How to Bring Your Team With You During Change
Keeping Your Employees On Board, Up to Date, and Doing Their Best Work During a Pivot
It’s 2025, and let’s be honest—business has changed drastically. Not just since the early 2000s, but even since the pandemic five years ago.
The way leaders ran companies 20 years ago—top-down decisions, slow approvals, “cash cow” strategies—brought success back then. But today? The landscape is different. Competition is sharper, industries are shifting overnight, and AI is changing how we all work.
Here’s the bottom line: no matter which direction you want to take your business, if you don’t bring your team along with you, your business will struggle. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow—but down the road you’ll notice things slowing down, employees pulling in different directions, and productivity hitting an all-time low.
So, how do you keep your people aligned and performing their best while you pivot?
1. Bring Role Responsibilities Up to Date
Most performance issues come down to one thing: employees don’t actually know what’s expected of them in the new direction. Roles that made sense before may not match where you’re headed. Update job descriptions, clarify responsibilities, and make sure everyone knows exactly how their role supports the pivot.
2. Redesign Processes and Procedures
Pivots often fail because businesses keep old systems in place. If you want faster client acquisition, for example, but approvals still crawl through six layers of management—your people can’t keep pace. Eliminate bottlenecks, redesign workflows, and give your staff the tools to succeed.
3. Communicate Relentlessly
Leaders often underestimate this. Remember: you’ve been thinking about this pivot for months. Your employees haven’t. They don’t see all the reasons behind the change or how it connects to the bigger vision. That’s why you need to over-communicate the why, the how, and the what—until it sticks.
4. Match People to the Right Roles
Here’s where pivots break trust: when leaders start shoving square pegs into round holes. If you hired someone for operations, and now you want them doing outbound sales—it may not be a fit. That doesn’t mean they don’t belong on the team. It may mean repositioning them so they keep doing high-value work while you find the right person for the new role.
The Pivot Test for Leaders
Ask yourself:
Do my employees know exactly how this pivot affects their role?
Have we redesigned processes to match the new direction?
Am I communicating clearly, consistently, and often?
Do I have the right people in the right seats for this new stage?
If you can’t confidently answer “yes” to all four, you’re at risk of dragging your team—and your business—through a messy, unproductive pivot.
The Good News
The good news is, this isn’t about overhauling everything overnight. It’s about clarity, communication, and alignment. Businesses that master this don’t just survive change—they grow stronger because of it.
>If you’re a CEO, owner, or leader in the middle of a pivot (or staring one down), I help businesses like yours align teams, clarify communication, and move faster without leaving employees behind. Let’s talk about how I can help your pivot succeed.
