This year I’ve met more change-tired teams than ever before, worn out from constantly adjusting, absorbing and making sense of priorities that keep shifting.
One frontline leader described it to me simply: “We’re not anti-change. We’re just out of bandwidth.”
If you manage a team, you might recognise this. What wears people down is everything around the change: the emails that don’t quite explain what’s happening, the same information coming from three places, the new process layered on top of the old one, and the effort of working out what it all means for their role.
As a manager, you often sit right in the middle of that. You’re absorbing change from above while trying to keep your team steady, and it’s easy to pass everything straight through because that feels like the transparent thing to do.
The leaders I’ve seen keep their teams energised through change did a few things differently.
They reduced the noise. They looked at the updates, emails and meetings they controlled and cut the ones that added effort without adding value.
They simplified the picture. They explained the why again and again, even when it felt obvious. You may have heard it five times in leadership meetings. Your team may have heard it once, in passing.
They created permission. Permission to slow something down, to say “let’s pause this while we embed the other change”, and to be honest about capacity without it seeming like a lack of commitment.
In one organisation, the leader reduced the weekly meeting load by 40 per cent. The work picked up pace, because people finally had space to focus.
You may not control how much change comes your way, but you have more influence than you think over how much of it lands on your team. Which of your regular meetings could be shorter, or go altogether? What are you forwarding that you could summarise instead? What have you explained once that needs explaining again? And when did you last ask your team how much they’re carrying?
If your team feels stretched, that’s a very human response to a demanding year. Pay attention to it. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is ease the load just enough that people can breathe again, and then move forward.
If your team is feeling the weight of change, whether that’s too many meetings, shifting priorities or people who seem tired even when the work is going well, I’d be glad to talk it through. Book a conversation.
