Change leadership often starts in the wrong place: behind closed doors, with a small group of senior people huddled together, convincing themselves they have found the answer.

Then comes the theatrical engagement: roadshows, slide decks, carefully managed Q&A sessions, and town hall meetings, aimed at getting everyone on board.

It is a well-trodden path. It feels efficient. But perhaps this is why change often fails somewhere down the line.

People in organisations often feel that change is needed; they are already on board. Their lived experience tells them change is overdue. Also, people rarely resist change because it is too hard! They resist because they have been excluded, patronised, surprised, or sold a decision that has already been made without them. They resist because they weren’t involved in the process, or if they were, it was too far down the line.

The Messy Bit Is Where the Truth Is

The middle of a change process can be messy. Good. That is where reality kicks in. It is where confident assumptions collide with awkward facts, where neat plans meet actual work challenges, and where the people closest to customers, students, systems, processes, and challenges can tell you what is really happening. It is where lived experiences become even more important

Leaders who wait for perfect certainty, for all the facts to line up, are not being responsible; they are hiding. Change leadership means acting with enough clarity to move forward step by step and displaying enough humility to learn. But “enough” doesn’t mean “all”; there will be gaps and information needs. The job is not to eliminate uncertainty. The job is to embrace it and to stop pretending it can be eliminated.

The Leadership Huddle Is the Problem

When leaders disappear into closed-door conversations or huddles and eventually emerge with a finished answer, they should not be surprised when trust seems to disintegrate. Organisational change shouldn’t be seen to involve a papal-like conclave where the followers wait for the white smoke to billow from the chimney.

The closed-door conversations create a gap. This gap between leadership teams and the rest of the organisation is not just an empty space. The gap quickly fills with suspicion, cynicism, and rumour. Trust becomes undermined.

Unfortunately, this is how organisations can accidentally create a parent-child culture: leaders decide, employees absorb; leaders explain and tell, employees listen and nod. Leaders give direct instructions, and employees are expected to blindly follow.

Leaders may ask for feedback, but only after the real choices have already been made. That is not engagement, and it certainly isn’t consultation. It is another word beginning with “c”: choreography. A ritual dance that occurs after a decision has been made (and probably locked in).

If leaders want people to own change, they have to stop treating them as placid passengers on the journey. Leaders need to move closer to the work, to the front line. They need to invite challenge earlier and listen to the people who know where the plan will bend, break, or be quietly ignored and worked around.

Engagement After the Decision Is Just PR

Often, the “people bit” arrives late; it is a bolt-on. The business case has been completed and signed off, and the strategy has been set. The direction is fixed. At this stage, the question of how to bring people along often arises. But by this point, involvement is reduced to messaging. The dance steps of the corporate choreography are being mapped out. But the leaders of the dance are often stepping on the dance partners’ toes!

Bringing people in earlier makes the change process smoother. Risks surface sooner. Blind spots become visible. Better ideas appear. Dead ends are prevented. Front-line experience stops being treated as anecdotal background noise and starts being recognised for what it is: operational intelligence.

This does not mean decision-making becomes a democracy. Leaders still have to decide. They still carry the weight of trade-offs, constraints, and consequences. The high salary comes with accountability.  But it is true that leaders make better decisions when they stop confusing seniority with insight.

If You Ask For Ideas, You Owe People Feedback On Those Ideas

Asking for ideas is not a worthless gesture; it is a necessity. Eliciting ideas from others creates opportunities for entrepreneurship. Not every idea will be right, affordable, or feasible. Some may even be totally bizarre.  However, most ideas will come from people who care about the organisation. Every contribution deserves to be treated as more than raw material for the organisational grinder where they are fed into the corporate machine and ground to dust. In just one of those ideas, the solution just may be found, or just one idea may be the seed from which other ideas blossom.

People need to know that they were heard; they need to know what actually changed, and why some things did not move forward. Silence after consultation is corrosive. It signals that their voices were merely treated as background noise, organisational static.

Real Change Is Co-Authored

Leading change is not about having the answer first and selling it later. It is about creating the conditions in which better answers can emerge. It is about creating space for debate because change takes place, a conversation at a time. Creating this space takes leadership courage and confidence, but not the brittle kind that cannot tolerate challenge and uncertainty. It takes the kind of confidence that allows leaders to say, “We have a direction, but we do not have all the wisdom.”

Change gains credibility when leaders stop waiting for certainty, start embracing risk, and become comfortable in making decisions when all the information isn’t readily available.  Those leaders lean into the organisation and the messy middle; they create connections and become more visible. They use those across the organisation as a source of vital intelligence.

Those organisations that navigate change best will not be the ones with the slickest slide deck and practised scripted dialogue. They will be the ones brave enough to let their people help shape the future before it is too late to matter.

When leading change, leaders should not wait until the change plan is finalised and cemented in place before involving others, as this makes it difficult to adjust direction. It is important to identify as early as possible who needs to be involved and who has the required data and insights.  What insights are being lost every day leaders stay in their leadership huddle? If leaders want people to commit to the future, they should stop presenting it as a finished product. If this is difficult, they should at least bring their people in before the cement sets and encourage them to help build what comes next.