Thoughts on Empathy, Change and Teams

Between 60 and 70% of change initiatives fail. And strategy is rarely the problem. However, what organisations miss most often is the human part. How people feel, react and behave while the change is happening around them.

Think about that for a moment. Your organisation spends months building the business case, aligning the leadership team, commissioning the consultants, rolling out the communication plan. But, in the background, managers are absorbing pressure from above while struggling to keep their team steady. Individual contributors are physically showing up every day while quietly checking out mentally. And long-term clients can tell that something feels different, the energy has shifted, the experience is not what it used to be. And, at the highest levels, nobody notices any of this, because the Gantt chart is on track.

This is the cost of ignoring emotional intelligence during change. It does not show up on the project dashboard. It shows up six months later in turnover, in disengagement scores, in the talented people who stopped putting their hand up.

When organisations go through change, teams travel a well-documented emotional journey, often without realising it. Psychologists adapted it from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s grief model, and it maps the internal experience of anyone navigating disruption.

It moves through shock and denial, into frustration and active resistance, down to a low point of confusion and depleted energy, before gradually rising through exploration, acceptance and finally commitment.

The manager sitting at stage two or three on that curve is not performing poorly. They are human. They are carrying uncertainty about their own role, absorbing pressure from above, and trying to maintain the confidence of their team below. Without the emotional intelligence tools to navigate that position, the stress has to go somewhere. It goes into shortened conversations, defensive reactions, and a gradual withdrawal of the psychological safety the team needs most precisely when change is hardest.

The individual contributor at the same point on the curve is watching for signals. They are reading every interaction with their manager for clues about what is real. When those interactions feel cold, distracted or inconsistent, the conclusion they draw is rarely charitable. They do not think their manager is struggling. They think they are not trusted, not valued, or about to be let go.

This is where performance quietly drop. Not in one dramatic moment. In a hundred small ones.

The solution is not to ask managers to pretend everything is fine. It is to give them the emotional intelligence skills to be honest about what is happening while still holding the team with steadiness and care. There is a significant difference between a manager who says nothing and a manager who says: I know this is uncertain, I do not have all the answers yet, and I am here.

One creates anxiety. The other creates trust.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 is unambiguous on this point. Empathy and active listening now rank among the most in-demand leadership skills globally, cited by 50% of employers, alongside resilience, leadership, social influence, and self-awareness. As automation and AI drive ever more rapid change, emotional intelligence is identified as one of the defining leadership skills of the next five years.

And yet most change programs still treat the human dimension as a communication task rather than a capability investment. 

Send the all-hands email. Cascade the key messages. Tick the engagement box. None of that equips a manager to sit with their team’s fear. None of it equips an individual contributor to process their own grief about a role or a team that no longer exists in the same form.

Research shows that 71% of employers already value EQ more than technical skills when evaluating candidates. This is not just a research finding. It is showing up in boardrooms right now. 

I recently ran a training session attended by a Director from BHP Australia. During the break we got talking, and he said something that has stayed with me: “when we hire graduates these days, we are no longer primarily looking at their technical skills. We look at their soft skills first.” When one of Australia’s largest companies tells you that, it is worth paying attention.

So what does good look like? 

It looks like:

• Managers who receive EQ training before a change program begins, not as an afterthought at the end.
• Individual contributors who are given language and frameworks to name what they are experiencing, so they can move through the curve rather than stall on it. 
• Leaders who model emotional honesty as a strength rather than hiding behind the language of strategy. 

And it looks like organisations that measure the human health of a change program with the same rigour they apply to the project timeline.

60 to 70% percent of change initiatives fail. The ones that succeed are rarely distinguished by a better strategy. They are distinguished by leaders who understood that getting people through change is not a communication problem. It is a human one.

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter and thank you for reading it!

To your success,

Lison

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