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Leading Through Change Fatique
8 Plays12 days ago
Change fatigue is real — and it’s not slowing down. Leaders everywhere are being asked to guide their teams through wave after wave of new initiatives, strategies, and reorganizations. But when exhaustion and skepticism set in, how do you keep trust and energy alive?
In this episode of The Exponential Mindset Leadership Podcast, Ron Minatrea shares three ways to lead through change fatigue: seek to understand the bigger picture, share honestly what you know (and what you don’t), and translate strategy into something your team can connect with. These simple moves will help you stay aligned, build credibility, and keep your team engaged — even when the changes keep coming.
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RonMinatrea
🌐 Learn more at: https://www.ronminatrea.com
💼 Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronminatrea
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Transcript
Introduction to Leadership Challenges
00:00:00
Speaker
How do you lead when you know your team is not bought into the latest new initiative? And if you're being totally honest, you're not sure you are either. Hello, I'm Ron Minitri, and this is the Exponential Mindset Leadership Podcast, where our goal is to help you lead more effectively and live more fully.
00:00:18
Speaker
Now, look, we've probably all been there. I know many times i was asked to stand up in front of my team and roll out the next big thing. Now, maybe it was a new program to boost engagement, or it was a new strategic direction for the company.
00:00:36
Speaker
Or often, it was a new organizational structure, maybe the second in less than a year. In a world of constant change, all those changes began to blur.
The Impact of Constant Change
00:00:48
Speaker
I remember at one point we had gone through so many changes back to back that my boss would always tell the same story. was a story about three envelopes. His predecessor left him three envelopes the first day on the job and says, hey, if things go bad, open an envelope.
00:01:03
Speaker
So things weren't going well. He opens that first envelope and it says, blame your predecessor. Well, I didn't feel right to him, but he tried it. But certainly it didn't work. So he went on a couple more months and eventually opened the second envelope because things were still not going well.
00:01:20
Speaker
And it said, reorganize. and Because it seemed like that was the flavor, right? ah But there was still a third envelope. And sure enough, in time, in desperation, he had to open it because things were really getting bad.
00:01:34
Speaker
And it simply said, make three envelopes. And we laughed. It was a funny story. He loved to tell it. But the truth behind that story isn't really funny because what it's saying is when change is constant, people start to expect change.
00:01:51
Speaker
They just don't expect much from it. They've seen so many shifts, so many urgent priorities. They grow weary and skeptical. And often I think they feel like they're just too busy to dive into something that they don't think is really going to last.
The Importance of Alignment in Leadership
00:02:08
Speaker
But the reality is we all know change is constant, and it's not going to slow down. In fact, it's accelerating these days. So how can we learn to lead in the face of what some have called this flavor of the month fatigue?
00:02:23
Speaker
I think we have to step back and start by looking at how we're thinking about things. Now, I've led some changes that I understood. I agreed with them. I believed in them.
00:02:34
Speaker
I've also led some that I didn't agree with or didn't understand at least. And that's the first thing you want to examine before you stand up to announce anything.
00:02:46
Speaker
Because when we agree and understand, we bring one energy. But when we don't understand or we don't agree, we bring a whole different energy. And our team can tell.
00:02:59
Speaker
They just know the difference because people believe what they perceive more than what you say. So if you're not bought in, they're going to sense that and they're not likely to buy in either.
00:03:13
Speaker
Now, I think people try to say what this they should say because they want to lead well. They have the best of intentions, right? They want to follow the party line or they want to be seen as a team player and Maybe they just have accepted that the change is inevitable and it's their duty as a leader.
00:03:34
Speaker
But if your team senses that you're believing one thing and saying something else, that creates a trust problem because they don't know that they can trust what you say.
00:03:44
Speaker
and it undermines your credibility as a leader. But it also creates a second issue. um And that's one of alignment. Now, One of the key principles of the exponential mindset is alignment. In fact, that's the that's the first step in our change model is align.
00:04:03
Speaker
We want to make sure that everything, who we are inside us is matching up with what's going on outside us. We want to know that our beliefs, our behaviors, passions, our actions, all are aligned in harmony.
00:04:20
Speaker
Now, if they're not, There's this incongruence or this dissonance that happens inside of us. And that will drain you. You know something's wrong. It puts a drag on you.
00:04:32
Speaker
It certainly makes you less effective. And it likely makes you less confident.
Effective Leadership Amidst Doubt
00:04:38
Speaker
I think hesitation will creep into your decision-making or your actions.
00:04:44
Speaker
Now, to avoid that dissonance, there's a temptation to go another way, and that is to to side with your team and join them in their frustration. Yeah, I don't know about this. I don't know what they're thinking. They don't get it.
00:04:58
Speaker
And I've seen people do that, and if I'm honest, I probably did it once or twice myself. But if also, if I'm honest, that's not leading well. I've undermined and compromised my role as a leader, one.
00:05:10
Speaker
But also, I have seeded an us versus them mentality that can kill a culture and the effectiveness of an organization. So what's the answer? What's our best path forward?
00:05:24
Speaker
We know we want to lead well. We want to be honest. We want to speak with integrity. We want to build trust. You know, we want to be part of a healthy culture and an effective organization.
00:05:36
Speaker
So what's the answer? I want to offer three things that I think we can do that will help navigate it. um The first thing is simple. if If you don't understand it, it's your job to at least seek to understand it.
00:05:51
Speaker
um I had another old boss that said, 95% of the time, if you armed everyone in the room with the same information, they would come to the same conclusion. um And what he was saying was,
00:06:03
Speaker
if If our leaders have chosen this new strategy or this new path or this new direction, what is it that they know that I don't know? Is there someone I can talk to to gain a better understanding of that? Do I know who the people were that made this decision? That's key because when you understand who makes a decision, where what level that's coming from, um you can at least begin to put yourself in their shoes and try to find their perspective.
00:06:32
Speaker
And it's almost a guarantee that it's going to be a broader perspective than you've been thinking with. It's going to be bigger than your team. And so if you can put yourself in your shoes, or let's say put yourself in the shoes of your boss's boss, probably somebody you know, but somebody that thinks at a broader level than you, ah what are they seeing? What are they thinking? What's that perspective?
00:06:54
Speaker
Are they seeing that this is being driven by things happening in other parts of the company, for instance, or maybe other parts of the world? Or certainly is it something to do with happening and some things happening in the competitive landscape. landscape See, if you can seek and build a framework that looks at this from various angles, you may be able to make sense of it or understand it.
00:07:17
Speaker
If not, you'll at least be able to develop a much more informed perspective. And that's something that you can share with your team. And you can do that without making it us against them.
00:07:30
Speaker
or without saying, I don't really believe in this, right? And that really brings us to the second thing that we can do. First, we seek to understand, but then we share honestly what we know.
00:07:42
Speaker
And that reminds me of something Colin Powell used to say. I heard him say this in meeting one time. He said, when a situation came to him, he always asked three questions. What do we know?
00:07:54
Speaker
What do we think we know? And what do we need to know that we don't know? And using that policy, you're able to go through this with authenticity.
00:08:05
Speaker
Do the work to learn everything you can, but then share honestly. What do you know? What do you not know? And why does it matter to your team if you can make that connection?
00:08:18
Speaker
You can do this without undercutting the mission of your team or of the initiative.
Connecting Strategies to Daily Tasks
00:08:24
Speaker
and And phrases that might help here are, here's the perspective I've been able to gain, or here's why I think this matters to us.
00:08:33
Speaker
And that really brings us to the third thing I would offer for you to do. See, sometimes I think The resistance is not about the initiative being right or wrong.
00:08:45
Speaker
It's about whether or not it connects to the daily work that I do. What does it mean to us? Why does this matter? Or what can we do with this? If they can't see themselves in it, they'll struggle to engage with it.
00:09:01
Speaker
So good leaders are also good translators. And this is especially true, I think, for what I call the middle leaders, the senior managers, the directors, even vice presidents who are leading, but they're also following at the same time.
00:09:18
Speaker
But we take then that higher corporate level goal, the initiative, and it may at that high level sound or feel abstract to our team. So we translate that into something that's tangible that our team can relate to directly.
00:09:36
Speaker
Remember years ago, a decision was made in our company to use free cash flow as a part of every employee's incentive and bonus plan. We were probably over 100,000 people at that time.
00:09:48
Speaker
Well, there were several problems with this, but the first one was it turns out some of the accountants couldn't agree on even how we should measure it. And secondly, in our warehouse and distribution team, it wasn't clear to us how we could impact such a high-level metric.
00:10:06
Speaker
But we did understand how we impacted inventory turns. We understood our quality would impact our financials. And we had a handful of other measures. And the the simple thing of just tying those to impacting free cash flow took things that we controlled and were measuring and could drive every day and made that our focus.
00:10:30
Speaker
It became tangible and people bought in. They still would prefer to have a measurement that was closer to home, but at least the things that they could control, they could measure and know what they were doing to contribute to the success of the company.
00:10:46
Speaker
So let's summarize. If you're leading something, a change that you're not fully bought into, there's three things that might help. First, seek to understand the bigger picture and what the leaders who are making those decisions are thinking.
00:10:59
Speaker
What do they know that you don't? Secondly, share honestly with your team what you do know and what you don't, but why it matters. Which leads to the third thing, which is translate the strategy into something that's tangible, that they can connect with in their everyday work.
Introspection and Confidence Building
00:11:17
Speaker
You'll build trust, maintain alignment, and you give you and your team a reason, a better reason to lean into this instead of checking out. So this week, here's the challenge.
00:11:30
Speaker
Where can you put this into practice? Is there an initiative where your words are saying one thing, but deep down, you're not bought in? Can you think of one initiative or change that you've been not giving your full support to?
00:11:44
Speaker
Do you feel that incongruence or dissonance inside? Are there places where you need to go back and say, wait, I'm a little out of line here. I need to bring that back in line. And by changing the way I think about that, it's going to make me a stronger, better, more confident leader.
00:11:59
Speaker
And remember, changing how you think changes how you lead and how you live. Hey, thanks for joining me today. I'd love to hear how this plays out for you. And as always, have a great day.