Leading Through Change

A new system, a restructure or a shift in priorities can look straightforward on a project plan. For the people living through it, the experience is rarely that tidy. A sensible change can still take away routines, relationships, status or the feeling of being good at your job. This chapter helps you see change from the inside. You will explore why people so often experience change as loss, and why that is normal. You will learn to recognise common reactions, from quiet withdrawal to open challenge, and to look for the concern that sits behind each one. Finally, you will turn the lens on yourself, because leaders go through change too, and your own reaction shapes how everyone around you responds.

Change happens outside, transition happens inside

William Bridges, an American consultant and author whose book Managing Transitions first appeared in 1991, drew a distinction that many leaders find useful. Change is situational: the new structure, the new tool, the new manager. Transition is psychological: the inner process people go through as they come to terms with it. A change can be announced in an afternoon. A transition takes longer, and it does not follow the project timeline. Bridges described transition in three phases: an ending, a neutral zone and a new beginning. His central point is that every transition starts with an ending. Before people can commit to the new way, they have to let go of something about the old one. The neutral zone in between is often confusing, yet Bridges saw it as a potentially creative period, because it is where people quietly rework their habits and assumptions.

What people actually lose

When a leader talks about a change, they usually describe what people will gain. The people affected tend to notice first what they stand to lose. That loss is often not obvious from the outside.

• Competence: the comfort of knowing how to do the job well.
• Status: a title, a reporting line or being the person others ask.
• Relationships: a trusted manager, a familiar team or regular contact with peers.
• Certainty: knowing what tomorrow and next year will look like.
• Identity: a sense of who you are at work and what you stand for.

Aoife leads a payroll team in Dublin. Her company is introducing a payroll system that automates most routine processing, and her team will shift from processing to checking and resolving exceptions. The business case is sound and no jobs are being cut. Yet one of her most experienced specialists, who built the old process over ten years, has gone quiet in meetings. For the business, this is an efficiency gain. For him, it is the end of being the expert everyone relied on. Aoife does not try to argue him out of the feeling. She acknowledges what is ending, asks what he would want to keep from the old process and invites him to help design the new exception checks. The loss is still real, but it is now named and respected.

Reactions are information, not character flaws

When change lands, people react in different ways. Some deny it is really happening. Some get angry. Some negotiate for exceptions. Some withdraw, and a few rush to embrace it before they have thought it through. None of these responses tells you that a person is difficult. Each tells you something about what they are worried about. You may have seen these reactions drawn as a change curve. It is usually traced to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a psychiatrist whose 1969 book On Death and Dying described five stages among terminally ill patients: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Organisations later adapted the idea to workplace change. Use it with care. Kübler-Ross herself noted that people can experience several stages at once and in different orders, and research on grief has not supported a fixed sequence. Treat the curve as a vocabulary for reactions, not a timetable people must follow.

Look for the concern behind the reaction

A useful lens comes from David Rock's SCARF model, published in 2008. Rock suggested that people respond strongly to perceived threats to five social needs: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. The model draws on neuroscience, and parts of it are still debated, so treat it as a practical checklist rather than settled science. It is helpful because a single change often touches several of these needs at once, and the loudest reaction may hide a quieter concern.

Respond to the concern

Otieno manages a claims team at an insurer in Nairobi that is moving to a new claims system. One senior handler challenges every training session. Rather than shutting her down, Otieno asks what worries her most. She explains that her fast turnaround times earned her respect, and she expects her numbers to fall while she learns. Her challenge is about status and fairness, not the software. Naming the real concern changes what Otieno needs to do next. Another tour of the system's features would miss the point, because her worry is about how she will be judged while she learns. Responding to resistance is the focus of a later chapter. For now, the skill is diagnosis.

You are going through it too

Leaders are often expected to champion a change the day they hear about it. Yet you may be losing scope, a valued colleague or the plan you had for your own career. If you skip your own transition, it tends to leak out anyway: as overselling the change, as visible cynicism or as avoiding your team when they most need you. Your team watches how you react. If you appear unsettled, they will read the change as more threatening. If you appear falsely cheerful, they will trust you less. Managing yourself first is not self-indulgence. It is the foundation for leading others with credibility.

Steady yourself before you speak

Lakshmi heads a data analytics team in Chennai. Late one evening she learns that her team will merge with a team in another region, and that she will report to a manager she has never met. Her first reaction is frustration, because she had been planning to grow her team, not hand part of it over. The announcement to staff is scheduled for the next morning. Before that meeting, she takes twenty minutes to work through a few questions on paper.

• What exactly is changing for me, and what am I losing?
• Which parts do I know as fact, and which am I assuming?
• What can I honestly say I support, and what am I still unsure about?
• What will my team most need to hear from me tomorrow?
• Who can I talk to privately so my frustration does not land on my team?

She realises that much of her frustration rests on an assumption about her own role that nobody has confirmed. She calls a trusted peer that evening. The next morning she tells her team what she knows, what she does not yet know and when she expects answers. She admits that the news surprised her too, without turning the meeting into her own complaint.

Build your own steadiness

Steadiness is not the absence of emotion. It is the ability to notice your reaction, give it a name and choose what you do next. Small habits help, such as pausing before you reply to difficult news, checking in regularly with someone outside your team and protecting your sleep in intense weeks.

Checkpoint: an unwelcome office move

What good looks like

You can now explain why change so often feels like loss, using the difference between the external change and the inner transition. You look past visible reactions to the concerns that drive them, such as certainty, status and fairness, and you treat change curves as a vocabulary, not a timetable. You also steady yourself before you speak, so your team meets a leader who is honest, calm and ready to listen.