Human-Centered Leadership: Designing Change People Will Support

Change is everywhere right now. But support for change? That’s collapsing.

According to Gartner research featured in Harvard Business Review, the average organization has gone from 2 major changes each year to 10 in the last decade. At the same time, employee willingness to support those changes has dropped from 74% to 38%.

Read that again. More change. Half the support.

That’s not a communication problem. It’s a leadership problem.

In our Human-Centered Leadership workshops—including one focused on cultivating change-capable organizations that I most recently facilitated in Seattle with 40 healthcare executives—we reframe what’s actually happening:

People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.

And that sense of being changed is directly related to what the change experience feels like for them. When we talk with employees, words they use to describe their change experience? Unclear. Out of my control. Disconnected.

Those feelings are why change resilience is breaking down.

Yet most leaders respond by pushing harder. More urgency. More pressure. More messaging. But resilience doesn’t come from pressure. It comes from how the experience has been designed with the employee in mind.

I'm curious. What do you see in your organizations showing up most right now around enterprise changes—resistance, fatigue, or something else?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kevin is passionate about helping people and organizations understand and foster belonging. Drawing on both personal experience and professional expertise, he helps leaders design cultures and experiences where individuals, teams, and communities can thrive and feel they truly belong.