Change Management · The data-backed guide · Featuring Kristy McCann
The One Subject That Makes Confident Leaders Go Quiet
We listened to 374 people-leaders talk about change. The data surprised us: they don’t get negative, they get careful. This is what that means, featuring Kristy McCann.
brought up change management.
We went back through all 374 conversations and listened for how these leaders talk about change — not what they prescribe, how they sound. One thing showed up right away.
When these leaders talk about anything else (culture, hiring, strategy), they’re openly positive about a third of the time. The moment the subject becomes change, that positivity dips. And here’s the tell: negativity doesn’t rise to replace it. It falls. What grows instead is a neutral, careful register. Change is the one subject that makes a room full of confident executives choose their words.
Positive
Neutral
Negative
459 change-management segments vs. all 49,641 segments across 374 episodes. Per-segment sentiment (AssemblyAI); change segments matched on change-management-specific language, not the generic word “change.”
That guardedness is the real story, and it’s exactly why leading change well is so hard. Kristy puts the stakes bluntly:
“It's one of the reasons CEOs get fired — a large reason — because they don't know how to manage change.”
So how do you get it right? We put that to her, and her answer started somewhere unglamorous: with a definition.
It starts with a definition
So what is it, really?
Featured expert
Kristy McCann
Former CHRO · Co-founder & former CEO, SkillCycle
Listen to her episode →Before you argue about how to do change management, you have to agree on what it even is — and Kristy’s isn’t the textbook version. Her first instinct wasn’t a framework at all. It was a gut check: “a lot of work, a lot of planning, and a lot of reality checking.” Then the actual definition:
“Change management is an evolution — a process to get from your current state to your future state. And it's how you build that bridge. If the bridge isn't built well — executive sponsorship, project management, communications — you're never going to cross it.”
Kristy's stoplight assessment
Your people go red, yellow, or green
Before Kristy plans a single step of a change, she runs what she calls a stoplight assessment — because the moment change lands, every person in the building turns one of three colors:
Red — won't move
The resisters. Often the loudest voices, usually the smallest group.
Yellow — the big middle
Unclear, un-incentivized, no “what’s in it for me” yet. Not against you — just waiting. This is where change is won or lost.
Green — the champions
Already bought in. They’ll help you carry it — if you let them.
Kristy McCann’s “stoplight assessment” — map your people before you plan the change.
The red and green mostly take care of themselves. The whole game is the yellow — and it’s the same crowd the sentiment finding surfaced. That oversized neutral, guarded majority is the yellow light. Not resistant, not on board. Just unclear.
“There's that very big middle — all the yellow people, unsure what they should be doing because they're not clear. There's no incentive there for them, no 'what's in it for me' factor. And you cannot move a company without its employees.”
What 374 leaders actually do
It’s a people problem, not a process problem
What do leaders actually talk about when change is the subject? We measured it against the episodes where change never came up, to separate what’s distinctive to change from what fills every HR conversation.
Resistance & fear
Getting buy-in / bringing people along
Communication & clarity
Culture
Crisis / layoffs / restructure
AI (a topic everywhere, not just change)
Share of transcripts touching each theme: the 210 core-change episodes vs. the 99 where change never came up. Ordered by the gap between them.
Read the gaps, not just the bars. Culture and communication are high everywhere; they fill any HR conversation. What truly spikes when the subject is change is the human friction: resistance and fear (double the baseline) and the fight for buy-in (more than double). Crisis and layoffs, the stuff most change-management content fixates on, barely move.
The leaders who’ve done this don’t treat change as a process to project-manage; they treat it as people to bring along. Kristy has both versions of that story: the billion-dollar mistake and the 80,000-person save.
The stakeholder everyone forgets
Change doesn’t stop at your own walls
Almost every change-management playbook treats this as an inside job: get your employees on board. Kristy’s least conventional point is that the walls don’t contain it. The people who revolt against a change aren’t only the ones on payroll.
“It doesn't incorporate feedback from customers either. We've seen this happen over and over — customer logos changing and people revolting against it.”
A rebrand, a repackaged product, a “we’ve streamlined your account team” email: those are all changes done to customers, carrying the same missing “what’s in it for me” that stalls employees. Kristy treats both as one job. Your customers and your employees are the two largest stakeholders in any change you make.
When it goes sideways
A merger that was perfect on paper
We asked Kristy for a change effort that went sideways. Her answer was immediate: “Oh God, quite a few.” Then she picked one: two well-known mid-market companies combining — two products, two sales processes, two cultures. The strategy was airtight. New verticals, new customers, clean integrations. On paper, perfect.
“It was a disaster as far as the mechanics. These cultures were never going to blend — and there was no incentive for anyone to change, because what they'd been doing was working before. Not being empathetic to how much a culture can make or break a company was a huge whiff.”
It took 18 months of cleanup — and what she called “casualties of war.” Great people left; time, money, customers, and investor credibility all took the hit. The company did eventually sell for a billion dollars. But the bill for ignoring culture came due first.
When it works
Moving 80,000 people across the bridge
The counter-example: Pearson — an 80,000-person company transforming from a book-and-media business into an e-learning one, absorbing roughly a dozen acquisitions along the way. What made it work wasn’t the strategy. It was two moves most leaders skip.
The move almost everyone skips
Before they changed anything, they taught 80,000 people what change management even is.
Not the reorg. Not the new tools. The concept — so everyone understood the process they were about to live through before it started happening to them.
Then, with that groundwork laid, they went hunting for their own blind spots on purpose:
“The feedback from managers and directors across the globe is a gift. They alerted us to blind spots in the plan we never would've seen — and we avoided major pitfalls that would have hit our customers, our tech stack, and our revenue.”
What makes that rare: the managers who actually execute change are usually the last people asked about it. Pearson asked them first, and that’s the whole difference.
Voices from the room
What everyone else said
Kristy isn’t an outlier. The same instincts surfaced again and again across the room — three lines that stuck with us:
“Transformation, I found, happens one conversation at a time.”
“People generally want to do the right thing, and if they're not doing it, it's probably because you haven't made it easy for them to do it.”
“In the moment we're in, nothing should stay the same. We should be evolving constantly.”
Make it practical
What to do Monday
- 1
Name the “what’s in it for me” out loud.
Ambiguity is the enemy. Say the thing people are quietly wondering before they have to ask it.
- 2
Treat communication as the work, not the wrapper.
Communication runs through 70% of change conversations — far more than when change isn't on the table. Over-communicate the why, in plain language.
- 3
Bring the executors into the strategy.
The managers doing the change are missing from the room. Pull them in early, before the plan is set.
And the one thing nobody else is saying
Before you kick anything off, ask what the change is actually for.
Kristy’s closer isn’t a tactic — it’s a gut check. Does this change serve the greater good across everyone with a stake in it: the CEO, the strategy, the investors, the customers, and the employees? Too often the honest answer is no. She points to employees quietly made to train the very AI meant to replace them: change done to people, with nothing in it for them. If it checks those boxes, go. If it doesn’t, she has two words for you.
“Reframe, or refrain. Look at these AI layoffs right now — they don't benefit customers, they don't benefit employees, they don't benefit the bottom line. They only benefit the vision-crazy ones, the AI tech guys who don't care and just want to move fast and break things. And this is what happens when you move fast and break things: you lose clout, you lose credibility, your stock drops, customers stop buying, people lose their jobs — and that domino effect doesn't disappear in a day just because the employees did. It lasts for years.”
Her math is simple, and it’s the part most leaders skip: your employees and your customers are your largest stakeholders. Employees build the company and sell to the customers; the customers buy from it. Break faith with either and there’s no change left to manage — there’s no company.
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