They were questioning whether they had another one of these in them.

Hey Spark Family,

I sat in a room not long ago while a CEO announced a major transformation.

She was good. Genuinely good.

The slides were clear. The rationale was airtight. She took every question, including the hard ones, and she did not flinch.

When she finished, people applauded.

Then I stood in the hallway afterward and listened to those same people try to work out what it meant for them.

Not one of them was questioning the strategy.

Every one of them was quietly questioning whether they had another one of these in them.

That is the gap I now watch for in every organization I walk into.

Announcing a change and leading people through it are two entirely different jobs.

Most leaders are doing the first and calling it the second.

The Research Is Clear

McKinsey's State of Organizations 2026 surveyed more than 10,000 senior executives across 15 countries.

What the data shows:

➡ 72% of leaders say their organizations are not fully ready for the changes ahead.

➡ Even among the optimists, only one in three feel prepared.

➡ Just over half of leaders expect their current transformation to succeed anyway.

Confident in the direction. Unprepared for the execution.

That is not a planning gap. That is a leadership gap.

And it shows up in the results:

➡ Fewer than 25% of organizations that set out to improve performance achieve sustained impact.

➡ McKinsey names the primary reason plainly: a failure to address the human side of the equation.

➡ And where people are already worn down, it compounds. 45% of employees in fatigued organizations name cultural resistance as a barrier.

Read that last one as what it actually is.

Resistance is often not disagreement.

It is depletion wearing a costume.

McKinsey's own conclusion is the part I would put on the wall: transformation is no longer a project with an end date. It is now a permanent operating condition.

Change is not a season anymore.

It is the weather.

What I'm Seeing In The Field

The leaders struggling with this are not the ones who do not care about their people.

They are the ones who underestimated what change actually asks of a leader.

Most manage the content of change well. Timeline, structure, communication plan. All of it competent.

What gets underestimated is the harder work. Helping people let go of what was. Sitting with them in the uncertainty of what is. Getting them to commit to something they cannot yet see.

I see the leader who communicated beautifully and cannot understand why her team is not energized. She told them what is happening and why it matters. Knowing what is coming and feeling ready to move toward it are not the same thing, and her job did not end at the announcement.

I see the leader who has taken his team through three significant changes in two years, each one framed as the last disruption before things settle. He is preparing to announce the fourth. He has never once said out loud what that pattern has cost them. He is genuinely puzzled that engagement is down.

I see the leader who still runs the milestone check-ins but stopped asking the real question. Not where are we on the timeline. How are people actually doing inside this. She stopped because the answers got complicated, and complicated slows things down.

Her team noticed she stopped asking.

They always notice.

Because in a change, you are sending a signal whether you intend to or not. Not in the announcement. In everything after it.

The questions you stop asking. The cost you never name. The pace you set without comment.

They are reading all of it.

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What We Teach Leaders Inside Spark Brilliance

When I work with leaders on this, I start with one distinction.

There is the change.

And there is the experience of the change.

Most leaders manage the first. The second is where leadership actually lives.

And here is the reframe that shifts everything: the goal is not to get your people through the change. The goal is to build a team that can enable change rather than survive it exhausted.

Three things separate the leaders who do that:

1. They name what is being asked
Not just the what of the change. The real cost of it. Saying out loud "this is a lot, I see what you are carrying, and it matters" does more for engagement than any communication plan. People do not need protecting from reality. They need to know someone with authority sees it clearly and is in it with them.

2. They tell fatigue apart from resistance
A team that is tired and a team that does not believe in the direction are two different problems. They do not respond to the same intervention. The leader who can read which one is actually in the room, instead of addressing whichever is easier, is the one people follow through the hard part.

3. They build in real recovery
Most change timelines are built around what the organization needs. The leaders who sustain performance build in what the people need, not as a kindness but as a requirement. Teams asked to sprint indefinitely do not perform better.

They perform until they stop.

⭐ Leadership Challenge

Before your week gets moving, think about the change you are leading right now.

Then ask yourself:

➡ Have I said out loud what this is costing the people living through it, or only what it will produce?

➡ Is there someone whose quiet I have been reading as a performance issue when it is actually a capacity issue?

➡ When did I last ask how people are doing inside this, rather than how the work is tracking?

And the hardest one:

If your team described what it is like to be led through change by you, would they say they felt seen in the difficulty, or just informed about the direction?

Change is not the hard part.

People are not fragile, and they are not the obstacle. They are the entire engine.

The leaders whose teams come out the other side still willing to move again are not the ones with the best rollout plan.

They are the ones whose people believed someone was actually with them in it.

Your team is reading you far more closely than they read your slides.

With gratitude,
Jackie

P.S. – If you are leading a hard change right now and want to think it through, hit reply. I read every response.✨