Dear Change Leader,
Jennifer kept telling herself that she had been through bigger challenges than this.
She’d navigated a merger. She’d led a team through a funding crisis. She’d earned her seat at the table through a decade of hard-won experience. So when her organization restructured, and her role shifted — same level, but a different scope and with a different team — she told herself everything would be fine.
And, to all appearances, it was. She was still showing up. Still delivering results. Still the person her colleagues called when things got complicated.
But sitting in a leadership meeting three months in, she had a thought she couldn’t quite shake: I don’t recognize myself anymore.
It wasn’t burnout. It wasn’t failure. It was something quieter and harder to name — a growing sense that the way she’d always led no longer quite fit, and that she didn’t yet know what should replace it.
When Change Disrupts More Than Your Org Chart
What Jennifer was experiencing has a name. William Bridges, whose work on managing transitions I return to time and again, made a distinction that most organizations completely ignore: there’s a difference between change — the external event — and transition — the internal psychological journey it triggers.
Leaders are generally quite good at managing change. We plan, we communicate, we execute. What we’re far less practiced at is navigating transition — and the identity disruption sitting at the center of it.
In her research on leadership transitions, Herminia Ibarra describes something counterintuitive: the source of struggle for many leaders is not a lack of competence, but the mistake of working too hard to stay the same. Holding to a mistaken belief that they must be seen (and experience themselves) as consistent, they resist the very evolution the new role and context requires.
The result is a leader who feels increasingly out of sync — not just with their organization, but also with themselves.
Think about the work that an anchor does: its primary role is to prevent the ship from being swept away, not to keep it from moving. Your values work the same way – they give you a foundation from which to adapt and evolve without losing yourself in the process. Your values provide rootedness. Your identity, by contrast, is meant to grow.
Three Ways To Stay Grounded While You Grow
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Anchor your values, not your identity.
Your values — how you believe people deserve to be treated, what kind of leader you want to be — are the true constants, and they deserve to be held tightly. Your self-concept, however — the specific style, habits, and story you’ve built around those values — needs to be held much more lightly. The goal isn’t to protect who you’ve been. It’s to discover who you’re becoming.
This week: Write down the two or three values that are truly non-negotiable for you as a leader — regardless of role or circumstances. Then ask: are there aspects of your current leadership style that might need to evolve to express those values more effectively in your new context?
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Borrow, adapt, experiment.
Identity doesn’t evolve through introspection alone — it evolves through action and experimentation. Find leaders you respect who are navigating similar terrain, and consciously borrow elements of how they operate. Not wholesale imitation, but selective adaptation — trying on new approaches until you find what fits. Feeling slightly uncomfortable or “not quite yourself” isn’t a warning sign. It’s what learning feels like.
This week: Identify one leader — inside or outside your organization — whose style in a specific situation you admire. What’s one thing they do that you could experiment with this week? Try it once, and notice what you learn.
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Update your story.
We all carry a narrative about who we are as leaders — a story built from defining moments, hard-won lessons, and accumulated experience. That story is valuable. But it can also become a cage. If the story you’re telling about yourself was written for a role you’ve already outgrown, it may be quietly limiting what you believe is possible now. The question isn’t just who have I been? It’s who am I becoming — and does my story need a new chapter?
This week: Reflect on the story you currently tell about yourself as a leader. What’s the defining experience at its center? Does that story still serve where you’re headed — or is it time to find a new touchstone for the next chapter?
Back to Jennifer
What eventually helped Jennifer wasn’t a new strategy or a better plan. It was a conversation with a trusted peer who asked her the question that opened the path:
“Who are you when you’re leading at your best — regardless of the role?”
She knew the answer immediately. Not the title, not the team, not the familiar habits she’d been clinging to. The values underneath all of it — how she engaged, what she stood for, why she led.
That was the anchor. And once she found it, she could let everything else move.
Until next time,
P.S. The question Jennifer’s peer asked her is one I come back to again and again in my coaching work — because it cuts through the noise quickly and gets to what actually matters. If you’re in the middle of a transition and feeling more untethered than you’d like, that’s exactly what one-on-one coaching is designed for. Reply here and let’s talk.
Recent Articles
Read other editions of this newsletter for further insights:
“The Art of Dynamic Balance” explores why strong leadership isn’t about holding perfectly still — and why staying grounded in your purpose, while remaining responsive to what’s shifting around you, is what genuine stability actually looks like.
“You’re Not Meant to Lead Alone” looks at why leadership can feel so isolating — even when you’re surrounded by people — and offers three practical ways to build the kind of support that actually helps.
“Is Your Success Setting You Up for Decline?” introduces Charles Handy’s Sigmoid Curve and asks a harder question: are you investing in what comes next while you still have the capacity to do so?
EFFECTIVE CHANGE RESULTS FROM INTENTIONAL LEADERSHIP
We’re a leadership and organization development consultancy. My team and I work with leaders like you to prepare for and lead successful change processes.
Here’s why our clients call us:
- Leadership Coaching: I support leaders as they navigate transitions into new roles or expanded responsibilities.
- Group Programs: Bringing groups of leaders together, I facilitate learning experiences and months-long programs that equip people to be effective change leaders.
- Effective Teams and Organizations: I work with leaders and their teams with tailored processes that increase their effectiveness, building layers of aligned teams that transform organizations.