I recently wrote about four paradoxes and tensions of building a healthy team culture – 1) the need to be both strategic and tactical, 2) understanding individual behaviour change in a collective environment, 3) how structure invites creative freedom and autonomy and 4) the need to slow down to speed up.
I’d like to dig into the second idea. I’m seeing it come up more and more with leaders supporting their teams through uncertainty and change. It seems to be something we encounter daily as we interact with our colleagues, yet it can feel like one of the most challenging tensions to work through.
As I wrote in the previous post, we set team-level goals for change, often based on organisational needs. But the speed at which these take hold depends on each individual’s relationship with change. This is deeply personal and influenced by factors far beyond the workplace – their life experience and background, personality, and mindset.
All of this comes into play – and is felt acutely – when a team faces a new workplace challenge, has to do something differently or is navigating uncertainty. Those who seem to be “resisting change” may not even be aware of how their relationship with it is impacting their behaviour.
As a leader, you need a vision for where your team is going – and an awareness of what’s happening for each person as you move towards it.
Change is part of building a collaborative team
Change is a recurring theme throughout my book, Workshop Culture. It is embedded at various levels in the approach of building a high-performing collaborative team:
- One of the four principles of a workshop culture is “small tweaks, not sweeping changes” – sustainable change happens through small, consistent actions, not big dramatic ones.
- To lead a workshop culture, a leader needs to understand behaviour change to turn strategic ideas into everyday habits.
- The mindset of a high-performing team includes a “change mindset” – the ability to translate intention into action.
- The fifth pillar of the framework is Change itself – continuous improvement through reviewing team habits and updating them as context and goals shift.
Change is often considered as something with a start, middle and end, with a point in time when things will settle. What we’re finding more and more is that being in change is the default state. Believing it will finish is counterproductive. It keeps us in limbo and waiting for a moment of certainty that never really comes.
A client said something simple but profound to me recently – that we need to stop talking about “change” and start talking about “evolution”. Change implies an event that eventually completes. Evolution implies an ongoing state of development that is built into how a team works.
If we’re building collaborative teams, how we deal with change (or evolution) is part of our make-up – whether we’re responding to something specific, like a restructure or new technology, or we’re driving change proactively ourselves.
Now, the focus must shift from doing a list of tasks to get us through a change, towards a new way of being as a team. And that’s where we can really start to tackle the tension between individual behaviour change and the team environment.
The aim is to narrow the gap in how individuals across your team relate to change, so you can all move forward together.
Here are four practices to try:
- Build individual and team agency
- Approach change collaboratively
- Balance alignment and cohesion
- Create a roadmap for change
Build individual and team agency
At the Festival of Work 2026, there was a clear message and theme that ran across nearly every talk I attended – the conditions around our work, most of which are outside of our control, are in a perpetual state of change and uncertainty.
There is no end in sight, and no sign of slowing down. Leaders and teams who are still trying to picture what things will look like “when we get through this” have a mindset shift ahead of them.
If change and uncertainty are now the default, the best way to respond is to become a team that is better at handling them. This means more agility, more proactive problem-solving and even more scenario planning. At a time when there are more questions than answers, we need to exercise our agency and start shaping the future we want.
Building agency as an individual is both a skill and a mindset, and it levels out how a team responds to uncertainty. Increased agency is also linked to higher motivation, engagement and performance, as covered by Frederick A. Miller and Judith H. Katz in their book The Power of Agency: Cultivating Autonomy, Authority and Leadership in Every Role.
To build agency at the individual and team level, consider principles such as:
Reflection. Ask people to share previous experiences of successfully navigating change, at work or personally, so they can recognise their own resilience and agency. Encourage them to explore how these learnings can apply to something they are experiencing now.
Resources. Some simple tools help people think differently about change. Many people are familiar with the concept of identifying what is inside and outside of their control. Reminding your team to map their current situation using this model can be enlightening and grounding.
Reframe. When people are stuck in black-and-white thinking, it blocks the exploration of different perspectives. Helping people see things from various angles and consider nuance is a powerful approach that sparks curiosity and loosens their grip on the past.
Approach change collaboratively
Sweden has a “co-determination act” which mandates that major workplace changes must be made in consultation with employee unions. I came across this in an FT article on AI adoption – “Should AI steal your job?” (paywall). The author Sarah O’Connor explained that because of this act, Swedish workers “have already got decades worth of muscle memory of how to navigate technological change”.
The theory behind this is that change done with people, rather than to them, gets more buy-in and happens more readily than otherwise. We know this instinctively – we are more likely to resist change that feels imposed – and various research studies support it (for example). However, this doesn’t make it any easier to put into practice. It’s a different, initially slower approach, and more challenging when the change is truly outside your team’s control.
Even when you have no authority over the change, start by discussing it together and consider how you might respond. You can still co-create your response to it and build a sense of agency as in the previous point.
Take time to understand the state of play – what you know, what you don’t know but expect to learn, what experience and existing knowledge might help, and what questions you still want answered (this exercise is similar to the Rumsfeld Matrix). Then build in moments to discuss what’s emerging and what you’re learning. Even when nothing significant has happened, a regular touchpoint keeps your team connected and supported.
Balance alignment and cohesion
Alignment and Cohesion are the first two pillars of Bracket’s five-pillar framework. While the pillars aren’t intended to be worked through in order, these two go hand in hand when dealing with the tension of individual change within a team environment.
Alignment is about zooming out to look at the big picture and creating a collective vision. Cohesion is zooming in – making sure that each person can see their contribution to that vision, understand how they perform at their best and how that’s positioned within the wider team.
Looking at these pillars together enables an honest take on the gaps – in mindset, skills and behaviour – that exist for the team as a whole and for each individual that could get in the way of working towards the vision. This is the start of the conversation about where change needs to happen.
You want a team unified on direction, without erasing the diversity that makes it unique. This needs a shared understanding of what success looks like, clear articulation of the behaviours that get you there, and a gauge of where everyone currently sits against that.
Create a roadmap for change
For this final section, I want to revisit an earlier point: the best way to respond to change and uncertainty is to become a team that is better at handling them.
Shifting your team towards this is a change itself (or evolution). You’re asking people to adopt new behaviours and habits, and their individual relationship to change applies here too. (Yes, it’s meta – your team has to change their behaviour to get better at dealing with change.)
The practices I’ve shared above – encouraging agency, approaching change collaboratively and balancing alignment and cohesion – done over time, will move your team in this direction. As I’ve shared, we are not aiming for an endpoint, but you still need a way to track progress and maintain momentum. This is where a roadmap is useful, especially because behaviour change can feel intangible.
To build a roadmap:
- Look 6-12 months ahead. What do you want your team to look like in how it deals with change?
- Discuss the behaviours that would make that a success. What would your culture look like?
- Look honestly at where you are now. Are those behaviours already embedded, or is there work to do – individually and collectively?
- Create a realistic sequence to start shifting behaviour.
Rather than a roadmap with deadlines and milestones, consider a “now, next, later” format that allows for more flexibility as new information emerges. You might identify some quick wins to build momentum, and other foundational work needed before other behaviours become possible. A quick win might be a tweak to one of your meetings to include time for reflection, whereas foundational work might involve making some strategic decisions to improve clarity.
Pair facilitated team conversations with individual coaching that helps people to explore the barriers and resistance they identified for themselves.
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If all of this sounds challenging, it’s because it is. Remember that despite being a leader, you are also an individual within a team environment, facing the same change and uncertainty as everyone else.
How you navigate that is shaped by your own relationship to change. Interrogate that for yourself: are you seeing change as something to get through, or accepting it as the state of play? Are you exercising agency in situations where there are more questions than answers? Are you assessing your own behaviour gaps and working to fill them?
There is also a new skillset to develop and practice – the ability to coach individuals and facilitate team conversations in a way that encourages agency, builds collaboration, and balances alignment with cohesion in a world where there’s no longer a time when things will settle.
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