Organizational change is often discussed in terms of strategy, timelines, communication, and implementation. Leaders are expected to guide teams through uncertainty, answer difficult questions, maintain stability, and keep the work moving.

What receives far less attention is what those leaders may be carrying themselves.

A restructuring may change more than an organizational chart. It can alter trusted relationships, professional identity, routines, expectations, authority, belonging, and a leader’s sense of what comes next. A merger can create opportunity while also bringing loss. A layoff can require a leader to support employees through painful decisions while privately wrestling with disappointment, guilt, uncertainty, or grief.

That raises an important question:

What happens when the person responsible for helping everyone else navigate change is also trying to make sense of it personally?

Organizational Change Can Involve Real Loss

When people hear the word grief, they often think first about death. But grief can also emerge when something meaningful changes, disappears, or no longer exists in the way it once did.

In organizations, that loss can include:

• A trusted team

• A valued colleague

• A familiar role

• Professional status

• Stability

• Workplace relationships

• Organizational identity

• Confidence in leadership

• A sense of control

• Expectations about the future

These losses may not always be publicly recognized, but that does not make them insignificant.

Organizational change can require people to let go of something before they have fully understood what that loss means to them. Leaders are not exempt from that experience.

In fact, their position can make the experience more complicated because they may be expected to help others adjust while still processing the change themselves.

Leaders Are Inside the Change, Too

One assumption organizations can make is that leaders somehow stand outside the emotional experience of change.

They do not.

Leaders may be responsible for explaining decisions they did not make, implementing changes they did not choose, or helping employees process outcomes they themselves are still trying to understand.

They may be expected to remain calm while feeling uncertain.

They may need to motivate others while feeling discouraged.

They may be asked to communicate confidence before they have had time to rebuild their own.

This creates an important tension. The role requires leadership, but the individual occupying that role may also be experiencing loss.

My research on the lived experiences of leaders with work-related unresolved grief reinforced how important this distinction can be. The leaders in my study described emotional strain, insufficient organizational support, disruption to professional identity and connection, different approaches to coping, and experiences of resilience and growth.

Their experiences also demonstrated something organizations can easily miss:

A leader can continue functioning while still carrying something unresolved.

Performance alone does not tell us whether someone has processed what happened.

That distinction matters because organizations often judge how well leaders are coping by what they can still produce.

What Leaders May Be Carrying

The hidden weight of organizational change can take several forms.

Emotional Weight

Change can bring disappointment, anger, sadness, frustration, fear, or exhaustion.

Some leaders may feel pressure to suppress these reactions because they believe emotional expression could be interpreted as weakness or instability. Others may simply have no appropriate space in which to process what they are experiencing.

The result can be a leader who appears steady while carrying significant emotional strain privately.

Identity Weight

Leadership roles can become deeply connected to a person’s sense of professional identity.

A restructuring, demotion, merger, leadership transition, or loss of responsibility can challenge how someone understands who they are within an organization.

A leader may begin asking:

Who am I in this organization now?

Does my work still matter in the same way?

What does this change say about my value?

What happens to the leadership identity I spent years building?

These are not merely operational questions. They can be deeply personal.

Relational Weight

Organizations are built through relationships.

When change separates teams, removes colleagues, alters reporting structures, or ends long-standing professional partnerships, leaders may experience genuine relational loss.

They may also feel responsible for supporting employees who are grieving those same relationships while having little opportunity to acknowledge their own.

Responsibility Weight

Leaders often become the visible face of decisions made elsewhere.

They may have to deliver difficult messages, implement unpopular changes, or manage the consequences of decisions over which they had limited control.

They may also become the person employees associate with the change, even when they did not initiate it.

That creates another burden: supporting others while simultaneously absorbing their disappointment, frustration, or anger.

Sensemaking Weight

Leaders are often expected to explain what change means.

But before they can help others understand a new reality, they may need to make sense of it themselves.

What happened?

Why did it happen?

What does this mean for the organization?

What does it mean for my team?

What does it mean for me?

Leaders may be answering these questions internally at the same time they are being asked to provide clarity externally.

That is one reason the psychological experience of organizational change deserves more attention. Leaders are not simply communicating change. They are interpreting it, experiencing it, and determining how to move forward within it.

Why Organizations Can Miss the Signs

One reason these experiences are easy to overlook is that leadership is commonly associated with resilience, competence, and strength.

If the work continues, the leader may appear fine.

If the team remains productive, the change may appear successful.

If deadlines are met, there may seem to be little reason for concern.

But visible performance does not tell the whole story.

Leaders can remain productive while feeling disconnected, emotionally exhausted, uncertain, or unsupported. Some may cope by working more. Others may withdraw, avoid difficult emotions, or focus so heavily on the needs of others that their own experience remains unaddressed.

And because they continue to perform, no one asks.

When organizations focus only on whether leaders are functioning, they may miss what those leaders are carrying.

The Cost of Ignoring the Human Side of Leadership

Organizational change places demands on everyone involved.

The issue is not that leaders should be protected from every difficult experience. Leadership will always involve pressure, uncertainty, responsibility, and difficult decisions.

The issue is whether organizations acknowledge that leaders are human participants in change, not simply instruments for implementing it.

When significant experiences remain unresolved or unsupported, they can influence how leaders relate to their work, their organizations, the people around them, and even their own sense of themselves as leaders.

Support does not weaken leadership.

Acknowledging loss does not make someone incapable of leading.

And creating space for leaders to process difficult organizational experiences does not eliminate accountability.

It recognizes that sustainable leadership requires attention to the person carrying the responsibility, not only the responsibility being carried.

A Different Question for Organizations

During change, organizations often ask important questions:

Is the transition on schedule?

Are employees adapting?

Is performance being maintained?

Are leaders communicating effectively?

Those questions matter.

But there is another question organizations should be willing to ask:

What is this leader carrying as they lead through this change?

That question creates room for a different kind of leadership conversation.

It recognizes that leaders can be both responsible and affected.

They can be strong and still experience loss.

They can continue leading while still needing support.

And they can successfully guide an organization through change while also having something of their own to process.

Understanding what leaders carry does not diminish expectations of leadership.

It gives us a fuller picture of what leadership actually requires.

About the Author

Jennifer Harden, Ph.D., is an Industrial/Organizational Psychologist, leadership scholar, and author whose research examines the lived experiences of leaders with work-related unresolved grief. Her work focuses on the human experience of leadership during organizational change and the ways leaders and organizations respond to loss, disruption, and transition. She is the author of Leading Through Organizational Grief: What Leaders Carry During Organizational Change and developer of the Leadership Grief Response Model™.

References

Harden, J. (2025). The lived experience of leaders with work-related unresolved grief. Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies.

Harden, J., & Rohde, D. (2025). The lived experience of leaders with work-related unresolved grief. North American Journal of Psychology, 27(3), 589-607.

Day, A., Crown, S. N., & Ivany, M. (2017). Organisational change and employee burnout: The moderating effects of support and job control. Safety Science, 100, 4–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2017.03.004

Garner, J. T. (2026). A case study of sensemaking during the trauma and healing of organizational change. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 54(3), 291–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2026.2636625

Gover, L., & Duxbury, L. (2018). Making sense of organizational change: Is hindsight really 20/20? Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(1), 39–51. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2208.

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