Change is Hard: Stop Managing Discomfort

The history of organisational transformations is littered with failures. These are usually ascribed to employee resistance, to leaders’ inability to properly explain the motivation for change or the failure to effectively help people change their behaviours.

However, as a Chief People Success Officer who has led, lived through and witnessed many change programmes in my career, I’ve seen one behaviour that does more damage to organizational transformation than any of the usual suspects. I would even go so far as to say it’s the silent cancer of transformation.

It is really subtle. It shows up in the guise of empathy. It almost always declares itself as a form of care.

I call this discomfort management. The language of discomfort management sounds like this: “We need to slow down”, “We must bring people along”, “People aren’t ready.”

In saying this, discomfort managers do something that is quietly devastating: they project their own discomfort onto the organisation around them and call it leadership.

Discomfort management is not care for employees. It is really control, dressed up in the language of concern.

How Discomfort Management Shows Up

It borrows the language of transformation. We hear that moving too fast will cause people to leave (as if staying were inherently a win, regardless of whether the organisation is delivering). Another thing we hear is that customers aren’t ready, when the evidence consistently shows they are often more ready than their vendors. We hear that employees can’t adapt, when the survey data shows a workforce more resilient than their managers. Discomfort managements say that first-line managers can’t cope with the pace of change, when what they really want is much more clarity.

Discomfort managers project their own resistance onto someone else. The signal that shows someone is managing discomfort is their certainty. They know for sure that others won’t be able to handle change. People who accept discomfort tend to be more curious. They can live with uncertainty.

The Idea That Speed Is Dangerous

Discomfort management says that if your transformation goes too fast, people will leave. Nobody wants to be the leader who drove away talent. But retention is not a proxy for transformation success and an organisation that retains everyone while delivering nothing has not won. It is making itself irrelevant.

The people most likely to leave under genuine transformation pressure are often the people whose departure accelerates the transformation – not because they lack value, but because their operating logic belongs to the model being replaced.

Holding onto these people, at the cost of transformation speed, is not loyalty. It’s inertia with better branding.

The question is never whether people will leave. The question is whether the people who stay are building something worth staying for.

Middle Management and the Discomfort Franchise

Discomfort management tends to show up in the middle of the organization. This isn’t because middle managers are less capable, but because the middle is where there is the most ambiguity. Middle managers sit between a leadership direction they did not choose and a team they are accountable for, which can be a genuinely difficult position.

The middle manager who slows the message, softens the urgency, and adds qualifications that leadership did not intend is not protecting their team. They are protecting themselves from the discomfort of delivering clarity they don’t understand or don’t support.

Teams feel this and they read it as ambiguity. And ambiguity, in a transformation, is more frightening than an honest discussion around what it is hard.

Discomfort Is Growth

What I’ve learned over decades is that discomfort is the engine of transformation. Every significant growth – personal, organisational, commercial – has a period of genuine discomfort. The leader who can hold discomfort, name it honestly, and move through it at pace is the leader a transformation needs. The leader who manages discomfort – their own, and by extension everyone else’s – is the leader who helps a transformation fail.

Speed isn’t cruel. Clarity is not unkind. Honest endings (which is what we at Sapiens call our transparent reduction in force) are not brutal – they are the most respectful thing an organisation can offer someone whose role is changing. What is cruel, unkind, and ultimately brutal is the slow management of discomfort that gets in the way of change.

The organisations that transform successfully are not the ones that eliminate discomfort. They are the ones that learn to move through it – at speed, with honesty, and without mistaking the discomfort of the manager for the incapacity of the people they lead.

The next time someone tells you the organisation is not ready, ask them one question: How do you know? This shouldn’t be a challenge, but a genuine enquiry. Because their answer will tell you everything you need to know about whether you are dealing with someone who accepts discomfort or who wants to manage it away.