The change has been decided. The leadership team knows what is coming, roughly when, and most of what it will mean. The workforce knows only that something is coming. That gap can last weeks, even months.
Nobody announces it. But people know something is up. The leadership team’s door is closed more often than it used to be. A standing meeting gets rescheduled, then rescheduled again. Reports that were routine come back with new questions. Plans go vague. Budget answers turn into “we’ll see.” None of it is meant as a message. Your people read it as one.
When we published the definition of Inherited Resistance™ on September 1, two findings from our Focusing Change to Win research went public with it.
That is accurate, and it is easy to agree with, because it makes insufficient communication sound like something that happens on its own. Here is the harder version. Most change communication runs one way. It announces, it updates, it informs. It rarely asks. That is a transaction, not a dialogue, and the people doing the communicating are usually the last to know it is falling short.
What Leaders Actually Notice
Leaders don’t walk around with either number in mind. What they notice is what the numbers produce. Rumours arrive faster than updates. People who used to raise problems in meetings stop raising them. Conversations end when a leader walks into the room. Most leaders sense that something is off, and most set it aside as nerves that will settle once the plan is announced.
The Uncomfortable Part
The contributors to our research are change leaders, and nine in ten of them name insufficient communication as a driver of resistance. Ask a leader in the middle of a change whether they are communicating enough, and they will almost always tell you they are. Somebody’s communication is falling short. If you ask the leader, it is rarely their own.
“The first number describes your people. The second describes you.”
Below Decks
Think of a crew below decks. They feel the ship heel. They hear the engines change pitch. Nobody comes down from the bridge to say why. The sea doesn’t frighten them; they have been at sea for years. What frightens them is the silence from the bridge, and the fact that they have sailed under other captains. They remember what it meant the last time the engines sounded like that.
Your workforce hears that same silence, and they don’t leave it empty. They fill it with memories, often adverse ones: from this organisation, from previous jobs, from what happened to a friend or a brother-in-law when their company “restructured.”
“Your workforce is not resisting your change. They’re remembering everyone else’s failures.”
Silence gives that memory time to ferment.
Why Leaders Go Quiet
Leaders rarely go quiet on purpose. Some don’t see a problem: as far as they are concerned, they have communicated. Others hold back for a reason that sounds responsible. Say something before the plan is complete, the thinking goes, and you invite rumour and speculation you can’t yet answer. Smart, well-intentioned, under pressure, and still wrong.
What the Silence Teaches
When nothing is said, people conclude the change is a done deal, and that raising a concern now would be pointless, or risky. So they keep their concerns to themselves.
Often the opposite is true. The “What” has been decided. The “How” has not, and on the “How,” the people doing the work often know more than the leadership team does. The silence shuts them out of the one decision that is still open.
Your people are not waiting for complete answers. Their questions are smaller and more personal than the plan. Is my job safe? Who will I report to? What stays the same? Holding back until you can answer everything misses the point. The earlier the dialogue starts, the sooner people help you find the workarounds, and the sooner you hear which mistakes from the last change they are braced for — including how they were spoken to and the aftertaste it left.
“A leader who says ‘here is what we know, here is what we don’t know yet, here is where we need your help, and here is the date you will hear from me again’ has closed most of the unknown. Without a single final answer.”
Uncertainty you disclose becomes a known, and it invites dialogue, even uncomfortable dialogue. Uncertainty you withhold becomes a rumour, and the rumour gets written by the last leader who went quiet.
What the Second Number Asks of You
The answer to the 90.5% who cite insufficient communication is not volume. Ten emails are still silence if none of them answers the question people are actually asking, or invites them to ask it. The opportunity is to go below decks before the engines change pitch and engage the people who will have to make the change work.
Saying what you don’t know. Asking for help on the “How.” Naming the date you will be back, and then being back on that date. If circumstances change and you can’t, say so, and say why, before the date passes.
That last part is the one that counts.
A kept return date is small, and it is evidence. Evidence is the only thing that makes the next silence less frightening than the last one.
Fear of the unknown sounds like your people’s problem. Read the second number again.