AI and layoff headlines have put many workforces on alert. That makes the truth about a change initiative harder to hear, at exactly the. moment leaders need it most.
The steering committee meeting runs right on time. Every scheduled training session has been delivered, the readiness dashboard is mostly green, and the sponsor thanks everyone for holding the date. Twenty minutes later, two people from that meeting are talking in the hallway. One says more than half the supervisors never showed up for their own training sessions, so their teams are going live with nobody nearby who can coach them. The other says the change lead has been working most nights to keep up and has stopped asking for help. Neither of them said a word of this in the room.
I’ve watched some version of that scene play out across healthcare, higher education and financial services this year. The executives in those rooms are capable people who care about the outcome. What they most need to know isn’t reaching them, because the people who hold that information don’t feel safe enough to say it. With AI reshaping roles and layoff announcements arriving every week, that silence is getting harder to break.
What executives most need to know isn’t reaching them, because the people who hold that information don’t feel safe enough to say it.
What do we mean when we say change management?
Ask five executives what change management is and you’ll often get five different answers. Some hear communications or training, while others see it as something the project team handles after the decisions have been made. When leaders hold different pictures of the work, nobody owns all of it, and it ends up underfunded by default.
The simplest way I can describe change management is helping people shift how they think and behave, so the change delivers the outcomes the organization paid for. Behavior follows thinking, and thinking depends a great deal on how safe people feel, which is why a new process on paper rarely changes much by itself. Communications and training are part of that work. So is engaging the people the change affects and noticing early when something isn’t landing.
What are executives missing when they plan for change?
Across very different organizations, I keep seeing the same blind spots. Each one comes with a sentence people are thinking but rarely say to the executive who needs to hear it.
Change gets planned as an event. Go-live, the town hall and the training session all have dates, so they get planned and celebrated. Progress gets measured by what was delivered, like sessions held, rather than by whether anyone is ready. Behavior changes over the months that follow, usually after the project team has moved on. What people aren’t saying is, “The training went well, and we’ve quietly gone back to the old way.”
Sponsors leave themselves out if it. Leaders often approve structure and discipline for project teams and then skip it for their own decisions. People watch what the sponsor does more closely than anything they’re told. Prosci’s research finds that projects with extremely effective sponsors met their objectives 79% of the time, compared with 27% for those with extremely ineffective sponsors. The sentence nobody says out loud is, “Our leaders aren’t doing what they’ve asked us to do.”
The work is invisible, so it gets underestimated. When nobody breaks down what each part of a change involves, the effort gets estimated low and staffed part-time. I’ve watched a role planned at 20 hours a week settle closer to 35, carried by someone already covering several other roles on the same program. “This can’t be done in the hours you’ve given me” is one of the hardest sentences for a capable person to say to their boss.
The change role goes to whoever is closest. It tends to land on someone trusted and already stretched, who knows the organization well but has never led a change at this scale. The person rarely says, “I don’t have the experience for what you’ve asked of me,” because right now it can feel like volunteering for the next round of cuts.
Too much is changing at once. When several initiatives compete for the same people, every new message becomes noise. I’ve heard communications teams admit that nobody is listening anymore because there are too many messages. Underneath that is a sentence leaders rarely hear: “We can’t absorb another change right now.”
Why don’t people tell their executives?
When people sense a threat to their job, their standing or their sense of control, the brain shifts its resources toward protection. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain we rely on to weigh options and see the bigger picture, works less well under that kind of stress. Neuroscientist Amy Arnsten at Yale has shown that even fairly mild stress, when it feels out of our control, can quickly impair those abilities. The brain falls back on what feels familiar and safe.
I call this Preservation Mode. In that state, speaking up to someone with influence over your future feels like a risk your brain would rather not take. So people agree too quickly in the meeting, raise their concerns only with someone outside the hierarchy, or say nothing at all. This kind of resistance is quiet. It shows up as delays, extra meetings and decisions that never quite get made, and leaders tend to read it as inertia.
Harvard’s Amy Edmondson has spent decades studying the opposite condition, which she calls psychological safety: a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Her research found that teams with that safety are more willing to speak up about problems and learn from them.
The current climate makes the safety harder to come by. Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted 120,136 announced US job cuts that cited AI between January and September of this year. Every one of those headlines travels into meeting rooms with the people who read them, so many workforces are already in Preservation Mode before a change is even announced. That includes the person leading the change.
That last point matters more than most executives realize. A change lead under the same threat as everyone else falls back on what’s familiar too, and curiosity is one of the first things to go. yet the role asks them to model the very learning they’re asking of others. When we hand that role to someone who is already stretched and uncertain about their own future, we’ve designed a system that makes the job close to impossible.
When we hand that role to someone who is already stretched and uncertain about their own future, we’ve designed a system that makes the job close to impossible.
What does it take to change how an organization works?
An organization changes at the pace its systems allow, which is rarely the pace of the announcement. Behavior change starts with the individual, and the threat must de-escalate before anything new can be learned. People need to understand what the change means for them, then try the new way somewhere it’s safe to get it wrong. Habits also take longer to form than most plans allow. Researchers at University College London found it took participants a median of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic, with a wide range from person to person.
For a team, the change has to show up in its routines. That means being clear about who decides what\, holding meetings with a purpose, keeping one-on-ones on the calendar and naming who owns each piece of work. Most of these cost little or nothing. Teams also need a hand in designing the new way of working, because people defend what they help build.
Across the organization, the surrounding systems must support the new behavior. Policies, job descriptions and incentives need to line up with it. Decisions needs a standing forum with a known rhythm, every change needs a named owner once the project closes, and someone must be watching the total load of change landing on the same people.
“People pay far more attention to what a sponsor does in month six than to what they said at the town hall.”
Through all of it, executives need to keep showing up. People pay far more attention to what a sponsor does in month six than to what they said at the town hall. And at every level, someone must make it safe to say the hard sentence out loud, because that’s the information the plan depends upon.
3 Questions For Your Executive Team
If someone walked the hallway after your next steering committee, what would they hear that never made it into the room, and who would be willing to tell you?
Who is leading the people side of your largest change right now, how many hours is it truly taking, and what else are they carrying?
What have you asked your people to do differently that you haven’t yet changed in how you make your own decisions?