Here's something I see play out constantly when organizations go through change.
A leader announces something new that they’ve really thought through: a restructure, a new process, a shift in direction. And then, bam, someone on the team says, "I don't think this is going to work," or "I don't really get why we're doing this," and the leader takes it at face value and goes back to re-explaining the logical conclusion they’ve already stated.
And nothing moves, because (shocker!) the words were never the actual problem.
When a big change gets announced at your org, you're usually:
I can’t, I won’t, I don’t…
Mary Chapin Carpenter has a song called "The Bug.” The line that always sticks with me is that sometimes you're the windshield and sometimes you're the bug. Change has a way of making people feel like the bug, even while the leader announcing it feels like the windshield. The gap between those two experiences is where most change efforts fall apart and trust erodes.
When someone says "I don't get it," they usually understand the information just fine but what they're carrying is actually anxiety about what's coming, uncertainty about where they fit, and the very tangible discomfort of not knowing what the new version of their job looks like.
When someone says "I don't like it," that's almost always fear of losing something they valued about the way things worked before, or fear that they won't be as good at what comes next as they were at what came before. Change is scary.
When someone says "I don't trust this," they're usually not talking about the initiative at all, but instead referencing a relationship, or a moment in the past when someone said everything would be fine and it really wasn't.
And when someone says "I can't do this," that person isn't pushing back on the change. They're telling you they don't feel equipped and they need real support, not more information.
The leaders who move their teams through change without leaving half the people behind have learned to listen past the words to the feelings underneath. Once you can do that, you stop trying to talk someone out of an emotional experience with a logical argument. Instead, you start actually meeting them where they are, which is the only place leadership ever works from, anyway.
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Change is hard. People resist it, fear it, and sometimes shut down in the middle of it. This one-page reference gives leaders the tools to communicate change clearly and coach their teams through the emotional weight of it, not just the logistics.
This is one piece of a much bigger, more nuanced conversation about change management, and it’s one we spend real time on in our Leader as Coach program because it deserves more than a paragraph. If you want to build the skills to lead your team through hard transitions in a way that actually holds, that's exactly the kind of work we do together over 39 weeks. (Our July–September cohorts are enrolling now, and spots are limited!)
Change is hard. Leading people through it well is harder. When someone on your team pushes back, remember to get curious before you get logical. The feeling underneath the words is where the real conversation starts.
We’re on your side,
Lauran Arledge
Founder, Bold Font
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