Addressing Leadership Challenges In Change Projects

Most leaders fail during major transitions. Here’s how to avoid it. I once watched a leadership team crumble during a major restructuring. Top players quit. Execution stalled. The CEO froze. Most leaders fail in moments of transition: → New ownership → Restructures and pivots → Big hires and team shake-ups When uncertainty hits, people freeze, protect their turf, or quit. The best leaders? They speed up trust, remove friction, and keep execution on track. Bill Campbell, the legendary coach behind Apple and Google, taught top CEOs how to lead through uncertainty. His 1:1 leadership principles built some of the greatest teams in the world. But his true measure of leadership? "The Yardstick. Measure your own success by the success of others." The best leaders don’t focus on proving themselves. They focus on elevating the people around them. So what if we applied Bill Campbell’s 1:1 leadership principles to change management? Here’s how👇 How to Lead Through Change Using Bill Campbell’s 1:1 Principles: 1️⃣ Speed up trust or lose your best people In times of change, silence breeds fear. Meet 1:1 with key players immediately, ask: “What’s working?” “What’s broken?” If they don’t feel heard, they’ll start looking elsewhere. 2️⃣ Shift from proving to empowering Most new leaders overcontrol. And lose their best people. Instead of dictating, ask: “What’s one thing to double down on?” Give ownership, not orders. 3️⃣ Kill friction before it kills execution Change creates silos and bottlenecks. Fix it by forcing peer accountability: “What’s the biggest blocker from another team?” “How can we solve it together?” Great leaders don’t just run departments. They align execution. 4️⃣ Re-sell the vision every 2 weeks During transitions, people forget fast. Repeating the vision isn't redundant. It's leadership. Every 2 weeks, reinforce: “Where we’re going.” “Why this change matters.” “How each person contributes.” 5️⃣ Make innovation a daily habit Uncertainty breeds fear. And fear kills creativity. To keep teams proactive, ask: “What experiment should we run this month?” “If you had full control, what’s the first change?” Execution-first teams outlast uncertainty. ↓↓↓ Do this, and your team will execute through any change. What’s the hardest part of leading a transition? Drop your experience in the comments. ♻️ Repost so your team sees this. ➕ Follow for more leadership strategies.

I’ve had to protect my team in the past, particularly when their time or focus was at risk. I’ve seen this happen at companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, where mandates and initiatives would stack during the same timeframe. While each initiative alone might have been reasonable, together they overburdened the teams. Those compiled costs may be invisible to the folks driving the individual mandates. You may have seen teams get overwhelmed by a major release, a review cycle, and bi-annual business planning all at once. This type of time management stress is usually manageable, but there are times when teams can be stretched too thin and compromise morale and quality. When you witness this, I believe it’s crucial to step in. You will hear from your team and you need to be close enough to the issues to decide how to respond. This can be tricky for a leader: on one hand, you want to ensure your team can succeed; on the other, you’re part of the broader leadership and need to support the decisions being made. Sometimes, you have very little room to maneuver. In those cases, I find it most effective to have a private conversation with key decision-makers. Meeting behind closed doors allows you to present the reality of your team’s capacity without putting anyone on the spot. Armed with clear data or project plans, you can often negotiate more realistic timelines or priorities. Another common pressure is when stakeholders create frequent direction changes. Repeated shifts in goals or features will thrash your team and waste energy. This often reflects deeper issues with strategy, alignment, and communication. However, you may not have time for a complete overhaul of your planning processes, and you still need a way to prevent thrash. A short-term fix is to set firm near-term milestones or “freeze” dates, after which any changes must go through a formal triage process. This ensures that if changes are necessary, they follow a transparent, deliberate sequence rather than blindsiding. After the freeze, broader project changes can be considered. Ultimately, I see my responsibility as a leader as fostering an environment where my team can perform at a high level, stay motivated, and avoid burnout. Part of a leader's role is to protect their team’s capability and long-term health. There will always be sprints and times when you need to push, but you also need to consider the long view and put on the brakes when required. People who feel supported are more productive, more creative, and likely to stay engaged.

Last month, I was facilitating a workshop for a group of leaders on how to navigate and lead through change. At one point, someone posed an important question: “Where do you think leading change efforts usually go wrong?” It was asked with genuine curiosity and what was unique was that everyone in the room was a people leader, but just as importantly, they had all been on the receiving end of change themselves, as individual contributors, team members, and participants in past transformations, both good and bad. To harness all that insight, we ran a “pre-mortem” exercise asking: If this change were to fail, what would have caused it? What surfaced was a revealing list of frustrations and patterns ➡ ️ Formulaic Approaches That Ignore the Human Side: There was a general agreement that change frameworks and models can be useful, especially at scale and for organization. But when change becomes a checklist rather than a conversation, it feels mechanical. Because change is personal. People don’t experience it in uniform ways. If we don’t make space for the human reaction, we lose the heart of the effort. ➡️  The WIIFM Trap (“What’s In It for Me”)We’ve all been told to lead with benefits, but several leaders called out how this can backfire. When the “what’s in it for me” message is tacked on as an afterthought, or worse, spun in an obviously false way, it erodes trust. Authenticity matters. If the benefit isn’t real, or if it’s only framed from the organization’s perspective, people will feel it. ➡️ Compliance > Commitment: While it’s true that you can mandate behavior, you can’t mandate belief or commitment.  Many leaders described being in environments where the focus was solely on  compliance, mandates, policies, new systems rolled out with minimal dialogue.  The result? Surface-level adoption at best, quiet resistance at worst. Commitment takes longer, but it leads to energy, ownership, and sustained effort. ➡️The Say-Do Gap: This one came up a lot. When leaders say one thing but act differently, when behaviors, priorities, or incentives don’t align with the stated change,that sends a loud signal. People don’t just listen to what leaders say. They watch what they do. Have you experienced one of these failure points during a change effort? Or figured out a way to avoid them altogether? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you.