Managers, What Are You Doing About Change Exhaustion?

Harvard Business Review: “Summary. How can leaders help their teams combat change exhaustion — or step out of its clutches? Too often, organizations simply encourage their employees to be resilient, placing the burden of finding ways to feel better solely on individuals. Leaders need to recognize… Re-orgs, leadership transitions, new technologies. Pre-Covid, many employees already were experiencing change fatigue, defined as feeling apathetic towards or overwhelmed by too many organizational changes in a row. When Covid hit, everything changed. We remember a tweet from digital health consultant Simon Terry that resonated with us: “Change fatigue. Resilience fatigue. Agility fatigue. WFH fatigue. Video-conference fatigue. Online schooling fatigue. Restriction fatigue. Conflict fatigue. Fatigue fatigue. 2020 – the international year of fatigue.” The heightened level of uncertainty in both our work and home lives pushed many of us into change exhaustion. Gartner found that employees’ ability to cope with change in 2020 was at 50% of pre-pandemic levels. How can leaders help their teams combat change exhaustion — or step out of its clutches? Too often, organizations simply encourage their employees to be resilient, placing the burden of finding ways to feel better solely on individuals. Leaders need to recognize that change exhaustion is not an individual issue, but a collective one that needs to be addressed at the team or organization level. Based on research we did for our book Big Feelings, here are four practices leaders can use to help their team or organization collectively combat change exhaustion…”