The Memory
I walked into work one morning and before I could finish going through my emails, the new executive assistant that I had just hired walked into my office.
“So we’re getting sold,” she said.
My eyes widened. My mouth dropped open. “Wait, what?” I asked.
I had no idea.
The look on my face must have said everything because I remember her expression changing instantly. Her eyes got wide and she froze.
“Oh…” she said quietly. She suddenly realized I had just learned the news. How does the HR Manager not already know?
At that moment, we were both thinking the same thing.
This is not a good sign.
Apparently my manager had tried to call me on my way into work to notify me, but I had forgotten my phone at home charging. Minutes later, I was reading the same announcement everyone else was receiving. As the HR leader, I was blindsided.
Suddenly, I felt exactly what employees often feel during times of change and uncertainty. I was worried about my future. I didn’t know whether I would have a job. I didn’t know what the acquisition meant. I didn’t know if the new parent company would absorb HR into their shared services model. I had questions but very few answers.
I recall employees coming to my office throughout the days ahead asking many of the same questions I had been asking myself.
“What does this mean”
“Will our jobs change”
“Are we going to be okay”
As an HR leader, I was accustomed to helping employees navigate change. This time, I was navigating it alongside them. I didn’t have the answers simply because I did not have the information. One of the hardest parts was not being able to help the employees through this uncertainty. I felt powerless and so did they. Over the following months, several key employees including our Chief Scientific Officer and our R&D Manager, left the organization.
Years later, I realized I had experienced something many employees are experiencing as AI transforms the workplace. Culture is felt most vividly during moments of uncertainty, not when things are easy, but when people don’t know what comes next. What I remember most wasn’t the acquisition itself. It was how I felt.
And perhaps that is what leaders are missing in the race toward AI. People are not just adapting to new technology. They are navigating uncertainty. And uncertainty is not simply an operational challenge. It is a human experience.
Why ‘Resistance’ is a Strategic Signal, Not a People Problem
Organizations often treat resistance as a people problem to be overcome, relying on linear change management plans. However, this treats the symptom rather than the systemic source. Misunderstanding resistance in this way leads to high turnover and disengaged teams during the periods when you need them most. But what if resistance isn’t the problem? What if we’ve been asking the wrong question?
Rather than asking why people resist change, we should begin by asking how people are experiencing change. That simple shift changes everything.
People navigate change throughout their lives. They move cities, recover from illness, begin new careers, build families, and reinvent themselves. Change itself is not unusual. What often makes organizational change different is that it often happens without voice, without participation, and without a sense of agency.
Looking back, the acquisition unquestionably created uncertainty. The business decision was outside most employees’ control. How leaders communicated, involved people, and built trust during the transition was not. People remember whether leaders invited them into the process or simply informed them after decisions had already been made.
When people feel excluded from decisions that affect them, uncertain about their future, or powerless to influence outcomes, what leaders often interpret as resistance may actually be the human consequences of uncertainty, exclusion, and perceived loss of control. This points to a different way of understanding resistance. If people are not simply reacting to change itself, but to how change is experienced, we should expect to see similar patterns beyond acquisitions and organizational restructuring.
Research suggests we do. The American Psychological Association (APA), drawing on findings from the Human Workplace Index, reported that employees increasingly feel unseen, unheard, and unvalued. Nearly 30 percent of employees reported feeling invisible, while 27 percent said they felt ignored.
Those findings are telling. If people already question whether they matter inside an organization, uncertainty becomes heavier. Change is no longer experienced as a shared organizational journey. It becomes a personal question of identity, belonging, and security.
Dennis Stolle, head of APA office of applied psychology, observed that “when people are in environments where they feel they matter, their work has meaning, and they feel psychologically safe, change (and even uncertainty) hit them a lot more softly.”
Rather than viewing resistance as insubordination, leaders can begin viewing it as information. It may be a signal that people are experiencing uncertainty without trust, ambiguity without transparent communication, change without participation, and transformation without empowerment. Above all, it tells us something about whether people feel seen, heard, and valued. Organizations that ignore these signals risk addressing resistance while overlooking its underlying causes.
The question, then, is no longer: “How do we overcome resistance?” The better question becomes: What is resistance revealing about the system?
People Support What They Help Create
If resistance tells us something about how change is experienced, the next question becomes what shapes that experience?
People support what they help create. When change happens with people, uncertainty doesn’t disappear. Participation changes how uncertainty is experienced. Voice creates participation. Participation fosters agency. Agency creates ownership. Ownership strengthens commitment.
The opposite is also true. When change happens to people, participation is replaced with compliance. Employees may follow instructions, but compliance is not the same as commitment. Over time, exclusion creates cynicism, silence, and disengagement.
Perhaps that is why resistance is often misunderstood. People are not always opposed to the destination. They may simply be reacting to how the journey is unfolding. Participation doesn’t eliminate uncertainty. But it reminds people that they still have influence. That they still matter. That they are not simply subjects of change, but contributors to it.
For leaders this creates an important shift. Participation is more than a communication strategy. It is one of the key ways that organizations create agency during times of uncertainty. Transparency, open communication, and meaningful opportunities to contribute help shape how people experience change before they determine whether they support it.
In many ways, the acquisition I experienced years ago was a localized stress test for my organization. The rapid adoption of AI has become a global, continuous stress test for organizations everywhere, exposing the same human fault lines in how we lead.
AI: The Accelerant for Human Disconnection
This challenge is not unique to mergers and acquisitions. Artificial Intelligence is not creating an entirely new leadership challenge. It is exposing and accelerating the same human dynamics that have accompanied organizational transformation for decades. Employees aren’t just wondering whether they can use the technology. They’re wondering:
- Security: (Am I safe? Is my job secure? Am I being surveilled?)
- Relevance: (Am I falling behind? What skills do I need? Do I still matter here?)
- Agency: (Why wasn’t I included? Is this happening to me, or with me?)
These aren’t technical questions. They’re deeply human ones. They reflect a fundamental human need to understand where they fit, whether they still have a voice, and whether they still have a meaningful role in what comes next.
Research helps explain why these questions matter. Job insecurity has consistently been associated with poorer mental and physical health, lowered job satisfaction, reduced organizational commitment, and diminished trust (Weir, 2026). In the 2025 Work in America survey, 65% of workers ages 26 to 43 and 75% of workers ages 18 to 25 identified job insecurity as a significant source of stress.
This uncertainty extends beyond employment itself. Research by Bordia et al. found that uncertainty during organizational change is associated with psychological strain, particularly when accompanied by a perceived loss of control. People don’t simply process uncertainty intellectually. They experience it psychologically, emotionally and physiologically.
As HR professionals, we often spend considerable time preparing organizations for operational integration, managing risk, planning workforce transitions, assessing talent, and supporting culture integration. Those responsibilities are essential.
Yet, organizational transformation is more than an operational process. It is also a human experience. Preparing organizations for change should include preparing people for the experience of change itself. That requires more than communication plans and training. It requires leaders who intentionally create the conditions that enable people to navigate uncertainty, contribute meaningfully, and move forward together.
A Human Centered Approach for Transformation
People experience transformation through more than new strategies, structures and technologies. They experience it psychologically and socially. Leadership must become more human-centered.
Human-centered leadership recognizes that people do not simply need information during times of transformation. They need leaders who intentionally cultivate the conditions where uncertainty is experienced with trust rather than fear, participation rather than exclusion and empowerment rather than helplessness.
From a trauma-informed perspective, uncertainty isn’t merely a cognitive experience. It is interpreted through the nervous system. Research in neuroscience and trauma suggests that when people perceive a loss of safety, predictability, or control, their capacity for curiosity, creativity, and strategic thinking can diminish as protective responses become activated. This helps explain why organizational change often evokes reactions that leaders misinterpret as resistance.
Recognizing this changes the role of leadership. When leaders understand how uncertainty is experienced, they can create environments where people are better able to think, contribute, and adapt.
When people experience agency, uncertainty becomes something they can think through rather than simply endure. They become active participants in change rather than passive recipients of it. People don’t need leaders who can predict the future. They need leaders who help them believe they still have a meaningful place in the future they are helping to create.
This shift raises a different set of questions for leaders.
Not “how do we get people on board”
But instead:
- How are people experiencing this change?
- Where might people feel powerless?
- Whose voices haven’t been heard?
- How are we communicating change?
- Are people being informed or invited into this change?
- Are we building compliance or commitment?
Psychological safety, trust, transparency, participation, and empowerment are not simply leadership practices. They are conditions that shape how people experience transformation and they reflect the core principles of a human-centered approach to leadership.
Closing
Looking back I was not upset that the company was being sold. I was upset that I was blindsided. I felt excluded. And to be quite honest I felt like I did not matter. What would have changed it was feeling included before the decision became final. Feeling trusted enough to be part of the conversation. Feeling like my perspective mattered.
Leadership cannot eliminate uncertainty. But it can shape how uncertainty is experienced. Leaders create the conditions. People create the outcomes.
People rarely resist change itself.
They resist feeling invisible inside it.
If we want organizations that can successfully adapt to the future of work, we should spend less time asking how we can overcome resistance, and spend more time asking what people are experiencing during transformation.
Employees rarely remember every town hall, slide deck, or announcement. They remember whether they felt seen. Whether they felt heard. Whether they felt valued. Whether they believed they still mattered.
Perhaps the future of organizational transformation will not be determined by how quickly organizations implement new technologies. It will be determined by how intentionally leaders create the human conditions that allow people to adapt, contribute, and thrive.
References:
Bordia, P., Hunt, E., Paulsen, N., Tourish, D., & DiFonzo, N. (2004). Uncertainty during organizational change: Is it all about control? European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 13(3), 345–365. https://doi.org/10.1080/13594320444000128
Weir, K. (2026) Workers are Facing an Age of Uncertainty. American Psychological Association. 57(1). https://www.apa.org/monitor/2026/01-02/trends-work-uncertainty?utm_source=chatgpt.com