The Wheel of Change in Action: A Real Operations Head Case Study

How I applied Marshall Goldsmith's Wheel of Change to my own Operations Head Shrimant's real leadership challenge — and what every manager in India can learn from it.

Most leadership books give you frameworks that feel brilliant in theory and vanish the moment you step back into Monday morning. I wanted to write something different in The Winning Edge, The Champion Mindset — real tools applied to real people with real pressures. Chapter 12 is about one of those tools: Marshall Goldsmith's Wheel of Change. And the story I use to bring it alive is not a famous CEO or a Harvard case study. It is the story of my own Operations Head, Shrimant.

Shrimant manages more than 50 employees spread across multiple locations. He is brilliant at the technical side of his work, trusted by his team, and deeply loyal to the organisation. But when I sat down with him one afternoon and asked him a simple question — "What does your leadership actually look like right now, versus what it needs to look like?" — the conversation that followed was the most honest, most useful planning session either of us had experienced in years.

I am sharing that session here because I believe every manager reading this has a Shrimant-moment waiting to happen. All it takes is sixty minutes and the right framework.

What Is the Wheel of Change?

Before I walk you through Shrimant's story, let me give you a clean picture of the tool itself. Marshall Goldsmith's Wheel of Change is built on four quadrants. You ask yourself four questions about your current leadership behaviour:

• CREATE — What new behaviours, habits or systems do I need to build that do not exist yet?
• PRESERVE — What is already working well that I must protect and continue?
• ELIMINATE — What am I currently doing — or tolerating — that is actively costing me and my team?
• ACCEPT — What is simply the reality of my role that I need to stop fighting and start working with?

The genius of this model is in its balance. Most leadership planning sessions focus only on what to add — more skills, more processes, more meetings. The Wheel of Change forces you to also ask what to stop, what to protect, and what to make peace with. That is why it works.

"A champion does not only ask what to add. The sharper question is what to stop — and what to finally accept." — from The Winning Edge, The Champion Mindset

In my workshops across Pune and Mumbai, I use this framework with leadership teams from manufacturing, IT, pharma and financial services. The pattern I see is consistent: most managers are very clear on what they want to CREATE. The hard conversation is always ELIMINATE and ACCEPT.

Applying the Wheel of Change with managers during a leadership workshop

Shrimant's Leadership Challenge

Here is the context. Shrimant had grown with the organisation from the ground up. He knew every process, every client nuance, and almost every team member personally. That depth of knowledge was his biggest strength. It was also the thing trapping him.

Because Shrimant knew everything, everyone came to him for everything. His calendar was a disaster. His days were consumed by operational firefighting — decisions that should have been made two levels below him were landing on his desk. He had no time to think at a strategic level. He was, in the language of leadership development, stuck in the doing and unable to move into the leading.

When I introduced the Wheel of Change, I asked him to fill it in honestly — not as an aspirational exercise, but as a map of what was actually true right now. What emerged surprised even him.

CREATE: The New Behaviours Shrimant Needed to Build

This is where most managers start and often stop. Shrimant's CREATE quadrant had three clear items:

• Build a core leadership team of 3 to 4 people. Instead of being the single point of knowledge and decision-making across all locations, Shrimant needed to deliberately develop a small inner circle of senior team members who could own their domains with full authority.
• Protect 90-minute daily blocks for strategic thinking. This was non-negotiable. Not a nice-to-have. A hard calendar appointment that no operational issue could override. Ninety uninterrupted minutes each day dedicated only to thinking, planning and reviewing direction.
• Schedule weekly one-to-one check-ins. Structured, regular, individual conversations with each key person on the team — so that information flowed upward without Shrimant having to chase it, and so that accountability was personal, not diffuse.

Notice that none of these are vague aspirations. Each one is a specific, schedulable behaviour. That specificity matters enormously. Vague intentions do not change leadership; concrete behaviours do.

"Clarity is kindness — to your team and to yourself. If you cannot name the exact behaviour you are going to change, you are not planning. You are wishing." — from The Winning Edge, The Champion Mindset

PRESERVE: What Was Already Working

This quadrant is underrated. In the rush to improve, many leaders throw away things that are genuinely valuable. Part of my job as a trainer and coach is to help people see what is already strong before they accidentally dismantle it.

For Shrimant, two things belonged firmly in PRESERVE:

• Team rapport and trust. Over years of working alongside his people — often in difficult conditions — Shrimant had built an unusually strong relationship with his team. People trusted him. They spoke honestly with him. That psychological safety is rare and hard to rebuild once broken. Every new system, every structural change, had to be designed around protecting that trust.
• Technical expertise as a consulting resource. Shrimant's depth of operational knowledge was not a problem to be discarded. It was an asset — but it needed to shift from being his day-to-day role to being the expert resource his team could draw on when truly needed. He needed to move from being the operator to being the advisor.

Naming what to preserve gave Shrimant something important: permission to change without guilt. He was not abandoning who he was. He was evolving how he showed up.

ELIMINATE: The Hard Truths

This is where the real leadership work happens. ELIMINATE is the quadrant that requires the most courage — because it means naming the things you are currently doing or tolerating that are actively hurting your team and your results.

Shrimant's ELIMINATE list had two powerful entries:

• Stop tolerating time-wasting by people who come to meetings unprepared. This was a pattern Shrimant had allowed for years. People would show up to discussions without having reviewed data, without having thought through options, and Shrimant — because he was always prepared — would simply solve the problem himself. This behaviour was teaching his team that preparation was optional. It had to stop.
• Stop allowing unclear accountability. Because Shrimant managed multiple locations and a large team, it had become normal for outcomes to be collectively owned — which in practice meant nobody owned them. When a deliverable slipped, it was hard to pinpoint who was responsible. Eliminating unclear accountability meant rebuilding every major responsibility around a single named owner.

When I reflect on this in the context of corporate India, I see these two patterns everywhere — in manufacturing plants in Pune, in back-office teams in Mumbai, in regional distribution centres across Maharashtra. The leader who does everything and the culture of unclear ownership are two of the most common leadership traps in Indian organisations, and they tend to reinforce each other.

"What you tolerate, you teach. Every time a leader accepts an unprepared meeting or a blurred accountability, they are training their team to keep doing exactly that." — from The Winning Edge, The Champion Mindset

The ELIMINATE and ACCEPT quadrants are where real leadership growth happens

ACCEPT: Making Peace with Reality

This quadrant is the one most leaders skip — and it is the most liberating one of all. ACCEPT is not resignation. It is wisdom. It is the honest recognition that certain features of your role are structural, not personal failures.

Shrimant's ACCEPT quadrant contained three realities he needed to stop fighting:

• Multi-location management is inherently complex. There is no system, however well designed, that makes managing 50-plus people across different locations simple. Some degree of friction, lag and misalignment is built into the job. Accepting this meant Shrimant could stop blaming himself every time coordination was hard, and instead put his energy into reducing friction where possible — not expecting zero friction.
• Some team members will always need more time than others. Not everyone develops at the same pace. A leader who resents this reality spends enormous emotional energy in frustration. A leader who accepts it designs their coaching and check-in systems to accommodate different development speeds.
• Perfect information flow is impossible. In a multi-location operation, Shrimant would never have complete, real-time visibility of everything happening everywhere. Accepting this freed him to design for "good enough information at the right time" rather than chasing an impossible standard of total awareness.

The ACCEPT quadrant changed Shrimant's emotional state as much as it changed his strategy. There is a real cost to a leader who is perpetually at war with the structural realities of their role — it drains energy that should be going into people, strategy and growth.

How You Can Do This in 60 Minutes

I want to be clear about something. The Wheel of Change is not an abstract leadership philosophy. It is a practical planning tool. Shrimant and I completed his Wheel in a single focused session. You can do the same. Here is how:

1. Find a quiet space and 60 uninterrupted minutes. This is not a group brainstorm — it is a personal audit. Do it alone first.
2. Draw four quadrants on a blank page: CREATE, PRESERVE, ELIMINATE, ACCEPT.
3. Start with PRESERVE. Ask yourself: what is genuinely working in how I lead right now? What do I want to be careful not to lose as I evolve?
4. Move to CREATE. What specific new behaviours, systems or habits do I need to build? Name each one concretely enough that you could put it in your calendar.
5. Tackle ELIMINATE with honesty. What am I doing — or allowing — that is costing my team? What patterns have I been tolerating that I need to stop? This is the uncomfortable quadrant. Sit with it.
6. End with ACCEPT. What are the real structural constraints of my role that I need to stop fighting and start designing around?
7. Identify one action from each quadrant that you will implement in the next 14 days. Not eventually. In the next two weeks.

The managers I work with in my corporate training programs across Pune and Mumbai consistently tell me that this one exercise — done honestly and followed up on — is more valuable than months of theoretical leadership reading.

Bring this to your team. I run Wheel of Change and leadership-focused corporate training and keynotes for companies across Pune, Mumbai and all of Maharashtra.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Wheel of Change in leadership?

The Wheel of Change is a leadership framework developed by Marshall Goldsmith. It asks leaders to examine their current behaviour across four quadrants: what to CREATE (new habits and systems to build), what to PRESERVE (what is already working), what to ELIMINATE (behaviours or tolerances that are costing the team), and what to ACCEPT (structural realities of the role to stop fighting). It is a practical planning tool that any manager can complete in 60 minutes.

How does Create Preserve Eliminate Accept apply to Indian managers?

Indian managers — especially those promoted from technical or operational roles — often face a specific leadership trap: they remain the single point of knowledge and decision-making for their teams. The Wheel of Change helps them create structured delegation (CREATE), protect the trust they have built (PRESERVE), stop tolerating unpreparedness and unclear ownership (ELIMINATE), and make peace with the complexity inherent in large, multi-location teams (ACCEPT). The framework is directly applicable to manufacturing, IT, pharma and service organisations across India.

Can the Wheel of Change be used in a corporate training workshop?

Absolutely. In my corporate training programs for companies across Pune, Mumbai and Maharashtra, the Wheel of Change is one of the most consistently impactful exercises I facilitate. Managers complete their individual Wheel during the session and leave with a concrete 14-day action plan. The combination of honest self-audit and immediate action planning is what makes it stick beyond the training room.

How long does it take to complete the Wheel of Change exercise?

A thorough, honest Wheel of Change can be completed in 60 minutes when done individually. In a facilitated workshop setting, I typically allow 90 minutes to include paired discussion and group sharing of themes. The key is quality of honesty, not length of time — leaders who rush through it tend to stay in their comfort zone and miss the most valuable insights in the ELIMINATE and ACCEPT quadrants.

The Wheel of Change is one of those tools that sounds almost too simple — until you actually sit down and fill it in honestly. What Shrimant and I discovered that afternoon was not new information; it was clarity. And clarity, as I write in The Winning Edge, The Champion Mindset, is the most underrated leadership advantage in any organisation. If you are a manager or leader in India in 2026, I encourage you to take 60 minutes this week and run your own Wheel. You may be surprised by what you find in the quadrant you were most tempted to skip. To explore how this work can come alive for your entire leadership team, visit my contact page, learn more about corporate training programs, or see how I work as a leadership trainer in Pune.

This article is adapted from my book The Winning Edge, The Champion Mindset.

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AC

Avinash Chate India's Leading Corporate Trainer | TEDx Speaker | Author With 1000+ organizations trained including RBI, JSW Steels, and Ferrero, Avinash Chate delivers high-impact corporate training across India. Creator of the KITE Leadership Framework and bestselling author of "The Winning Edge." Website YouTube

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By Avinash Chate — Maharashtra’s #1 Corporate Trainer & Motivational Speaker. Published 2026-06-27.