There is a moment in organisational change that we rarely talk about.
A manager walks out of a briefing about a restructure. Their reporting lines may be changing. Their team may be changing. Parts of their role may disappear and new responsibilities may be added. They may have concerns about the logic behind the restructure, and there are questions about what happens next that nobody has answered.
They are still trying to work out what the announcement means for them.
An hour later, they are standing in front of their team explaining it.
People want answers.
Why is this happening? What happens to my job? Who will I report to? Is this the beginning of further cuts? Why weren’t we consulted? Do you think this is a good idea?
The manager may not know.
More uncomfortably, they may be asking some of exactly the same questions.
Yet in that moment they are no longer treated as someone experiencing organisational change. They are treated as someone responsible for leading it.
That distinction is important.
The people leading change are often recipients of it too
Much of our traditional thinking about organisational change gives managers a particular role.
Senior leaders determine the direction. Change teams design the process. Managers help employees navigate the transition.
It sounds tidy. Organisations rarely are.
Middle and senior managers frequently find themselves implementing decisions they did not make, explaining rationales they had little part in developing and managing consequences they cannot materially alter.
They may have been consulted. They may even have contributed to parts of the process. But that does not necessarily mean they had meaningful influence over the decisions that eventually emerged.
And the change affects them too.
Their workload may increase. Their responsibilities may shift. Their authority may change. Their relationships with colleagues may be disrupted. Their own position may become less secure. They may disagree with elements of the decision or be concerned about the way it is being implemented.
Then we give them a communication pack and ask them to lead confidently.
The problem isn’t that communication packs, manager briefings or change-leadership tools are useless. They can be very useful.
The problem is assuming that they solve the problem.
Sometimes what looks like a manager capability issue is actually a problem in the conditions surrounding the manager.
The middle-manager paradox
Managers in organisational change can occupy two positions at exactly the same time.
As a recipient of change, they are asking:
What does this mean for me, my role and my future?
As a leader of change, they are being asked:
How do I help everyone else navigate this?
This isn’t simply a difficult workload problem. It is a sensemaking problem.
Research into the role of middle managers in organisational change has recognised this complexity for some time. Middle managers have been described as “change intermediaries”: people who translate strategic intent into something employees can understand and act upon. Australian research has similarly examined the capacity and organisational support managers need to fulfil that intermediary role effectively.
More recent research describes the paradox even more directly: middle managers can simultaneously be translators of organisational change and targets of that same change.
That captures something I have seen repeatedly in organisations.
We expect managers to help other people make sense of a change before they have necessarily had enough time, information or psychological space to make sense of it themselves.
Consider what that requires.
A manager hears about a significant restructure at 9 am. By 11 am, they are briefing their team. In those two hours they are expected to move from their own uncertainty to somebody else’s source of stability.
That is an extraordinary psychological transition to treat as routine.
It also helps explain why simply telling managers to “communicate confidently” can be so unhelpful.
Confidence isn’t the same thing as certainty. And requiring managers to perform certainty they do not possess can create problems of its own.
Employees are remarkably good at detecting the gap between the official message and what the person delivering it appears to believe.
Look at what the manager is being asked to carry
This is where an Organisational Ecology lens becomes useful.
Rather than immediately asking whether the manager has the right change-leadership skills, look at the conditions surrounding the work.
Start with Pressure.
Managers often experience pressure from both directions during change.
Senior leaders need implementation to proceed. Employees need answers, reassurance and practical support. Customers still need serving. Budgets still need managing. Performance targets rarely disappear because a transformation program has begun.
Change becomes another layer of work, often without an equivalent layer being removed.
Then consider Influence.
A manager might be accountable for adoption of a new technology within their team while having had no involvement in selecting the technology. They cannot alter the implementation date. They have limited control over the training available. They cannot fix problems with the system. They may have no authority to increase staffing during implementation.
Yet if adoption is poor, whose performance is questioned?
Often, the manager’s.
This is an Accountability–Influence Alignment problem: the degree to which someone has meaningful influence over the outcomes for which they are held accountable.
Accountability itself isn’t the problem. Managers have responsibilities and should be held accountable for how they exercise them.
The question is whether the organisation has aligned that accountability with sufficient authority, resources and influence to make the outcome reasonably achievable.
There is an important difference between holding a manager accountable for how well they lead their team through a technology implementation and holding them responsible for every consequence of an implementation process they had little ability to shape.
Good organisational diagnosis needs to know the difference.
Change consumes capacity
There is another resource organisations consistently underestimate during change: Capacity.
Leading change is work.
Listening to worried employees is work. Reprioritising workloads is work. Re-explaining decisions is work. Dealing with implementation problems is work. Managing conflict is work. Learning new systems is work. Having the same difficult conversation six times with six different people is work.
Much of it also requires considerable cognitive and emotional bandwidth.
Yet organisations routinely layer change leadership onto a manager’s existing responsibilities as though it occupies no space.
Safe Work Australia’s psychosocial-hazard guidance is relevant here. It identifies job demands, low job control, poor support, lack of role clarity and poor organisational change management as psychosocial hazards, and importantly, advises organisations to consider how hazards interact and combine rather than treating each in isolation.
Its guidance on low job control even includes situations where the level of autonomy does not match the role — including supervisors who lack sufficient authority to do their jobs effectively.
That takes us well beyond “managers need to become more resilient”.
If an organisation has substantially increased the demands placed on a manager, reduced their control over important decisions, given them incomplete information and provided insufficient resources to implement a change, resilience training does not alter those conditions.
The problem may not reside inside the manager.
Managers are expected to protect the climate too
Then there is Climate.
During uncertainty, managers become important signals of what is happening in the organisation.
People watch them.
Can I ask questions here?
Is it safe to disagree?
Does my manager know what is happening?
Will somebody tell me the truth?
Are decisions being made fairly?
Does anyone actually understand what this change is doing to our work?
Managers can have considerable influence over the climate within their own teams. They can communicate badly. They can avoid difficult conversations. They can become defensive when challenged. They can undermine a change they dislike or amplify anxiety through careless speculation.
We shouldn’t romanticise middle management.
Manager behaviour matters.
But managers do not manufacture organisational climate independently of the wider system.
A manager cannot indefinitely maintain trust in a process if information keeps changing above them. They cannot create genuine psychological safety while being instructed not to discuss issues employees reasonably want explained. They cannot promise consultation when key decisions have already been made. They cannot restore credibility to commitments repeatedly contradicted elsewhere in the organisation.
Eventually the local climate and the wider organisational climate collide.
When that happens, telling the manager to communicate more positively can make matters worse.
And then another change arrives
The final condition is Recovery.
Organisations tend to think about change initiative by initiative.
Employees and managers experience the accumulation.
The restructure follows the technology implementation, which follows the operating-model redesign, which overlaps with the cost-reduction program, while a new strategy is being introduced and several key vacancies remain unfilled.
No individual initiative necessarily looks unreasonable on the project plan.
Together they can create a very different organisational reality.
Change-fatigue research needs to be interpreted carefully. Cross-sectional research has found associations between more frequent organisational change, greater change fatigue and outcomes including strain, burnout, turnover intentions and reduced engagement. Because those studies are cross-sectional, they do not by themselves establish simple causal relationships. But they do reinforce the importance of looking at accumulated exposure rather than examining each initiative in isolation.
That is particularly important for managers because they often absorb both the operational and emotional consequences of successive changes.
They finish helping their team through one transition and immediately become the delivery mechanism for the next.
Where, exactly, does recovery happen?
Before you fix the manager, diagnose the system
None of this means managers should be absolved of responsibility.
Some managers genuinely lack the skills required to lead through uncertainty.
Some avoid conversations they should have.
Some communicate badly.
Some become cynical and transmit that cynicism to their teams.
Some blame “the organisation” for decisions that sit squarely within their own authority.
Those are legitimate leadership and capability issues.
But there is a danger in diagnosing every implementation problem as a manager problem.
Australian guidance on organisational change increasingly points organisations towards a broader diagnosis. Safe Work Australia identifies poorly planned, communicated, supported or managed organisational change as a psychosocial hazard when exposure is sufficiently severe, prolonged or frequent. Comcare similarly notes that change can increase workload, role conflict and uncertainty while reducing role clarity and feelings of control.
This matters because it changes the questions we ask.
Instead of immediately asking whether the manager needs more change-leadership training, ask what the organisation is requiring that manager to carry.
How much influence do they actually have over the outcome for which they are accountable?
What authority have they been given?
What information do they possess?
What additional capacity has been created for the work of implementation?
Can they safely tell senior leaders that something isn’t working?
Can they express legitimate disagreement without being labelled resistant?
And perhaps most importantly: who is helping the manager make sense of the change before they are expected to make sense of it for everyone else?
Those are organisational questions, not resilience questions.
Change leadership happens inside a system
One of the reasons managers matter so much during organisational change is precisely because of where they sit.
They occupy the space between strategic intention and lived organisational reality.
They see what happens when the beautifully designed transformation deck meets the roster, the customer, the outdated system, the vacancy nobody has been able to fill and the employee who has already lived through four restructures.
That position gives managers agency.
It also creates pressure.
So when a manager appears to be struggling to lead change effectively, the answer may indeed be coaching, development or clearer expectations.
But it might not be.
It might be a Pressure problem.
An Influence problem.
A Capacity problem.
A Climate problem.
A Recovery problem.
More often, it will be some interaction between them.
That is why the quality of our diagnosis matters.
Before asking whether a manager is leading change effectively, examine the conditions in which they are being asked to lead it.
They may be responsible for helping other people navigate the change.
But they are living through it too.
And if your organisation expects managers to carry the uncertainty, workload and emotional consequences of change while giving them little influence over the conditions creating those pressures, perhaps the first question isn’t whether your managers are sufficiently change-ready.
Perhaps it is: what, exactly, are we asking them to carry — and have we created the conditions that make it possible?
About Ros
Rosalind Cardinal is the Founder and Managing Director of Shaping Change, an Australian leadership and organisational development consultancy.
With almost 40 years’ experience in organisational development, executive coaching and leadership consulting, Ros helps leaders and organisations navigate the hidden dynamics that shape culture, influence, decision-making and performance.
She is the creator of the Recognition Pathway™, Political Intelligence Compass™, Organisational Hidden Ecology™ and the Women’s Leader Archetypes™ framework.
Book a chat with Ros.
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