It's not about Change Management. It's about Change Enablement.
- Ashley Andersen, MSW
- 6 hours ago
- 4 min read
Only 27% of employees believe their leaders are trained to lead through change. And of that 27%, more than half only slightly agree.
Bet that’s not surprising.
We are not in a shortage of change management frameworks, methodologies, or certified practitioners. We have Prosci. We have Kotter. We have communication plans and stakeholder maps and carefully sequenced rollout timelines. And yet, the majority of employees are watching their organizations move through change and thinking: our leaders are not equipped for this.
So what's the missing piece?
In short: the conversation that needs to happen before anything else begins.
Change management plans the work. Change enablement ensures that how people are led during change actually matches what change demands of them.
What Change Management Actually Does (And Doesn't Do)
Change management is a robust discipline. At its best it covers stakeholder analysis, training plans, readiness assessments, resistance management, and more. What all of it has in common, though, is that it's organized around executing the initiative — getting the right information to the right people at the right time, and tracking whether the plan is on schedule.
What it wasn't designed to do is account for who your people become when you put them inside that plan.
The problem is, when you're rolling out change, your people are not in a stable, predictable state. And leading a workforce that is calm, focused, and operating from a place of stability is a fundamentally different job than leading one that is anxious, uncertain, and asking in a panic, "what does this mean for me?"
The gap between who people are during change and how most leaders are equipped to lead them is where change initiatives break down.
The Question Change Management Doesn't Ask
Change enablement starts with a different question entirely. Not "how do we roll this out?" but: who are our people during change, and how do we, as leaders, need to adapt our approach in light of that?
That reframe changes everything about how you lead.
When people are operating under uncertainty, the brain registers it as a threat. Not metaphorically, but neurologically. The same systems that activate when we're in physical danger activate when our sense of control, belonging, or relevance feels threatened. And organizational change, almost by definition, threatens all three.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Employees who seemed on board in the all-hands but are quietly back-channeling panic to each other
Leaders who feel like they're communicating clearly but whose teams say they have no idea what's happening
Resistance that gets labeled as "people just don't like change" — when what's actually happening is that people are filling in the blanks you left with their worst-case scenarios
High performers suddenly going quiet, making mistakes, or checking out
What's happening is a completely natural neurological response to perceived threat — and communication plans alone aren’t going to cut it when something is so hardwired.
Change enablement starts with something most change initiatives skip entirely — understanding who your people are during change and what that demands of the people leading them.
It asks leaders to recognize that the person who thrives in a stable environment and the person sitting in front of you during a restructure are not operating from the same place. Same human, different context, different needs, different leadership required.
What Enablement Actually Looks Like
Change enablement isn't a single workshop or a checkbox before kickoff. It's a set of capacities that need to be built — in your leaders, in your teams, and in the culture — before, during, and across initiatives. Here are a few facets of what that looks like in practice:
Building leaders' self-awareness during change. Leaders who understand their own threat responses — how they show up when they're uncertain, anxious, or under pressure — can regulate themselves and show up steadier for their teams. A leader who is reactive under stress amplifies team anxiety. A leader who can stay grounded creates the safety people need to keep functioning.
Equipping leaders to lead differently when the context demands it. Most leadership training is designed for stable environments. The skills that make someone an excellent manager in steady state — directness, decisiveness, high expectations — can become liabilities during change if they're not adapted. Enablement trains leaders on what changes about their role when the context changes.
Addressing the three emotional barriers that derail adoption. Fear of irrelevancy. Story-making in the absence of information. Loss of control. These three dynamics show up in virtually every change initiative and drive the behaviors that leaders interpret as resistance. Enablement gives leaders the tools to recognize and respond to these — not push through them.
Creating the conditions for honest communication. Psychological safety collapses during change. Enablement actively works to rebuild it, because without it, leaders never get real information about what's happening on the ground. And without real information, they're navigating blind.
These are teachable, practicable skills, and they're what separates organizations that come out of change stronger from the ones that spend years recovering from the fallout.
The Horse Has to Lead the Cart
Change management and change enablement are not either/or. You need both. But the order matters.
You can have the most well-designed change initiative in your organization's history — clear rationale, tight timelines, beautiful comms plan — and watch it stall because the leaders responsible for carrying it out weren't equipped to lead through change.
Enablement is not a nice-to-have you layer on top after the strategy is set. It's the foundation the strategy has to be built on.
The question for CHROs and People leaders right now is not whether your organization has change management. It's whether your leaders are actually equipped to lead people through what change demands of them.
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