Leading Through Change

Change has always been part of organisational life. But today, the speed, scale, and intensity of change feels different. Markets shift overnight, technology reshapes how we work, and mergers or restructures redraw whole organisations in a matter of months. For leaders, that means the question isn’t whether you’ll need to guide your team through change, it’s how well prepared you’ll be when it happens.

Over the past fifteen years, I’ve worked with organisations large and small to help them navigate change. From global consumer goods companies to financial services and tech, the pattern is the same: what determines the success of a transformation isn’t the strength of the strategy or the detail of the project plan. It’s the behaviours of the leaders who guide people through the uncertainty.

Change isn’t just a technical process it’s an emotional and behavioural journey. People experience it in different ways. Some move quickly to curiosity and experimentation; others stay longer in frustration or doubt. Leaders themselves are often further along the curve than their teams, which can create a gap between what feels obvious to you and what feels daunting to them.

This human side of change is often underestimated, but it’s also where the greatest opportunities lie. When leaders acknowledge emotions, create clarity, and model the right behaviours, teams can move through uncertainty with greater confidence and resilience. When they don’t, change becomes something that happens to people rather than with them. That’s where resistance grows.

Here we’ll focus on the skills and frameworks that matter most for people leaders. (Side note: it’s worth acknowledging at this point that the models aren’t the work…they simply support and enable the work. So you could choose any models you like.) The models we’ll use throughout here are both from Prosci and stand out as especially useful because they are simple and practical:

• ADKAR: a diagnostic tool that helps you pinpoint where individuals or teams may be struggling, whether it’s with awareness of what’s changing, desire to engage, or the ability to perform in a new way.
• CLARC: a set of five leadership behaviours and roles: Communicator, Liaison, Advocate, Resistance Manager, and Coach. These give managers clear, practical moves to support their teams day to day.

These frameworks aren’t theory for theory’s sake. They’ve been chosen because they help support real leaders in practical ways. They give leaders a way to both understand and act in the messy, human reality of transformation.

You’ll often here about balance in life, right? The answer being somewhere in the middle. It’s true of leading through change too. It’s about balance: balancing clarity with empathy, structure with flexibility, direction with dialogue. This piece will explore the emotional journey of change, the tools and behaviours that matter most, and the practical ways leaders can help their teams not just cope with change, but build capability and confidence through it.

In the end, leading through change isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about creating the conditions where people can move forward together.