Evolving Industry
What happens when the very success that propelled a company to market leadership begins to drag it down?
Wayne Powers, Principal at Powers Consulting LLC, has helped multiple companies navigate this exact turning point.
With experience spanning Fortune 50 firms and private equity-backed turnarounds, he understands how organizations lose momentum and what it takes to reclaim it.
Wayne talked with us about:
- When organizational transformation is needed in wayward companies
- How culture and clarity can become the foundation for turning things around
- What it takes to see true transformation through to the end
How Market Leaders Lose Their Way
Wayne has seen it all across various industries as once-dominant companies drift from relevance.
But he suggested that rarely does the decline start with a single bad decision. More often, it’s a slow drift rooted in a false sense of security.
“They get sometimes complacent, and they really kind of shut out all the competition around them,” Wayne said. “They consider themselves the leader and that everybody else is trying to play catch up.”
That aloofness leads to reactionary thinking. Instead of evolving with customers, leaders double down on old strengths and miss the signals that their market is moving on.
“You start making reactionary decisions,” Wayne advocated. “Acquisitions they buy or products they try to launch that don’t necessarily align with the core base of business.”
The consequences pile up: internal friction, siloed teams, misaligned goals, and even incentive structures that pull employees in opposite directions.
But Wayne believes recovery is possible with the right starting point.
“It starts with culture, making sure that everybody understands what it is that we’re trying to get to. Where’s the ultimate goal?”
Why Culture and Clarity Must Come First
When stepping into turnaround scenarios, Wayne doesn’t begin with process redesign or org charts.
He starts by talking to people, both employees and customers alike.
“The first thing I want to do is talk to the customers and look at what kind of experience they’re having, whether they be the consumers [themselves] or people buying the product or service on their behalf.”
Wayne sees culture as the linchpin in any transformation. He argued that without it, even good strategies collapse under their own complexity.
“Uncertainty just drives a lot of anxiety, and in times of anxiety and no clarity, you lose your good people.”
Wayne avoids that employee churn by bringing transparency and consistency to his leadership approach.
In one role, he set weekly standups with his executive team and bi-weekly company-wide meetings to reinforce alignment and impetus.
“You start taking a lot of that anxiety out of the company once [your employees] start to see the transition taking place,” Wayne said. “I try to make sure there’s clarity around goals and sharing that progress.”
He also emphasized the importance of verbalizing even the subtle shifts that occur as a company evolves, so employees never feel that change is happening to them without explanation.
“Sometimes a change kind of gives birth throughout the process,” Wayne conceded. “Grab the whole team, pause, and say, ‘I just want to acknowledge that this happened.’ [Otherwise], if you don’t identify that early enough, it creates a lot of trust issues.”
Wayne encourages what he calls “trusted conflict,” creating safe spaces where leaders can challenge one another honestly, then leave those discussions united.
“They can sit and scream and yell at each other in the room, but once they leave the room, they go out as a team. That to me is a cultural change.”
Organizational Transformation Requires Speed and Discipline
Despite the emotional toll of fast-moving change, Wayne maintains that organizational transformation requires leaders to act quickly.
“You need to do those things pretty fast. The faster you can move, the better it is for the organization.”
But speed without structure leads to chaos. That’s why Wayne uses a tight 30-60-90-day model: talk to customers, assess internal capabilities, and then make the difficult calls, whether that’s reorgs, leadership changes, or resource realignment.
He also brings teams together for short, focused working sessions to surface challenges before they grow. These aren’t performative check-ins but spaces for real-time decisions.
“We’d do standups, 15 minutes with product, marketing, and sales teams… just to ask, ‘What’s happening this week?’” Wayne explained. “‘Is there a challenge or an issue that wasn’t identified earlier?’ Sometimes, those things can put you on the path to a greater challenge in the future if you don’t deal with them.”
Even the casual moments matter. Wayne holds monthly fireside chats with his leadership team, sometimes over wine or bourbon, to create space for honest reflection.
“It takes a meeting or two for people to get really comfortable. [Then] they start to share issues or challenges they wouldn’t have said before,” he said. “That’s when culture really gets defined and built.”
For Wayne, success is never just about financial performance. It’s about how well people align, commit, and execute together.
That’s why his final piece of advice, drawn from decades of rebuilding broken momentum, is simple but critical.
“ If you're not fully aligned and don't have transparency in the goals that you're trying to drive, [then] it doesn’t matter how hard you work and how smart you are as a leader… It’s just not going to work.”
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