The Hidden Weight of Leading Through Constant Change
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Marcus* has been a program manager at a mid-size nonprofit for six years. By any measure, he’s good at his job. His team respects him. His executive director trusts him. He’s navigated rough budget cycles, staff transitions, and program pivots with competence, care, and calm. But over the past year, something shifted.
The organization has been through two rounds of funding uncertainty, a leadership restructure above him, and a staff team that’s noticeably exhausted. Marcus finds himself between a rock and a hard place: sitting between a senior leadership team under significant pressure and a team of direct reports looking to him for something steadier than the sensible direction he’s known for giving. For some reason, the challenge he’s now facing feels hard to name.
He knows what he was trained to do. To manage performance. To hit deliverables. To solve problems and communicate up and down. But what his team needs from him now is different, and that widening gap is taking a real toll. He’s finding it harder to show up as the steady, grounded presence his team needs when he’s absorbing the same disruption they are, without any language for what that experience is, exactly. That absence of language is itself part of the problem. When you can’t name what’s happening to you, it’s harder to ask for what you need or recognize that what you’re carrying isn’t a personal shortcoming, but a structural one.
What Marcus is navigating isn’t unique to him. Across nonprofits and public agencies right now, people in roles exactly like his are absorbing pressure from above while steadying teams below. They are discovering that the leadership toolkit they were given wasn’t built for this. Most leadership development is valuable for preparing leaders to lead in relatively stable environments.
What happens when well-trained leaders lead in environments they were not adequately prepared to lead in?
What Traditional Leadership Training Gets Wrong
Most leadership development, whether formal training, graduate coursework, or on-the-job mentorship, has been built on a set of assumptions that made sense in more stable environments. Lead from a position of authority. Demonstrate technical mastery. Project confidence and certainty. Manage outcomes through structured systems and clear hierarchies.
Those assumptions produced capable, reliable managers in organizations where the primary challenge was - and is often - execution. But they haven’t served leaders as well in environments defined by continuous disruption. Sustained funding uncertainty, rapid workforce changes, federal and philanthropic budget volatility, and the accumulated weight of years of organizational stress have fundamentally changed what leadership demands. That’s a meaningful difference from the conditions most leaders were trained for, and it shows up in ways that are hard to ignore.
It is also worth naming something that can be easy to lose sight of when disruption becomes prolonged: what we are experiencing right now is not normal. Sustained workforce displacement, ongoing funding volatility, and the accumulated stress of years of uncertainty are not conditions that leaders and their teams simply adapt to and move past. They accumulate. They erode empathy - both the empathy leaders extend to their teams and the empathy organizations extend to the people who have been displaced by forces entirely outside their control. Naming that reality isn’t a distraction from the work of leadership. In many ways, it IS leadership work.
The leader who was trained to have answers is now leading in a context where honest uncertainty is more useful than performed confidence. The leader trained to direct from a position of authority is now most needed as a stabilizing presence - someone who can hold the emotional reality of the team without collapsing under it. And the leader trained to drive outcomes is now being asked to do something more nuanced: to help people stay engaged and effective when the ground beneath them won’t stop moving.
These are not small adjustments. They represent a fundamentally different orientation to what leadership is for, and most leaders were never given the tools to make them.
The Thing Nobody Warned Leaders About
There’s a concept that organizational psychologists have been studying with increasing urgency in recent years, and it goes a long way toward explaining what Marcus - the program manager we met at the beginning of this story - is experiencing. That concept is change fatigue.
Change fatigue is a state of emotional and physical exhaustion brought on by frequent and intense changes, resulting in a person’s diminished capacity to adapt to and engage with new demands. Every change, large or small, draws on a set of psychological adaptive resources. When those resources aren’t replenished, even relatively minor changes begin to feel overwhelming. The system that usually helps people adjust simply runs low, making what once felt manageable start to feel like way too much to take on.
What the research reflects:
The average employee experienced 10 planned organizational changes in 2022, nearly double the number from 2016. By 2025, that figure had risen to 14 concurrent change initiatives per employee. Employee willingness to support organizational change dropped from 74% in 2016 to 43% in 2022.
For people in roles like Marcus’s, this dynamic is particularly acute. Research on organizational change has begun to examine managers not just as change agents who lead others through transition, but as change recipients who are themselves absorbing the weight of continuous disruption. They’re not above the storm. They’re inside it - trying to protect their team from the worst of it while weathering it themselves, typically without acknowledgement that this is what’s being asked of them.
What makes this especially difficult is that most leadership training never addressed it. There’s no module on leading when you’re depleted. There’s no curriculum on what it means to hold space for a team’s collective exhaustion while managing your own. The assumption built into most leadership development is that the leader is a stable platform from which guidance flows. That assumption is harder to maintain when we acknowledge that a leader is just as human as the people they’re leading.
The assumption built into most leadership development is that the leader is a stable platform from which guidance flows. That assumption is harder to maintain when we acknowledge that a leader is just as human as the people they’re leading.
What the Current Moment Asks of Us
So, if the leadership model most of us were trained in wasn’t built for this moment, what is?
In practice, a few things show up consistently among leaders who are navigating this period with integrity and care:
Honesty about what is known and what is not. Teams under sustained pressure are more resilient than we often give them credit for. What erodes that resilience isn’t the difficulty itself but the sense that the difficulty is being managed around them rather than named with them. Leaders who speak truthfully about uncertainty and about what they don’t yet know tend to build more trust than those who project confidence they don’t genuinely feel.
Attention to energy, not just output. Change fatigue tends to show up in people before it shows up in performance numbers. Leaders who genuinely check in on how their team is doing are more likely to catch depletion before it becomes disengagement or departure. That kind of attentiveness requires slowing down enough to notice, which is harder than it sounds when you’re carrying your own weight at the same time.
Permission to be human. One of the quieter and more powerful things a leader can offer a team under pressure is to model that it’s acceptable to find things hard. Not to collapse under the weight, and not to perform an invulnerability that no one believes anyway, but to occupy the honest middle ground between those two. That kind of leadership doesn’t come from a training curriculum. It comes from self-awareness and a willingness to be real with the people who depend on you.
All told, none of these require a new framework or leadership retreat. What they often require is a quality of presence and intentionality that the pace of this moment makes harder to sustain and a lot more necessary than ever to develop.
A Place to Begin
Remember Marcus - the program manager sitting between a rock and a hard place? He didn’t arrive at that place because he’s a poor leader. He ended up there because the conditions around him changed faster than the tools he was given to lead with can adapt. The disruption above him filtered down. The exhaustion below him accumulated. Somewhere along the way, the gap between what he was trained to do and what the moment required became impossible to ignore even if he still didn’t have the language for it. That’s where many leaders find themselves right now.
The place to begin isn’t a new framework or a leadership assessment. It’s an honest question worth sitting with before the next team meeting, difficult conversation, or the next wave of change:
Have I honestly named, to myself and my team, what this period is costing us? Have I created space for that reality to be acknowledged?
This question is important. A simple act of recognition that the people doing this work are human, that their capacity is real, and finite, and that a leader who acknowledges that truth is more likely to sustain their team through difficulty than one who pushes past it. The gap between the leader your team needs and the leader you were trained to be isn’t a personal shortcoming. Rather, it’s a reflection of how rapidly the demands of leadership have changed and how slowly most development systems have kept up with evolving realities. Recognizing that gap and naming it honestly, even just to yourself, is the first step toward closing it.
That recognition - honest, grounded, and shared with the people around you - is itself a form of leadership the current moment very much needs right now.
*”Marcus” is a composite character drawn from patterns observed across organizations, not a portrait of any specific individual.
Sources & Further Reading
Drasin, J. & Holliday, T. (2024). Navigating change fatigue: The energy-commitment model for organizational change. EDUCAUSE Review. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2024/11/navigating-change-fatigue-the-energy-commitment-model-for-organizational-change
Westover, J. (2025). Organizational change fatigue: Building adaptive capacity in an era of permanent disruption. Human Capital Leadership Review. https://www.innovativehumancapital.com/article/organizational-change-fatigue-building-adaptive-capacity-in-an-era-of-permanent-disruption
Center for Creative Leadership. (2025). How to overcome change fatigue & lead workplace change. https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/change-fatigue-continual-evolution
Groulx, P., Maisonneuve, F., Harvey, J. F., & Johnson, K. (2024). The ripple effect of strain in times of change: How manager emotional exhaustion affects team psychological safety and readiness to change. Frontiers in Psychology, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1298104
