Building Resilience For Change: Why Personal Resilience Isn’t Enough
Written By Maciej
If you’ve already grabbed the “Weight of Change” tip-sheet from this episode, this article unpacks the reasoning, the research, and the stories behind those six points in more depth.
Where change actually happens
Ask most organisations where change happens and they’ll point to the sponsor’s steering committee. Michelle’s answer is different: change happens on the ground, inside what she calls a person’s ecosystem – their manager, their peers, their immediate team. Upper levels sponsor and legitimise a change, but the lived experience of it is entirely local.
That reframe leads to a genuinely counterintuitive finding from her thirty years in the field: the group most resistant to change, and the group that feels it most acutely, isn’t the frontline. It’s the managers directly above them – squeezed by leadership pushing the change down, and by their own team pushing back from below. Michelle calls it, bluntly, being sandwiched. Any organisation serious about change resilience needs to focus there first, not last.
Why leaders have been set up to fail at this
Michelle makes a point here that she describes as controversial in some circles, and it’s worth sitting with: most leaders have never actually been trained to lead change, and the performance management systems most organisations run don’t measure or reward the ability to do it well. Someone can get coaching on emotional intelligence and still have no real skill in driving change – because the two have never been formally connected.
Compounding this, organisations routinely promote their highest-performing individual contributors into management on the basis of tenure or technical skill, not people leadership or change capability. That’s hard enough on its own. Layer “also be resilient through relentless change, and model that resilience for your team” on top, with no training and no incentive structure that rewards it, and the gap becomes obvious. As Michelle puts it, leadership itself isn’t about change tools – it’s about behaviour, about how someone shows up and sets the path forward. A leader’s sense of calm, or its absence, filters straight down to their team.
Three simple hacks anyone can use tomorrow
Michelle is deliberately unromantic about what actually helps here – no mystical frameworks, just practical moves anyone can start using immediately.
The three circles. Control, influence, and everything outside both. When change hits and a brain starts spiralling, the exercise is to sort what’s actually happening into those three buckets and then, deliberately, stop spending energy on the third one. In Michelle’s words: “What can I control? What can I help steer? What’s completely out of my control?” Energy spent on the uncontrollable is, in her phrase, simply wasted.
Reframing. Change gets framed as loss by default – something ending, something being taken away. Michelle pushes leaders to consciously reframe it as something being gained instead: an opportunity rather than a threat, a chance to pivot rather than a problem to survive. The frame a leader chooses becomes the frame their team absorbs.
Micro habits, physical anchors, and people anchors. Michelle cites a Scientific American study showing that a new daily behaviour takes an average of 64 days to take root – a useful reality check against how often change programs expect adoption in a fraction of that time. Her recommendation is to break change into small, repeatable chunks, and to actually celebrate progress and milestones along the way, something she believes the industry does far too rarely.
Alongside the habits themselves, she recommends identifying two kinds of anchors before a change lands, not during it: a physical one (a coffee routine, a quiet corner, a solitude space you return to) and a people one (who you actually call when a day gets hard). The reasoning is simple – when a change is happening around you, the things that stay exactly the same are what reduce fear and build buy-in. She goes further with a genuinely fresh idea for leaders: naming the hard stretch explicitly in advance, and inviting the team to lean on you through it, is something she says she’s almost never seen done – and describes it as what a real change champion should look like, replacing the “symbolic cheerleader” version most organisations default to.
Even change practitioners aren't immune
Asked directly whether change practitioners themselves are resilient, Michelle doesn’t soften the answer: in her words, practitioners are often some of the least resilient people around change, because the moment a change lands on them personally, they become an impacted stakeholder too, and slide into the same patterns they coach everyone else out of.
This connects to how she thinks about dissenters – what she and her Australian collaborators call “squeaky wheels.” Most organisations treat them as a problem to route around, driven by a natural aversion to conflict and loss. Michelle’s view, informed by Rob Cross’s research on organisational network analysis, is that “de-energisers” are one of four recognised types of organisational influencer, and they’re worth actively recruiting rather than avoiding – they surface the dissent, the devil’s-advocate view, and the risks that no one else is willing to name out loud. She points to a colleague on her own team, nicknamed “the night watchman” (a cricket term, for the non-Australians), whose entire value lies in being the person who reliably flags the risk everyone else is too optimistic to see.
Templates are not the outcome
One of Michelle’s sharper points in the conversation is aimed squarely at her own profession: change practitioners have become attached to tools and templates as if they were the point of the work, when they’re only ever an enabler of it. “The template is not the outcome,” as she puts it – and treating every change as a cookie-cutter exercise, checking the same boxes regardless of context, is a big part of why the industry keeps struggling despite thirty years of frameworks and tooling.
Her practical filter, carried over from her corporate career: if you can’t clearly explain why an activity matters or what it enables, don’t do it. Fit-for-purpose beats standardised, every time.
She also brings a marketer’s instinct to this problem: distilling a change down to a simple, repeatable “change story” – what the change is and why it’s happening, in a tagline people can actually repeat back – does more to embed a change into an organisation’s day-to-day language than most formal comms plans manage. Say it enough times, consistently, and it becomes part of the organisation’s own vocabulary rather than something imposed from outside.
Resilience doesn't stop at the office door
Michelle is direct about something many change programs quietly ignore: people don’t have a separate reserve of resilience for work and for the rest of their life. Since the pandemic, she argues, work and personal life have stayed genuinely entwined in a way that makes treating “resilience at work” as a distinct category a bit of a fiction. The same three circles exercise, the same reframing, the same physical and people anchors apply just as directly to a personal upheaval as to an organisational one – and a technology shift like AI is reshaping both spheres simultaneously, not just the workplace one.
The practical implication for leaders is straightforward emotional intelligence: knowing that someone on your team is navigating something significant outside work – Michelle gives the simple example of a colleague with a new baby – and adjusting how you show up for them accordingly, is part of leading change well, not a separate soft skill.
The real problem is the ball of change
Michelle’s closing point in the conversation is the one she circles back to as her real “golden nugget,” and it’s a structural critique rather than a personal-resilience tip. Most organisations lead change project by project, and she argues this is fundamentally mismatched with how people actually experience it. Nobody on the ground distinguishes between three overlapping changes hitting the same business process at the same time – they experience one undifferentiated weight, what she calls the ball of change.
She makes the math concrete: three concurrent projects, each with five communications, one training, and one readiness survey, adds up to fifteen separate communications landing on the same stakeholder group before anyone has actually changed how they work. Survey the same group project by project and the data becomes meaningless – you can’t tell whether someone’s strong reaction belongs to the first change, the second, or the cumulative effect of all three, because people can’t separate it either.
Her recommendation isn’t to abandon project-based funding, which she acknowledges is a financial reality that isn’t going away. It’s to connect the logical dots across concurrent initiatives before they reach the people experiencing them – simplifying what actually lands on any one group, even if a practitioner can only ever see a third of the full picture across an organisation. Her view is that a partial view, actively synthesised, still puts a practitioner well ahead of treating each project as if it exists in isolation.
The takeaway
Underneath every hack in this conversation is the same structural argument: individual resilience training will always run up against its limits if the organisation keeps generating more weight than any one person, or one team, can reasonably absorb. Build the anchors, reframe the narrative, recruit the dissenters – but also look up from the individual project plan and ask what the cumulative load on a single group of people actually looks like. That’s the harder, less comfortable question, and Michelle’s argument is that it’s the one the profession has avoided for too long.
The Outlier Group
A specialist Change Management agency who design and deploys change campaigns that are memorable and move the needle.
Recent Posts