Lead with Curiosity: Change Feels Different Depending on Where You Sit
Article 12 in the Leadership in Real Life Series.
Jennifer Youngblood
7/8/20262 min read
The view from the top of an organization is genuinely different from the view at the ground level. Not better or worse. Different. We think we understand that it's different. We rarely understand how big that difference is.
Change is a perfect example of how this plays out. When you are higher up in the organization, many things look like small change. No big deal. Let's clean that up. Let's rebrand this. Let's change the name to signal forward movement. You make the decision and move on. It's just a tiny drop of water in the bucket. But to people further down the chain, doing the daily work, it may hit much harder. It may feel like a waterfall.
Here are two examples that I watched happen a time or twenty throughout my career (and I've probably been guilty of this myself a time or two). A company-wide template has been the same for years. It's time to modernize it. Give it a new name, a new format, a new well-designed color cover. Totally reasonable. Probably even overdue. But now... IT has to change every system template. Automated connections are decoupled and reconnected. How-to guides get rewritten. Efficient people have to slow down and learn a new way. And the colored cover? The office uses a year's worth of toner in a few months.
No one is being careless here. A leader focuses on an outcome. A deliverable. Proof that things are moving or changing. But two things that should be happening often aren't quite hitting the mark. First, it’s really hard to fully account for the impact of implementation and understand how it will hit and who it will hit hardest. And, second, most often, the leader hasn't explained the why behind the change enough to the people who need to hear it. Simon Sinek says to start with the why. I think you have to start, continue, and end with the why. In my experience, failing to explain the why to the right people causes many performance stumbles. People carry heavy weights when they understand why it matters. They drag them when they don’t. And there is always someone who didn’t hear your first, second, or third message on why.
The best change leaders I've known do one thing before they push something forward: they ask the people closest to the work what they see. Not for permission. For information. Those people know things that don't show up in any briefing. And that knowledge almost always makes the change more effective, not less. In that asking, that seeking of information, they also get to explain why the change matters to the people who most need to hear it.
Because the change itself usually isn't the problem. The gap between how it looks from where the decision was made and how it lands where the work truly gets done, that's where things go sideways.
Closing that gap is a leadership responsibility. And a real competitive advantage.
Leadership in Real Life: Lead with Curiosity
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