. Neither will a clearer slide or a third explanation of the benefits. Each one lands on a brain that has already classified the change as a threat.

What helps looks a lot like what helps anyone who’s grieving:

• Name the loss. “You built this, and it mattered” costs nothing and turns the alarm down.
• Give it time. Grief that’s acknowledged tends to pass. Grief that’s suppressed goes underground and comes back as foot-dragging.
• Show what stays. Competence and status need a new home before the old one is taken away.
• Let people shape the change. A say in how something happens reduces the sense of threat more than any explanation of why it changed.

A clear mission makes the case for change. It does nothing to shrink the loss.

Logically, the analyst should have been grateful. In reality, they were grieving. Experienced leaders plan for the second. They stay present with the loss and keep moving toward the mission. Difficult experiences are part of the path, and a leader’s job is to walk people through them.