When Leaders Design the End State but Ignore the In-Between
Announcing change without managing the transition
Organizations make the same mistake over and over: they design a new state, announce it, and treat the change as instantaneous. The organizational change happens in a moment. The psychological transition takes much longer.
William Bridges drew this line in his Transition Model. External change is the event. Transition is the internal process people go through as they move from what was familiar to what is unknown. Most leaders skip the transition and then wonder why people resist, performance dips, and good people leave.
Picture a set of monkey bars. The gap between the bar you're letting go of and the bar you're reaching for is the neutral zone, and it scares people because they've released the known without a grip on the new. We cover why change initiatives fail in the neutral zone in more depth elsewhere.
Why the neutral zone gets ignored
When a leader announces a new scheduling system, a restructure, a new process, or a cultural shift, they often skip the steps that make it stick. They didn't ask for input or build buy-in. They didn't support people through learning a fragile new system or letting go of the old one.
The result is predictable: broad criticism, active resistance from individual contributors and managers alike, and burnout among the people who try to make it work anyway. If the system itself is fragile (say, automation that depends on a single person who later burns out), the whole change collapses. If leaders treat feedback as resistance, they lose the people best positioned to fix the implementation. Change fails without emotional leadership for exactly this reason.
Years later, when the change has done lasting damage, the people who designed it have often moved on to other roles or companies, telling success stories while the team they left is still cleaning up.
What leaders need to do instead
The neutral zone is where the leadership work happens, and it asks four things of leaders.
First, acknowledge that transition exists. The announcement is the easy part. The work happens in the space between.
Second, guide people through the confusion. Clarify what stays, what changes, and why. Be present and available for questions, and leave room for dissent instead of scripting answers. Regular one-on-ones that actually work are where most of those questions get asked. Leaders new to a team should also observe before they optimize, so they understand what people are being asked to give up.
Third, apply the change to yourself. If a new performance management system is coming, managers should go through it first and reflect on how it changes their own work. If a new operating system is rolling out, leaders should follow all of it, including the inconvenient parts. That's the moment values stop being words.
Fourth, stay. When the neutral zone gets hard, leaders can't declare victory and move to the next assignment while the team is still learning and adjusting. The damage compounds when the designers leave early and others inherit the consequences.
If your change initiative is stalling, look at the in-between before you redesign the destination. See how we work at Kestryl Edge or talk with us about your change effort.
Dan Korus, Kestryl Edge founder, publishes The Updraft, a weekly newsletter on leadership, trust, and how teams actually perform. Subscribe here.