The Work Expert: Why Your Obsession With Speed Is Destroying Your Team | Bree Groff

Why do 70% of organizational transformations fail? It isn't because of bad strategy, poor funding, or a lack of talent. It is because we have fundamentally misunderstood the psychology of change.

In this episode, we sit down with Bree Groff, a Senior Advisor at the global transformation consultancy SYPartners and the former CEO of NOBL Collective, to discuss the counter-intuitive truth about innovation: you cannot build the future until you mourn the past.

Bree explains that what leaders often label as "resistance" or "laziness" is actually a form of grief. Drawing on her unique background—which spans cognitive psychology research, a tenure as a high school physics teacher, and over a decade advising C-suite leaders at companies like Google, Pfizer, and Calvin Klein—she breaks down the "Six Types of Loss" employees experience during a pivot.

We dive deep into why the "move fast and break things" era is ending and why the most successful modern companies are those that allow teams to "metabolize" the loss of their old identities. Bree also previews insights from her book, Today Was Fun, challenging the toxic positivity of corporate culture and offering a scientific framework for why we need to stop forcing agility and start designing for closure.

About Bree Groff: Bree Groff is a renowned expert in organizational psychology and transformation. Currently a Senior Advisor at SYPartners, she previously served as the CEO of NOBL, a global change agency known for pioneering new ways of working. She holds a Master’s in Learning and Organizational Change from Northwestern University and a B.A. in Psychology and Biology from the University of Pennsylvania. Before entering the corporate world, Bree explored human behavior from two very different angles: as a psychology researcher studying decision-making and as an actor and math teacher—experiences that shaped her belief that work should be designed for humans, not just efficiency.