A Q&A with Rosie Evans Krimme reveals that the success of transformation is determined by people, not processes
As manufacturing continues its rapid digital evolution, organizations are investing heavily in new technologies, systems, and processes. Yet, transformation programs still often fail to deliver their full promise. This is because success hinges as much on people’s willingness to adapt as on the tools themselves.
We spoke to Rosie Evans Krimme, Director Innovation Lab & Behavioural Science at CoachHub, to explore how manufacturers can better manage the human side of transformation and why coaching can be a powerful lever for lasting change.
Rosie, could you start by telling us a little about yourself and your work at CoachHub?
Of course. I’m a behavioral scientist with a background in coaching and psychology. At CoachHub, I lead my team who effectively design, implement and evaluate coaching programs and create digital and AI coaching products that support employees and leaders through transformation.
Our work is grounded in behavioral science: understanding of human behavior and experiences in the workplace to improve both employee well-being and organizational performance.
Many transformation programs fail to achieve their goals. From your perspective, why does that happen?
Transformation programs routinely fail, with studies showing a 70 percent to 95 percent risk of failure. This is because organizations prioritize technical systems
and strategy while critically neglecting the human experience of change. This failure stems from insufficient employee involvement, leading to resistance and misunderstanding of benefits, a fundamental lack of organizational agility where structures and managers do not support the new direction, and a failure to quickly re- and upskill to meet complex market forces.
Organizations can also often overlook human factors, such as transformation fatigue, which is the emotional and cognitive depletion among staff.
What makes people such a critical success factor in transformation, especially in manufacturing?
People are critical because they supply the behavioral flexibility required to overcome the industry’s traditional rigidity and integrate new technology. While manufacturing excels at precision and control, modern transformation demands experimentation and adaptation, which are exclusively human qualities.
The workforce must continuously learn, unlearn, and relearn to adapt to automation and data-driven factories, shifting their mindset from control to curiosity. Machines handle routine tasks, but humans provide the creativity, judgment, and resilience necessary to solve novel problems and drive innovation. This human factor is especially critical because leaders often fall into the ‘engineering project’ trap, focusing solely on tangible technical elements and neglecting the crucial need for trust, belonging, and psychological safety.
Furthermore, middle managers can become a bottleneck, preventing the frontline operators from successfully adopting new systems.
How does coaching help leaders and teams navigate those kinds of shifts?
Coaching directly tackles the human factors that determine success. It develops ‘change leadership’ by encouraging vulnerability and helping leaders translate the change’s purpose to foster commitment. Critically, coaching builds psychological safety necessary for honest dialogue and experimentation, which counteracts the traditional manufacturing aversion to ‘failing fast.’
By supporting middle managers and developing the workforce’s behavioral flexibility, the ability to learn and adapt, coaching ensures that new technical systems are genuinely adopted and maximized by resilient, creative people.
Do you see any patterns in how manufacturing leaders approach transformation compared with other industries?
Yes, manufacturing leaders exhibit distinct patterns, driven by the industry’s deep-rooted culture of precision and physical assets. This strong emphasis on control and consistency makes it exceptionally challenging to embrace the experimentation approach necessary for innovation.
Consequently, manufacturing leaders often need to be coached to unlearn their core strengths and pivot toward fostering psychological safety and curiosity to empower their workforce and enable true system adoption.
What practical steps can organizations take to embed a coaching culture within their change initiatives?
Organizations must train leaders to coach and integrate coaching into the change process itself. This starts by making ‘leader as coach’ training mandatory for all managers, focusing on deep listening and empowering questioning to foster psychological safety.
Crucially, leaders must model this vulnerability from the top. The change effort must then be designed using coaching principles, ensuring teams co-create the ‘why’ behind the transformation rather than just receiving mandates.
What misconceptions do organizations often have about coaching in this context?
Organizations frequently hold several key misconceptions about coaching during transformation, which undermine its effectiveness. They often mistakenly believe that coaching is merely an expensive, standalone remedial benefit reserved only for senior leaders, when it must be integrated into the business process and made accessible to everyone.
Furthermore, they view coaching as too slow for rapid change, failing to realize that its focus on individual needs actually accelerates learning and adaptability faster than mass training.
If you could give one piece of advice to manufacturing leaders embarking on transformation, what would it be?
Prioritize human transformation first by intentionally shifting the organizational culture. Success depends not on how efficiently new technical systems are installed, but on the behavioral flexibility and psychological safety that leader’s model and empower in their people, and ensure that the workforce adapts, adopts, and sustains continuous change.
Rosie Evans Krimme
Rosie Evans Krimme is Director Innovation Lab & Behavioural Science at CoachHub. CoachHub is the leading global talent development platform that enables organizations to create personalized, measurable and scalable coaching programs for their entire workforce, regardless of department and seniority level. CoachHub’s global pool of coaches is comprised of over 3,500 certified business coaches in 90 countries across six continents with coaching sessions available in over 80 languages.