Change Isn't the Problem. Pretending People Are Fine Is.
- Monica Jacobs
- Jul 1
- 8 min read
Updated: Jul 6
The human side of leading through change - why change management fails at the individual level, and what leaders can do about it.
Someone in your organization is going through a change right now. A restructure. A new system. A shift in leadership. A process nobody asked for, or hell, maybe you did; you just aren’t making the correlation.
And somewhere in a conference room or a Teams chat or a one-on-one that ran ten minutes too long, a well-meaning leader said some version of this:
"Change is hard, but we're going to get through this together."
And then moved on.
Here’s the thing about that sentence: it is not wrong. It’s just not enough. The gap between saying it and meaning it, between acknowledging change and managing it, is where most organizations quietly lose their people.
Your Brain Was Not Built for This
Before we talk about what leaders should do, let's talk about what is happening inside the people they are leading. What you're seeing isn't really about morale, it's biology.
When your brain perceives a threat, and change, even good change, registers as a threat, it does something very specific. The amygdala fires. That small, almond-shaped structure deep in your brain that has been keeping humans alive for hundreds of thousands of years kicks on and starts scanning for danger. Cortisol and adrenaline flood your system. Your prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for rational thought, creativity, and long-term planning, goes partially offline.
You know this as fight-or-flight. But in the workplace, it shows up differently. It looks like:
The usually engaged employee who suddenly goes quiet in meetings.
The high performer who starts missing deadlines for the first time.
The team member who seems fine until they are absolutely not.
The person who pushes back on everything, not because they are difficult, but because their nervous system is telling them something is wrong.
This is not resistance. This is a regulated biological response to perceived uncertainty. You cannot logic your way past it, not for yourself, and not for your team.
What Prosci Got Right (And What Gets Lost in Translation)
Prosci's change management work has long held that change happens at the individual level, not the organizational level. You can redesign a whole company in a tiny conference room. But the change does not happen until each individual person decides, consciously or not, to move with it.
Their ADKAR model maps that journey: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement. Five stages. Every person on your team is sitting somewhere in that sequence. Most leaders treat the whole team like they are all in the same place at the same time.
They are not.
The person who has been through six restructures is at a different place than the person who has been here eight months and thought they were finally somewhere stable. The veteran who is exhausted and the newcomer who's scared, are having completely different experiences to the same announcement. Both are watching how you respond.
The model is sound. Where it falls apart is in execution, particularly when organizations use it as a communication plan instead of a human plan. When they check the box on "awareness" with an all-hands meeting and wonder why nobody has "desire" yet.
Awareness without safety is just information. People need to feel like they can respond to what they just heard before they can do anything with it.
The Difference Between Acknowledging and Soothing
This is the one I want you to sit with.
Soothing sounds like: "I know this is a lot, but we're going to be fine."
Acknowledging sounds like: "I know this is a lot. I'm not going to pretend it isn't."
One closes the conversation. The other opens it.
Soothing is what we do when we are uncomfortable with someone else's discomfort. It’s well-intentioned. It’s also a way of telling someone that their feelings are an inconvenience to the timeline.
When you soothe, you're asking people to skip the part where they grieve what was, resist what is unfamiliar, or sit inside the uncertainty of not knowing how this turns out. You’re asking them to arrive at acceptance before they have been allowed to move through anything.
That's not how humans work and it's definitely not how change works.
Acknowledging means staying in the room with the hard thing. It means saying "yes, this is uncertain" without immediately following it with a "but." It means trusting that people can handle the truth more than they can handle being managed.
Leaders who acknowledge, not soothe, are the ones whose teams follow them through hard transitions. They may not have solved anything, but they stayed in the room when it was hard.
Meeting People Where They Are
Most change initiatives are designed around where leadership wants people to be, not where people are.
The announcement goes out. The timeline is set. The training is scheduled. And the assumption is that everyone will move at the pace the project plan requires.
But some people are still grieving the way things were. They’re likely not being intentionally resistant. They are in the loss. You cannot pull someone out of a stage they have not finished yet. You can only create enough safety that they are willing to move through it.
Some people need information before they can do anything. They're not asking questions to derail the process. They're trying to build enough certainty to engage.
Some people need to know that their specific experience, their role, their team, their day-to-day, has been thought about. A company-wide email does not answer that. A five-minute real conversation sometimes does.
Meeting people where they are is not about lowering the bar. It is about being honest about where the starting line is.
The Change They're Carrying Isn't Always Yours
Here is something the project plan usually never accounts for: the change someone on your team is struggling to absorb may not be the one you announced.
Change does not stay neatly inside the building. The brain that goes into fight or flight over a new reporting structure is the same brain bracing for a different kind of upheaval at home. A spouse just moved to night shift, and the whole household rhythm must be rebuilt around someone who is now asleep when everyone else is awake. School lets out for the summer, and a parent who had childcare handled in May is suddenly improvising coverage for ten weeks. A car repair, a rent increase, a medical bill, and a budget that was already stretched does not have anywhere left to flex. The carefully balanced calendar that everyone depended on quietly falls apart.
None of that shows up in your change management plan. But it shows up in your meetings. It shows up in the person who is short with a colleague, the one who cannot seem to focus, the one who used to volunteer for everything and now just wants to get through the day. You may be assuming it is your change they are struggling with, when their nervous system is maxed out by a summer with no school, a paycheck that does not stretch, or a schedule that no longer holds.
This is not a reason to lower expectations or stop leading the change. It is a reason to lead it differently. When you ask "where are you right now?" and mean it, you make room for the answer to be about something other than work, and you stop reading home-life overwhelm as resistance to your initiative. People do not arrive at work as blank slates ready to absorb whatever you put in front of them. They arrive carrying everything. The leaders who remember that are the ones whose teams stay with them, because they're being met as whole people, not as resources to be moved through a timeline.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Stop asking "is everyone on board?" and start asking "where are you right now?" One is a performance question. The other is an actual question.
Name the loss, not just the gain. Every change involves something ending. Acknowledging that does not undermine the case for change. It builds the trust that makes change possible.
Watch behaviors, not just words. The person who says "sounds good" in the meeting and then quietly stops showing up for optional calls is telling you something. Silence is data.
Slow down to speed up. The leaders who take an extra week to hear their teams almost always move faster through the resistance phase than the ones who push the timeline and then spend months managing fallout.
Do not confuse compliance with commitment. People can comply with a change and be completely checked out. The organizations that come out of change stronger are the ones that invested in the commitment.
You're In It Too
Let's not forget about YOU. Maybe you asked for this change. Maybe you didn't. Either way, you are part of it — helping design it, develop it, deploy it, and defend it — and ultimately responsible for leading everyone else through it, all while your own amygdala is doing exactly what everyone else's is. You do not get to stand outside the change and direct traffic. You are in it too, absorbing the uncertainty while being asked to be the steady one, under pressure to hit the timeline and model the calm you are not sure you feel. Naming that, even just to yourself, is the only honest place to lead from.
The Bigger Picture
Change is not going to stop. The pace of it is only increasing. Which means the leaders who learn to manage the human experience of change, not just the logistics of it, are the ones whose teams will be able to move through it without breaking down.
This is not soft skills. This is strategy.
None of this is about blame. Most leaders are doing the best they can with what they have, leading with real intention. But change is complicated, and good intentions do not automatically become the choices that help a team feel safe. So give yourself the same grace you are learning to give them. Grace is what you extend; space is what it buys you, the room between what happens and how you respond. The work is widening that space, with enough room to lead with both heart and action rather than choosing between them.
People are watching how you show up when things are uncertain. They’re deciding whether they trust you, whether they belong here, whether they're willing to bring their full capacity to whatever comes next.
And the truth is, nobody is going to be immediately okay with change. That's not the problem. The problem is when we pretend they should be.
If any of this resonated, let's map where you are and what to do next.
Leading a team through change? Book a discovery call. If you want to go deeper, a Blueprint Session gives you focused time to map where your people are and the next move that builds trust instead of burning it. Navigating change of your own? A clarity call is a single, focused conversation to cut through the noise and find your footing
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