There is a common narrative today that suggests that people are stubborn, inflexible, and unwilling to adapt. There is no shortage of experts willing to argue that people naturally resist change. That is why change is hard. But if that were true, human history would look very different than it does.
Human beings change constantly. People become parents, move across the country, leave careers, recover from setbacks, adopt new beliefs, build new identities, and make difficult personal decisions every day. We are capable of tremendous change.
I believe what people resist is not change itself. What they resist is being changed.
That distinction is important because it shifts our attention away from the people experiencing the change and toward the leaders communicating it. In my experience, the failure of many change efforts can be traced not to the quality of the decision itself, but to the way the decision is introduced.
Leaders often feel pressure to eliminate uncertainty when announcing change. They reassure people that everything will work out, that everyone will benefit, that the path is clear, and that success is all but guaranteed. While these messages are usually well intentioned, they often have the opposite effect. Most people have enough life experience to know that significant change rarely unfolds so neatly.
The challenge for leaders is not to create certainty where none exists. The challenge is to create trust in the presence of uncertainty.
Over the years, I have come to believe there are four things leaders should consider communicating before any major change.
1. Not everyone will benefit equally.
We’ve all heard that we should frame change around “what’s in it for me.” While that advice has merit, it often gets stretched into something less honest: the implication that everyone wins.
But meaningful change almost always involves tradeoffs. Some people will gain opportunities while others experience disruption. Some teams will see immediate benefits while others may carry additional burdens in the short term.
Pretending otherwise rarely increases buy-in. It usually decreases credibility.
People know when a change creates winners and losers. Trust grows when leaders acknowledge that reality rather than attempting to explain it away.
2. We don’t know everything yet.
The truth is that no leader, regardless of intelligence or experience, has access to complete information about the future. Markets change. Competitors react. Assumptions prove incomplete.
None of this is a failure of leadership. It is simply the nature of reality. Yet many leaders feel compelled to communicate as though every variable has been accounted for.
There is something surprisingly reassuring about hearing a leader say, “This is our best assessment based on what we know today, but we know there are things we do not yet know.”
People do not require omniscience from their leaders. They require honesty.
3. We reserve the right to get smarter.
One of the most damaging habits in organizational life is the belief that changing course is evidence of weakness.
As a result, leaders often become prisoners of their own announcements. New information emerges and yet the organization continues down the same path because no one wants to admit that an adjustment is necessary. Commitment to an outcome does not require commitment to a particular plan.
Be willing to say, “If we learn something that suggests a better approach, we will change our approach.”
Far from undermining confidence, this kind of humility often strengthens it. It signals that the organization values learning more than ego and effectiveness more than consistency.
4. We still believe this is the right decision.
This final message is what prevents the first three from becoming an exercise in ambiguity.
Acknowledging tradeoffs does not mean abandoning conviction.
You can hold two seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time. You can acknowledge everything you do not know while remaining clear about what you believe.
In sum, when leading change consider the following shpiel:
“We know some people will not like this decision. We know there are variables we cannot predict. We know we may learn things that cause us to adjust our approach. And despite all of that, we believe this is the right thing to do.”
That is confidence. And confidence, unlike certainty, does not require pretending to know the future.
Elsewhere in Culture
Congrats on Getting a Job (Or Is It?) John Frehse and I started with a simple question that became more complicated the longer we sat with it: why do we congratulate people on getting jobs? We explored what that language reveals about how we think about work, whether loyalty is always productive, and why leaders who genuinely support people moving on may be building stronger cultures than those trying to keep everyone in place. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ceo-daily-brief-with-dr-jessica-kriegel/id1725350421?i=1000771660749 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/33PawQiwgroIm4LW3zWtAy?si=18d586dc42064783
How to ACTUALLY Measure Culture I challenged one of the most accepted assumptions in business: that employee engagement is the best way to measure culture. We’ve spent decades optimizing for engagement scores. I’m increasingly convinced the more honest measure is whether the way people think and act is producing the results the organization exists to achieve. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ceo-daily-brief-with-dr-jessica-kriegel/id1725350421?i=1000771840797 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7oZbmS9kPGuP2RGlPdgaWA?si=4456542b03c14886
The Jobs Report Nobody Trusts John Frehse joined me to unpack why jobs numbers feel less useful than they used to and what leaders should pay attention to instead. We talked about confidence, noisy signals, and the difference between reacting to uncertainty and adapting through it. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ceo-daily-brief-with-dr-jessica-kriegel/id1725350421?i=1000772007284 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6dINPSMHPXarEsjJOGNp7E?si=1c4071ca37424ca2
And later this week…
CEOs Are Losing Confidence John Frehse and I discussed the implications of declining CEO confidence and why uncertainty changes behavior long before it shows up in outcomes. We explored what happens when leaders pull back investment, shorten planning horizons, and try to lead in an environment that feels increasingly unpredictable.
Complicated Workplace Relationships I explored the tension between professionalism and authenticity at work and asked why vulnerability often only seems acceptable once something difficult happens. What would change if we created workplaces where people didn’t have to wait for a crisis to be seen as fully human?