At NEP we work with forward-thinking leaders and their teams, and regardless of industry or company size, we are hearing similar feedback about the overwhelming pace of change in today’s workplace.
I had one leader say to me that “Every week there’s something new we’re supposed to understand, implement, or worry about. My people are exhausted from trying to keep up, and I can see it’s affecting their execution of the fundamentals.”
Another senior executive told me that “We’re constantly reactive to the latest trend or technology. My team feels like they’re always behind, and it’s impacting our ability to focus on what actually drives results.”
A third leader shared that “Half my team thinks AI will replace them, the other half thinks we’re not moving fast enough with it. Meanwhile, our client satisfaction scores are slipping because everyone’s distracted.”
So it appears we have a fundamental disconnect between the pace of change occurring around us and our collective ability to process and respond to it effectively.
Why are so many teams struggling with change right now, even when they know change is inevitable?
Firstly, we need to highlight that being overwhelmed by rapid change is a completely human response to an unprecedented situation. The brain is naturally wired to look for any threats and will assume the negative of a situation.
Yes the workplace is evolving, and that’s actually pretty awesome. We were working like we were still in the industrial revolution for way too long! However it does feel like the pendulum of change has certainly gathered momentum and is now testing people a lot more. So to embrace the opportunities that change provides, leaders definitely need some upskilling on getting their teams through this.
The root of this overwhelm generally comes down to our brains not being wired to handle the current volume and velocity of change. Our brains are designed for much slower, more predictable environments.
Mental health isn’t what it used to be…
Add to this challenge that multiple studies are supporting that mental health is generally declining across workplaces, and that’s not a great recipe for high performance without burnout. Now I’m paraphrasing here, but the gist of the definition of mental health is really only a base level of functioning – basically we can deal with the normal stresses of life and hold down a job. This hardly screams high performance. So it’s concerning for leaders who want to drive results that their peoples’ mental health is probably on a slope in the wrong direction.
Think about the differences in workplace change over just the last five years:
- Different technological capabilities – AI went from science fiction to daily reality almost overnight.
- Different workforce composition – five generations working together can lead to some interesting interactions, to say the least. Cue the popcorn!
- Different perceptions about work-life integration and career expectations.
- Different communication channels and information overload – we’re now questioning if putting social media on an iPhone was really such a great move?
- Greater developments in remote work, hybrid models, and digital collaboration tools – yet did anyone actually think to coach their leaders on how to change their leadership to adapt to this?? (Luckily our clients did!)
So it’s hardly surprising that people’s mental health is now being challenged. Yet, as leaders, if we want people to get more results at greater speed, we need them with more than a basic level of mental health. We need them to have greater psychological capital. We want to start with mental health as a foundation and help people build their mental fitness higher than that baseline, progressing their psychological capital to a point where they cannot just tolerate change, but embrace high levels of change and look for opportunities instead of obstacles.
Many people in my workshops have heard me quote Ryan Holiday’s book “The Obstacle Is The Way” – the gist is that most people will see these changes as obstacles, whereas the top 10% of people will see them as opportunities to embrace. These 10% of people have a very different mindset to the other 90%. In today’s workplace, it’s super important for leaders to work on their own mental fitness and to help their teams do the same.
So how do we solve this change overwhelm situation?
Well you are already halfway there – you now understand that the issue isn’t the change itself, but rather our approach to processing and responding to it. This goes a long way to reducing the anxiety and resistance that naturally arise.
First, develop psychological capital (aka mental fitness) as a priority
Rather than just managing change reactively, focus on building your team’s capacity to thrive during change. Psychological capital includes four key components: hope, optimism, resilience, and self-efficacy. When teams have strong psychological capital, they don’t just cope with change – they actively seek opportunities within it.
This means helping people shift from asking “What if this goes wrong?” to “What possibilities does this create?” It’s the difference between seeing AI as a threat to job security versus seeing it as a tool to eliminate mundane tasks and focus on higher-value work.
Martin Seligman’s research in his book Tomorrowmind shows that people who report to resilient leaders are 30% more productive than those who don’t. Interestingly, resilience is only one part of psychological capital, so imagine the impact when you develop all four components across your team.
Second, get your decision making matrix sorted!
It baffles me how often we see that decision making is done by consensus with no one person responsible for the ultimate decision. Lack of decisions, and the ambiguity it causes is way worse than swift decisions.
Not every change deserves the same level of attention or energy. Develop criteria for assessing which changes are strategic imperatives, which are worth testing, and which can be safely ignored for now.
For example, when a new AI tool launches, instead of immediately diving into research mode, ask: Does this directly impact our core client value proposition? Does it solve a current pain point? Can we test it without major resource commitment?
This prevents the common trap of spreading energy thin across every shiny new development while neglecting the fundamentals that actually drive results.
Of course it’s important to hear feedback from people before making a decision, but ultimately one person needs to pop their grownup pants on to make the decision and be held responsible for it once feedback has been gathered. This process requires two things beforehand. Firstly – normalise that not everyone will get their way. Then normalise that they still need to move forward with the decision, and lead others to move forward with the decision in a productive way. And not just waiting for the decision to fail so that they can say “I told you so”.
Don’t sugar coat it – spell it out. When teams have clear frameworks for handling change, they spend less energy on worry and more energy on execution. Either way – that’s a good result!
Building psychological safety around change conversations is also a great way to ensure that concerns get addressed before they become performance issues.
Understand the neuroscience and build mental fitness at every opportunity
At NEP we are also working with organisations to help them understand the neuroscience of mindset and how to build psychological capital. Changing team meetings to be far more energising and connecting to wins and purpose can have a great impact on psychological capital. When people work on this both inside and outside of work, they are more prepared to deal with change and have greater self-confidence that they will deal with any changes thrown at them.
We are seeing improved team confidence, clearer priorities, and significantly faster strategy execution when leaders consistently model how to assess changes using established frameworks while also building their team’s psychological capital.
If you have a team with a great change management mindset, you will see happier clients and customers, you will see projects and strategies implemented way more quickly, and your team will have much less chance of getting burnt out.
You need your people spending their energy credits on actually doing the work!
The world is getting more and more complex, and this is creating decision fatigue and performance degradation in organisations of all sizes. Without clear approaches to change, teams burn out from trying to keep up with everything instead of excelling at what matters most.
The more we can normalise change as a constant rather than an exception, the better teams become at maintaining performance during transitions and the less unnecessary energy credits they will be spending.
We are seeing significantly better client outcomes, faster strategy execution, and higher team satisfaction when people are operating with strong psychological capital and clear change management frameworks rather than hoping each new development will somehow sort itself out.
If you’re planning on driving high performance without burnout and making sure that everyone is allocating their energy credits in the best ways possible, you really can’t ignore the mindset of your team and whether or not they are ready for your big plans. If they aren’t ready, you can have a great strategy, but you’ll need more than a lot of luck for it to be executed successfully.
Our reactive approach to workplace change needs to change. We now need to make sure we know how to navigate constant evolution without sacrificing performance on what actually matters to our clients and customers. What worked in 2015 is no longer a thing – let that go.
The good news is that we can build change resilience as a competitive advantage if we want to. And that is exactly what we help organisations to do.
If you’re facing challenges with change management mindset and want to learn more about implementing these approaches in your organisation, book a Performance Call.
Of course, if you’d like to find out more about how to improve performance with less effort why not either book a Performance Call or sign up for our next 20/20 session or one of our open workshops here.