The Leaders Who Can Steward A Team Through Change (And Those Who Can't)

Suzanne Schröder spent nearly three decades at Valtech. Her employee number was a single digit. By the time I worked with her, she was Chief People Officer, with the kind of institutional credibility that only comes from being in the organization long enough to understand not just how things work, but why they work that way.

We worked closely together on the kind of initiatives where, by their nature and definition, you don’t have all the answers upfront. Policy changes. A redesigned bonus program. A major acquisition. The destination was clear. The path had to be built while we were walking it.

What I remember most about working with Suzanne isn’t what she decided. It’s how she decided. She listened more than she spoke, which isn’t a small thing for someone with three decades in and every reason to be confident enough to fill the meetings with her own perspective. When she disagreed with something, including something I’d brought to her, she didn’t immediately redirect. She sat with it first and considered what was being proposed. I often came in with one approach and left with a different one, not because I’d been overruled, but because I’d been shown something that wasn’t known to me before.

I’ve watched a lot of leaders over the years. Good ones, difficult ones, brilliant ones who couldn’t communicate, average ones who made everyone around them better just by being decent and consistent. The leaders who navigate continuous change well are not necessarily the smartest people in the room, though sometimes they are. They’re the ones who’ve made peace with not knowing, which sounds simple and isn’t. Most organizations still reward certainty. You get promoted for having answers, knowledge, and expertise. You signal authority by projecting confidence.

There’s one behavior that separates adaptive leaders from the rest more reliably than any other, and it isn’t the one that carries a certification. It’s how they handle being wrong.

In a stable environment, being wrong is costly and risky, so leaders learn early to minimize visible wrongness. They hedge. They qualify. They cover up. They build in enough deniability that when things go sideways, the causality stays ambiguous. In a continuously evolving environment, that instinct becomes the problem. You will be wrong regularly, not because you’re a bad leader, but because you’re making decisions with incomplete information in shifting conditions. Adaptive leaders treat being wrong as information. We made this call with what we knew. Here’s what we’ve learned. Here’s how we’re adjusting. Then they move forward.

That’s not public self-flagellation. It’s organizational modeling. When leaders demonstrate that being wrong and adjusting course is normal, everyone else can do the same thing. Organizations where leaders perform certainty and hide wrongness produce teams that do model that behavior right back.

I have an opinion about what causes this, based on my own experience and observations inside organizations for more years than I’d like to admit, and it isn’t a character flaw. Most leaders earn their job title precisely because they’re good at the opposite skill. Deep expertise. Enough answers to look like they have all of them. That’s what gets you promoted in the first place. Then a transformation lands on their desk, and the job changes underneath them without warning. They’re suddenly expected to lead through uncertainty and ambiguity, to make calls without having all the answers, and almost nobody has ever taught them how, or shown them what it actually looks like in practice.

I saw this weak point often enough, in organizations with otherwise strong, capable leadership, that I built a workshop around it directly: Leading Through Change. In most cases, the leaders in the room weren’t bad at their jobs. The problem is that this particular skill was never developed in them, and most organizations assume it will show up on its own once someone has a senior enough title. It doesn’t. It has to be built the same deliberate way I assume Suzanne built it, with emotional intelligence, through practice, through being shown what it looks like when someone else does it well.

This is the crucial distinction, clear on why, flexible on how, that separates leaders who can steward a team through change from leaders who can only hold on with a tight grip to a plan that was only ever a guess to begin with.

This is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of my new book, Stop Managing Change: Start Building an Organization That Doesn’t Need To, out now. If this sounds like your leadership team has plenty of expertise and not enough practice leading through the parts nobody can plan for, the Organizational Adaptability Pulse Check is a free starting point. For anyone who wants to talk through what building this looks like in your organization, including the Leading Through Change workshop, a conversation with me is the next step.

P.S. If you’ve read Stop Managing Change, an honest review on Amazon helps other readers find it.