A short YouTube video by James Laughlin advising leaders on what not to do during organizational change. The speaker warns that leaders often withhold information because uncertainty makes them reluctant to share, which reduces conversations about how change affects employees and their feelings; this silence lets employees "make up their own minds," potentially increasing resistance and mistrust.
This other interesting thing happens when we go through change in organizations is that we start to question whether we're being told the truth because there's so much uncertainty with change that a lot of leaders, they think to themselves, well, I can't tell everyone everything because not everything's set in stone yet. In fact, I can't tell them much at all because I don't really know much to share with them. And so what happens is as leaders, we fail to communicate enough and to really talk to people and engage them with good conversations about what the change represents for them, how they feel about the change, because we're also worried that people are going to resist the change and talk about the change in unfavorable terms and create this toxic environment where no one wants to bloody welcome this change. So we don't talk about it enough. And when we don't talk about it, we'll make up their own minds about the change.
