Change readiness grows when employees see purpose in a change and can bring their competence to bear effectively. For leaders, this means looking at people at least as closely as at structures and processes.
Change readiness is the attitude of a person or a team to actively help shape something new and to bear the uncertainty of the transition. It shows in behaviour: People who are ready ask questions, try things out and take responsibility for the next step.
Connecting people, making workplace and working hours flexible, simplifying hierarchies, establishing autonomy: That’s what many programmes for the new world of work look like. Change has become a permanent state.
A typical pattern looks like this: A company focuses its change on structure, hierarchy levels disappear and the organisation becomes flatter. For some employees, this means enormous freedom and new momentum.
Others lose important points of orientation because the leadership they knew is no longer there. Stability, security and familiarity fall away, and collaboration suffers. If you only look at structures during change, you lay the groundwork for inefficient collaboration.
Both reactions are normal, the enthusiasm and the sense of loss. That’s why they belong in the planning of every change, with the same care as the new organisation chart.
Agility is a way of working, and agile organisations need leadership and orientation, too.
In times of change, empowerment answers two questions. How can someone get their competence into shape? And how can they then bring it to bear in the best way?
This includes discussing content and about your own leadership behaviour, as well as working atmosphere, participation and independence. The leader’s capacity for reflection decides a lot here: If you review your own behaviour regularly, you raise your leadership effectiveness and notice earlier where the team is losing touch.
The clearer the answers to these questions, the more likely employees are to experience change as something they help shape. What this means in daily work is the subject of Empowering leadership: What it means and how to put it into practice.
Purpose, too, is the result of reflection. If you can bring your potential to bear, you devote yourself to meaningful tasks, exert influence and make decisions. That’s how a person becomes effective in their role and identifies with the work.
Personal responsibility grows from purpose you’ve experienced, and motivation, productivity and satisfaction follow from it. Learning effects and limits are individual: What inspires one person overwhelms another.
That’s why purpose tends to emerge in conversation more than on a stage. Ask your people what attracts them to the new task and where they have doubts. Their answers will tell you more than any strategy presentation.
Plan for the people. For every structural change, clarify who loses orientation and who will provide it in future.
Make competence visible. Discuss with each person which ability they bring to the new situation.
Take participation seriously. Participation means feedback can still change the plan. A team quickly notices when the decision was made long ago.
Explain the purpose. Say what the change is good for, in two sentences and in your team’s language.
Stay present. Flatter structures need more leadership: Active, attentive and together with employees. Standing and respect are the basis for this. Especially in the phase when the old rules no longer apply and the new ones aren’t established yet, your team looks to you.
Change readiness starts with top management. Leaders who experience empowerment themselves can pass it on to their employees. If you don’t feel any room to act yourself, you’ll hardly pass it on credibly.
I object to one extreme: Abolishing leadership in the name of agility. Leadership is needed more than ever during change, the kind that conveys purpose and stays present when certainties fall away.
You can measure the effect in behaviour. Which decisions does the team now make itself? How openly does criticism come to the table? A 360-degree feedback before and after a phase of change makes such differences visible, for the leader too.
A good starting point is a look at your own leadership quality, for example with the Empowering Leadership Tool.
By withdrawal and silence in meetings, by conversations that get loud during breaks and go quiet at the table, by tasks that get left undone. Open resistance is often the better sign, because you can talk about it.
Only indirectly, through conditions: Information, participation, purpose people actually experience and leadership that stays present. Orders tend to produce conformity on the surface.
Empowerment gives people the chance to bring their competence into the new situation. If you’re effective, you tend to experience change as room to shape things. Without that experience, what’s mostly left is the loss of security.
That depends on the starting point. First signals often show after a few weeks, when the team sees that its feedback makes a difference. A stable attitude develops over months.
Further reading on hofmann.coach: Change management: How to make change a success · 16 coaching techniques to overcome resistance · Learning organisation: What defines it and how leadership sustains it
Note: This article combines two articles first published on 27.06.2019 and 03.07.2019 and was revised and expanded in October 2026.
Cristian Hofmann is an executive coach in Zurich and Schaffhausen (MAS Coaching & Supervision BSO, Forbes contributor). Over more than 20 years he has coached more than 1,500 leaders: CEOs, executive boards and leadership teams in Switzerland, with measurably agreed goals and, on request, pay-for-results. More about Cristian Hofmann.
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