Here we are at the time in the calendar when everything changes. In the early months you were closing the books and focused on wrapping up projects from last year. Then, you got the 2025 initiatives and strategies so you set up your plans to achieve them. By this point, we’re in ‘throw away the plan’ mode as the market or your own boss hit you from the side with new projects and priorities. It can be painful no matter what level you’re at in the company. Sr Leaders feel like they’re forced to abort their perfect strategy to put out fires. Individuals are getting whiplash from task switching so often. Meanwhile the managers and supervisors have a foot in both camps and are just trying to get everything done. This year, leading change is going to be even more difficult. (Want to learn this with even more specific examples? Click here for the video!)
What makes leading change in 2025 different?
This year leading change will be even more difficult, and more critical to your success. It’s not that 2025 is special, it’s what happened leading up to it that makes this a pivotal time for your company and your own career.
In each of the last two years more than 700,000 jobs were cut, according to Forbes. Looking at the last 15 years, 2024 had the most jobs cut in a year, except for 2020. Jobs created vs lost isn’t the only stat following this trend. Employee engagement saw a steady rise since Gallup started measuring it holistically in 2009. Again except for two key years when engagement saw a marked drop. You guessed it, we had a drop in engagement in 2024 equivalent to the drop in 2020. There is another similarity, for job cuts and engagement, for 2024 specifically, both numbers are disproportionately impacted from the manager level. Manager level roles were the largest impacted in layoffs. Those who remained in the organization reported a rise in active disengagement. All that to say, if you thought leading change was tough in years past, 2025 has another thing coming.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t effectively lead significant change this year. You can influence behaviors and generate change that will have lasting effects into 2026 and beyond. You can make that impact while working your regularly scheduled hours and while not only maintaining but enriching your relationships as well.
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How to gain the buy-in and advance the ball
Whether you’re a senior leader guiding your company through an acquisition or you’re a front line manager introducing a metric your team’s never been measured against, you are leading change. Your job isn’t done when you identify the perfect retention ratio or broker the best deal, that is when the hard work begins. Once you set the goal, your initiatives become listening, empowering, and prioritizing to see success long term. You don’t have to go it alone. This article shows you how to engage your leaders first so they can hit the goal for you.
Listen Fully
Listening is a critical skill for leaders, and not just to the squeaky wheel. We sometimes forget to listen to the leaders reporting to us and rely on them ‘just getting it’ to help bridge the gap with everyone else. Your leaders need your support on a personal and professional level. You can’t replace their workplace bestie, but you can empathize with their workload, pressure, and mounting to-do list. Watch and listen for listen for their signals. Notice what is working and what isn’t then ask them what you could do to support them. If you can support the leaders of the group, they will ‘get it’ and support the team just as you hoped.
One Chief Operating Officer took a traditional approach after layoffs removed her second in command. She immediately went tactical, redistributing duties. Almost instantly, important metrics, like customer response time, began to falter. When she took a step back and listened, she realized she’d gone too fast. She held a listening session and in it she could see the fear on her management team’s faces. They were so worried about making a mistake on a newly assigned task, they neglected the basics. Once she started listening fully, she met them where they were. Then she listened to understand their specific concerns and asked them what they needed. She was transparent that dropping the basics wasn’t acceptable. Then she leveraged their recommendations to bring about solutions that would benefit everyone.
Respect their expertise
Supporting your leaders does not mean micromanaging them. Often when we need to make big changes with tight budgets, we take an authoritative approach to allocating resources. Controlling resources is great, controlling people is not. Just like we saw with our COO, encourage your leaders to get creative and use their strengths. Gallup has seen time and again the massive impact leaders have on those they manage. When you show your confidence in their ability to meet the challenge and you vastly increase the likelihood they will. You set the direction; they organize and carry it out. Remind them how much you trust them to do that work well.
I shocked a podcast host recently. I told him I was lucky enough in my first corporate management role to have never done the work before. Meaning, I was promoted within the company but not from within the team. I had no choice but to respect the expertise of the team. There was no way for me to assume I knew more about any technical aspect. So when we wanted to change our quality program from the top down, I was fortunate enough to only be qualified to set the vision. Then, I got curious with my audit experts on how they could achieve the vision. It gave them autonomy and allowed us to collaborate because I only gave the why and what, they determined how to execute.
Prioritize the workload
No matter the change, from layoffs and reallocation of work to expansion of a new product, when you change your standards must adapt. You can’t immediately see the same progress with reduced resources. In time, your leaders will improve. They’ll grow new skills, and those following them will become more efficient.You, and they, will get stronger, it doesn’t happen overnight. So, get incredibly clear on what the priorities are so you can truly prioritize what needs to be done. This creates focus, results, and renewed hope for what the collective team can do. Missing the need for clear priorities will cause frustration, confusion and missed goals on multiple sides.
Lets go back to our COO for a moment. She first created clarity by introducing the new tasks that needed to be redistributed after staff reduction. However, she assumed that everything else would just continue as is. She shared what needed to happen but she didn’t prioritize any of it and because she put all of her emphasis on the new work, everyone assumed that was the priority. Following that listening session, where she got all of the great ideas from her team, she used their expertise and her understanding of the why to get truly clear.
Armed with feedback and technical expertise, that COO could share what was critical, important, and nice to have. She and her team removed work that was redundant which freed up at least 2 hrs a week from each leader. They also identified inefficient processes and tasked reworking them to people who wanted opportunities to grow. Within 3 months they had absorbed the work and were more efficient at it than they had been with a full employee taking it on.
What happens when you lead change right this year?
Leading change can feel like a lot of work that is more of a nice to have than a need to have. Leading change really is the lynch pin in the critical process that is successful business. The only constant is change. Meaning change is required for your team or organization to survive, not to mention thrive. You navigate those changes successfully by engaging your people in the work. Gallup found that the most successful organizations are seeing as much as 70% engagement overall. How are they doing this? By equipping leaders at all levels with the basics we covered above, listening, respect, and prioritization.
Now, I didn’t measure the engagement at this organization, but let’s look at one last example. One client refused to hold one-on-ones with her team. She didn’t have the extra 8 hours a month to devote to just talking to the leadership team. It would be one more thing on her plate. After the second round of one-on-ones her entire outlook changed. She had proof that the hour a month with her office manager meant they could balance workload seamlessly. An hour a month with her lead trainer meant she could fully delegate onboarding and still feel completely in the loop. Dedicated time with the supervisors meant she could keep the main thing, the main thing.
This starts with training leaders on the basics, which we talked about last week click here for that article. Then continued development to get those basics into practice every single day. Cultivated repetition creates mastery. Yes, it will take time but that time becomes the lynch pin that makes the whole system work. It is how you go from my plate is overflowing, I can’t handle one more thing, to feeling seamlessly balanced, with projects fully delegated, while having your finger on the pulse of everything you’re responsible for. And that, is what you want isn’t it?