The Leadership Mistakes That Quietly Slow Down Organizational Change

When a change initiative stalls, the first place most organizations look is the strategy. Was the plan clear enough? Were the right systems in place? Did we communicate it properly?

But in my experience, the strategy is rarely where things go wrong.

The plan is usually solid. Timelines are set. Milestones are defined. The rationale makes sense. And still, progress slows. Adoption is uneven. Teams hesitate. Leaders find themselves wondering why something that looked so clear on paper feels so heavy in practice.

Most of the time, the answer is in how the change is being led, not what the change is.

The leadership behaviours that create friction during transitions are rarely intentional. They come from pressure, urgency, and the genuine difficulty of guiding an organization through uncertainty while everything else keeps moving. But they have real consequences, and catching them early makes a significant difference.

Here are seven of the most common ones I see.

Mistake 1: Assuming That Clarity Equals Readiness

Once a change has been explained, it’s tempting to assume people are ready to move forward. The message went out. The rationale was shared. Everyone nodded. Time to execute.

But clarity and readiness are not the same thing.

Someone can fully understand what’s changing and still feel uncertain about how it affects their role, their workload, or their ability to succeed. Readiness involves more than intellectual understanding. It includes emotional acceptance, practical capacity, and genuine confidence in the path ahead.

When leaders jump from explanation to execution too quickly, teams often comply without really integrating the change. That compliance looks like progress, but it’s fragile. It needs constant reinforcement to stay in place.

Pausing to actually assess readiness, rather than assuming it, creates a much stronger foundation.

Mistake 2: Underestimating How Much Mental Energy Change Requires

Change asks a lot of people. Think differently. Act differently. Learn new systems, new expectations, new ways of measuring success. All of that takes real cognitive energy.

The problem is that most organizations introduce change without adjusting anything else. So people are absorbing something new while still carrying everything they were already responsible for.

The overload is invisible. It doesn’t show up in a status report. But it shows up in performance. Even highly capable, deeply motivated people start to slip under the weight of too much at once. And when leaders notice the dip, they often interpret it as resistance or disengagement, when really it’s just capacity being exceeded.

Acknowledging this reality and adjusting expectations accordingly, even temporarily, does more for morale and performance than pushing through ever will.

Mistake 3: Leaders Sending Mixed Signals Without Realizing It

Leadership alignment is one of the strongest predictors of whether a change succeeds. And yet it’s one of the most commonly overlooked conditions.

When leaders interpret the change differently, or communicate it in ways that don’t quite match up, teams get mixed signals. And mixed signals produce hesitation. People delay decisions, seek more confirmation, or quietly revert to familiar behaviours because they genuinely can’t tell which direction to follow.

It doesn’t even have to be a dramatic contradiction. One leader emphasizes urgency; another emphasizes caution. Both are probably right in their own context. But without coordination, the team ends up confused rather than guided.

Consistent messaging across leadership gives people something solid to move toward. It creates stability at exactly the moment when things feel most uncertain.

Mistake 4: Tracking Execution While Ignoring Experience

Leaders are often measured by what gets done. Did the project launch? Were the milestones hit? Did the organization implement what was planned? Those are fair and necessary questions.

But they don’t tell you how people experienced the change. And that matters more than most leaders realize.

If people felt unsupported, unheard, or disconnected during the process, they may technically comply with the new way of doing things while never really committing to it. And when pressure returns, old behaviours come back with it.

Leaders who pay attention to the experience of change, who create space for questions, who actually listen to concerns and adjust when needed, get more durable results. Not just task completion, but genuine commitment.

Mistake 5: Stepping Back Too Soon

In the early stages of any change, leadership presence is typically high. There are announcements, updates, check-ins. Leaders are visible and engaged.

Then, as things settle into motion, attention shifts. There are other priorities. The change seems to be running. Leaders begin to step back, assuming the organization can carry it from here.

That transition almost always happens earlier than it should.

People continue looking to leadership for signals about what matters and what’s expected long after the launch phase ends. When presence decreases prematurely, uncertainty quietly increases. The change starts to lose its footing before it’s fully embedded.

Staying visible and consistent, even as things stabilize, reinforces that the change is real and that leadership is still invested in seeing it through.

Mistake 6: Treating Resistance as Something to Shut Down

Resistance gets a bad reputation. Most leaders experience it as a barrier, something to push through or manage away.

But resistance is almost always carrying information.

It can reveal gaps in clarity that weren’t visible before. It can surface concerns about capacity or alignment that nobody had put into words yet. It can point to something important that the change plan didn’t account for.

Leaders who approach resistance with genuine curiosity, asking what’s underneath it rather than how to eliminate it, gain real insight into what their teams need to succeed. They can address the actual issues before they grow into something larger.

When resistance is dismissed or suppressed, those issues don’t go away. They just become harder to see and harder to address.

Mistake 7: Expecting the Change to Sustain Itself

Even a well-executed change needs ongoing attention to hold.

As conditions evolve, teams encounter new challenges. Decisions get made at every level that shape how the change actually unfolds in practice. Without regular touchpoints to realign, small differences in interpretation start to accumulate.

Over time, that drift adds up. What started as a cohesive change effort starts to fragment, not because anyone made a bad decision, but because nobody was actively maintaining the alignment.

Creating intentional, ongoing spaces for leaders and teams to align ensures the change stays coordinated as it matures. It’s not extra work. It’s what prevents a much bigger problem later.

Strategy Sets the Direction. Leadership Determines Whether People Actually Get There.

The most carefully designed change initiative will struggle if the leadership conditions aren’t right. And the good news is that those conditions are within a leader’s control.

When leaders create clarity, stay aligned, support capacity, and remain present through the hard middle stretch of a transition, adoption happens more naturally. Progress accelerates. The organization moves forward with cohesion rather than friction.

The mistakes in this list are almost never the result of bad intentions. They’re the result of pressure, competing demands, and the very real complexity of leading through uncertainty. But they’re also adjustable, and catching them early is what separates change that holds from change that slowly fades.

Change isn’t sustained by plans. It’s sustained by how leaders show up, day after day, through the transition.

Is your change initiative moving slower than it should?

Lisa Blanchet works with leadership teams to strengthen alignment, clarify roles, and create the conditions change needs to succeed. Book a consultation to explore how that support could help your organization move forward with more clarity and momentum.