The Story

Over the course of my career I have worked through a succession of reorganisations of varying scale, alongside strategy shifts and repeated changes to the operating model. Enough of them that at some point change stops being an event you get through and becomes the condition you work in. Accepting that honestly changes what leadership is for. The hardest part is rarely the technical surface. Systems get migrated, teams get restructured on paper, reporting lines get redrawn. What is genuinely difficult is the human side — people trying to read their own future from fragments of information, motivation quietly draining while an announcement is pending, and the gap between what is known and what can be said. This is where a leader actually steps in. Protect the team from noise that will not turn out to matter. Share what is known as soon as it is known, rather than waiting for a complete picture that may never arrive. Listen more than usual, because concerns surface sideways during a transition. And say plainly when there is no answer yet, because silence gets read as bad news and fills with something worse than the truth. Meanwhile business as usual does not pause. Knowledge and talent have to be retained deliberately, and transferred before they walk out of the door rather than after. The habit worth keeping is treating knowledge transfer as continuous rather than as something triggered by an announcement. By the time change is announced, it is already late.

These are the problems I find worth the effort: unglamorous, constrained, and consequential. If you have one like it, I would like to hear about it.

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