Every significant change has a plan, a budget and a project team. Whether it works usually comes down to something less tidy: whether the people affected believe their leaders mean it. They decide that by watching what leaders do over months, long after the launch.
This guide covers what leaders need to do during a change, the different jobs of the executive sponsor, the leadership team and middle managers, and the mistakes that most often stall a change. It is part of our wider guide to change leadership.
What is the leader's role in change?
Leaders own the reasons for a change, give it authority and resources, and model the behaviour they are asking of everyone else. They explain why the change matters, stay involved for its whole life, clear the obstacles only they can clear, and hold their peers to account for their part. The project team can plan and coordinate the change. It can't supply the authority or the example.
Different leaders carry different parts of that job:
| Who | Their part in the change | What goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Executive sponsor | Owns the case for change, the resources and the authority | Announces the change, then moves on to other things |
| Leadership team | Gives one consistent account and backs it with their own behaviour | Each leader tells a different story, or protects their own area |
| Middle managers | Translate the change into what it means for each team | Hear about it at the same time as their staff, with no time to prepare |
| Frontline leaders | Hold the day-to-day conversations and coach people through the new way | Are expected to sell a change they don't understand |
| Change and project team | Plan, coordinate and support the people side of the change | Are left to own a change that only senior leaders can own |
Why does sponsorship matter so much?
Sponsorship is the factor most consistently linked to success in change research. Prosci reports that sponsorship has ranked first among contributors to success in every one of its benchmarking reports since 1998, and that projects with an extremely effective sponsor met or exceeded their objectives more than twice as often as those with a very ineffective one (Prosci n.d.).
Many sponsors don't know what the role involves. Half of the participants in a recent Prosci study said their sponsors had less than an adequate understanding of the sponsor role (Prosci n.d.). People are often made sponsors because of their seniority, then left to work out the job for themselves.
What does an executive sponsor actually do?
Prosci summarises the sponsor's job in three parts: active and visible participation throughout the project, building a coalition of sponsorship among other senior leaders, and communicating directly with the people affected (Prosci n.d.). In practice, a good sponsor:
- Explains the reasons in person, more than once, to the groups most affected.
- Stays visible for the life of the change. Prosci lists being visible at the beginning of a change, then disengaging too early, among the common mistakes sponsors make (Prosci Singapore 2024).
- Brings their peers along, so the change has backing across the leadership team as well as from one person.
- Clears the obstacles above the project team's authority, such as competing priorities, budgets, contracts or policies.
- Asks regularly what is stuck, and acts on the answer.
- Changes their own behaviour first. If the change asks people to work differently, they watch whether the sponsor does.
Picture two versions of the same change. A manufacturer is moving its scheduling from spreadsheets to a new planning system. In the first version, the general manager announces it at a site meeting, hands it to the IT lead and returns to the order book. Supervisors read the silence correctly, and the spreadsheets stay in use alongside the new system for months. In the second version, the same general manager walks the floor to explain why the change matters, sits in on the first planning sessions, settles an argument between production and sales about who owns the schedule, and asks every week what is getting in the way. The system, the budget and the timeline are the same. The message the supervisors receive is very different.
Why does the leadership team need to tell one story?
People look for differences between their leaders. If one senior leader talks about growth, another about cost and a third barely mentions the change, staff conclude that nobody at the top really agrees, and that the change can be waited out.
Kotter (1995) listed failing to build a powerful enough guiding coalition among the most common reasons transformations fail. A related error on his list is under-communicating the vision "by a factor of ten". People also need to believe their leaders support the change before they will commit to it themselves. Armenakis and Harris (2009) list leadership support as one of five beliefs that make people ready for change.
Agreeing on one story takes work. Leaders need to work through their disagreements in private, settle on the reasons and the trade-offs, and then hold each other to that account in public. Where a leader has real doubts, those are better raised and resolved before launch than discovered by staff afterwards.
What role do middle managers play in change?
Middle managers turn a change from an announcement into something people do. They translate the reasons into what the change means for each team, answer the questions senior leaders never hear, and manage the anxiety that comes with any significant change.
They also carry a heavy load doing it. Huy (2002) studied a large organisation through radical change and found that middle managers who attended both to the change and to their people's need for some continuity helped the organisation adapt. Gallup research has found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores (Harter and Adkins 2015), so how they handle a change shapes how their teams experience it.
People want to hear about a change from two places. Prosci's research shows that employees prefer to hear the business reasons for a change from the person in charge, typically a senior leader, and to hear how it affects their own daily work from their own manager (Creasey 2022). Leaders who rely on all-staff emails and town halls cover only the first.
Many managers aren't ready for that second job. In Gartner's 2023 survey of HR leaders, 82% said their managers were not equipped to lead change (Gartner 2023). DDI's assessment data found that only 30% of mid-level leaders were strong in leading change, and only 15% of emerging and frontline leaders were strong in facilitating it (DDI, reported by ATD 2026).
How should senior leaders support their managers?
Senior leaders get more from their managers when they treat them as leaders of the change in their own right. In practice:
- Brief managers before their teams. Managers who hear about a change at the same time as their staff can't answer questions, and they lose credibility trying.
- Give them the reasons, along with the decision. Managers can only explain what they understand, and they will be asked why.
- Tell them what they can and can't say. Be clear about what is decided, what is still open and when more will be known.
- Give them time. Leading people through a change takes hours each week. Take something else off their plate.
- Listen to what they hear. Managers pick up concerns long before they appear in a survey. Ask them regularly, and act on it.
- Support them too. Managers are often affected by the change themselves, and they need someone to talk to as well.
What are the most common leadership mistakes in change?
Most of the mistakes we see come from leaders treating the announcement as the main event. The common ones:
- Announce and move on. The launch gets all the attention, and the sponsor is absent for the hard months that follow.
- Hand it to the project team. The team is asked to own a change it has no authority to make stick.
- Mixed messages. Senior leaders give different reasons, or say one thing and reward another.
- Too little communication. Leaders who are tired of the message assume everyone else has heard it.
- Broken promises. Commitments made at launch and not kept generate resistance that leaders then blame on their staff (Ford, Ford and D'Amelio 2008).
- Punishing bad news. If people who raise problems are treated as negative, the problems go underground. People speak up when they believe they won't be punished for it (Edmondson 1999).
- Piling it on. A new change is added to teams already carrying several others. Our guide to change fatigue covers what that costs.
Can people lead change without formal authority?
Yes. Heifetz (1994) separates authority, which comes with a role, from leadership, which is an activity anyone can take up. People without senior titles often lead change in practice: the respected operator who tries the new system first and shows others how, or the team member who raises the awkward question nobody else will.
Senior leaders can make room for this. Involving informal leaders early, listening to the people raising hard questions and recognising those who help colleagues through the change all spread the work of leading it. Our guide to adaptive leadership covers this idea in more depth, and our guide to resistance to change covers what people need from their leaders when a change costs them something.
If you are about to sponsor a significant change, or your managers are carrying one without the support they need, talk to us about our change management work. Our executive coaching and leadership workshops help leaders at every level build the skills to lead change well.