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In 2021-2022, CareRx was handling an ambitious expansion. In a span of 20 months, the Canadian pharmacy services company tripled its business through a series of acquisitions. Each acquired company brought its own processes, systems, and cultural norms.
Employees barely had time to adjust before the next change arrived. “We were growing so fast that the organization could not keep up,” said Adrianne Sullivan-Campeau, chief employee and customer experience officer at CareRx. “We had teams under the same roof not speaking the same language. It was an us-versus-them situation.”
In late 2022, compounded by the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, turnover spiked and customer complaints piled up. At one location, Sullivan-Campeau recalled, a leader from the head office arrived to roll out yet another change, and employees turned them away. “‘Leave us alone,’ they said. ‘We’re done.’”
“People were overwhelmed,” she said. “They were asking us as leaders, ‘Why are you doing this? Where are we going?’”
I see this pattern repeatedly in my work advising C-suite leaders through organizational transitions: too much change, too soon, with too little attention to the people living through it. The leaders who navigate this well focus on one thing: managing how their people experience it.
Right now, multiple forces are driving change, including mergers and restructurings, economic volatility, geopolitical instability, and AI technology. Employees and leaders are feeling all of it. Eighty-three percent of business leaders are experiencing more major change than ever before, according to research conducted by my company, The Grossman Group, with The Harris Poll. Employees can realistically absorb only one or two major changes per year, yet leaders are planning on three or four by 2027, our research found. Meanwhile, though nearly all business leaders believe that they communicate change well, we found that 1 in 4 employees say they disagree or are not sure.
Three leadership disciplines make the difference in helping teams analyze and handle change.
1. Make Dialogue Nonnegotiable
Dialogue is one thing many leaders cut back on during periods of change. It takes time and effort, both of which feel scarce in the middle of transformation. Leaders default to what feels efficient. They craft the message, send it out, and move on.
But change is emotional, not just operational. The people closest to the work have perspectives on what’s going well and what isn’t. When they don’t feel consulted, they go quiet, and leaders lose the very information they need most.
Samantha Stark understood that. She was hired to turn around a several-hundred-person business unit at a global marketing agency that had just lost a major account. “I had tons of ideas,” she recalled. “But I needed to have conversations first and understand the team.”
She met with employees one-on-one, asking about their passions, their dream projects, and barriers they faced. She explained that their input would shape what came next.
Employees told her that the same people kept getting tapped to manage new accounts regardless of their interest, so she built a passion survey that matched people to work they cared about. She heard that different disciplines worked in isolation: The creative team and the public relations team barely spoke to each other, for example. So she redesigned the pitch process to bring them together.
She also created “culture captain” roles and restructured her senior leadership team. She made a point of walking through the office every day and regularly visiting other locations. “When a senior leader puts themselves in a position where people don’t tell them the truth, you’ve lost,” she said. Within months, the team went from negative year-over-year growth to double-digit increases and began winning industry awards.
Making dialogue nonnegotiable starts with listening before taking action and then treating feedback as strategic input. When leaders respond to what they hear and adjust course visibly, people follow.
But leaders also need to close the loop. They won’t be able to use every idea. But employees deserve a response, whether that means moving forward with an idea, modifying it, or saying no and explaining why. Go silent, and they’ll draw their own conclusions, which often leads to quiet resistance that shows up later as disengagement, burnout, or failure.
2. Align on a Change Narrative
Dialogue with employees works only if leaders are all telling the same story. Many aren’t.
Leadership teams I’ve worked with routinely underestimate how much time they need to spend getting aligned before communicating with the rest of the organization. Instead, each leader tells the story their own way, and employees are left to make sense of a fragmented message on their own.
Aaron Radelet, who served as chief communications officer at Hilton, was one of the first hires Chris Nassetta made when he became CEO following the company’s $26 billion acquisition by Blackstone in 2007. They inherited a company in serious trouble: one with more than $20 billion in debt, a slow-moving hierarchical culture, and brands and regions that were operating in silos. There was no shared story or common purpose.
First, the executive team had to agree on what the story was. The vision came from founder Conrad Hilton’s own words: to be the “light and warmth of hospitality,” with a mission to be the world’s preeminent hotel company. That message was woven into talking points, videos, posters, and team meetings. “Nine out of 10 team members knew our vision, mission, and values,” Radelet said. “That doesn’t happen by accident.”
The change was visible externally, too. Nassetta moved the headquarters from Beverly Hills to Washington, D.C., closer to the new owners and one of the country’s richest hospitality talent markets. “The goal was to send a message,” Radelet said. “We were literally and figuratively moving in a new direction.”
Nassetta also launched an executive immersion program in which every leader did stints in front-line roles, such as housekeeping and valeting. Global surveys led to improvements, including a hotel discount program for employees, new education benefits, and a better parental leave policy. Employees felt heard, and the stiff, formal culture that had defined the company gave way to something warmer, Radelet said. Employees who once called the CEO “Mr. Nassetta” were now greeting him with high-fives and hugs. The narrative around warmth helped Hilton improve its culture and go public in a successful IPO in 2013.
Before communicating change to the organization, leaders need to answer four questions as a team: Where have we been? Where are we today? Where are we going? And what does it take to win? When leaders skip this step of developing a shared change narrative, employees fill in the gaps — and they rarely fill them in favorably, often defaulting to confusion, skepticism, and ultimately disengagement.
