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Weekly Dose of Work Recovery Vol. 7.22.26

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but the decision that something else is more important." — Ambrose Redmoon

 This week's essay is a behind-the-scenes look at what leading real transformation actually requires. If you're navigating a major shift at work right now, whether it was chosen or handed to you, this one is for you. What it takes to move an organization, a team, or yourself through big change is harder and more human than most conversations about it let on…

The Capacity Question Nobody Asks

I've been facilitating some of the most intense conversations of my career lately - and the conversation is industry agnostic. I've led versions of the same courageous conversation with elected government officials, retail leaders, and service and tech executives. 

It's not the kind of discussions that end with clean slides and a clear path forward. They're the kind that sit in my body for days. Where I travel home in silence because I spent everything I had, and I'm still uncertain my best was enough.

I'm not sharing this to impress you with my effort. Building the future of work is intense AF, and too many people in this space are quietly nodding along to a version of transformation that looks tidier than it actually is.

What's happening in these rooms is pointing to a pattern that plays out everywhere.

Ambitious people and organizations tend to share a version of the same story. They have a compelling vision, good intentions, and strong momentum. They're ready to move, so they do. They launch the initiative, roll out the strategy, bring in the right people.

But they skip the harder question: Are we actually ready for this?

When transformation gets uncomfortable, the default response is to push through. Double down on the vision, increase urgency, and find a way to optimize past or ignore the inherent friction with the change. 

We've learned to treat discomfort as a problem to be solved by accelerating. The messy, emotional reality surfacing in the room gets treated as a distraction from the real work.

Here's what actually happens when you skip it.

Big projects die on the vine. The vision gets quietly replaced by a shinier one. Talented people decide they're done and start mentally checking out. And months later, everyone is trying to reverse-engineer what went wrong and why the big change stalled out completely.

What went wrong is almost always this: nobody stopped to ask whether the people being asked to carry the transformation were resourced for it. Whether they were operating in survival mode, trying to execute on a vision they hadn't fully processed.

Change Management Drives Better Outcomes

Brené Brown's research has been pointing at this for years. 

We cannot undertake significant change without first evaluating folks' actual capacity for it. This is foundational change management, and it's the step that gets cut when the calendar is full and the pressure is on.

Here's what I know after years of doing this work: tough conversations are the actual work of transformation. 

They sit at the center of business growth. They're where real change moves through the people who have to carry it.

What makes those spaces rare and necessary is that they allow something most strategy decks never create room for: people saying the things they've been quietly carrying and never quite saying out loud. The fears they've been managing. The honest read on their own capacity that nobody has asked them to give.

That costs something. It should. Anything worth building usually does.

Candid sharing in 1:1s, strategy sessions, or executive retreats are the mechanism by which you actually know where people are. Without it, you're making decisions based on performed signals rather than real capacity.

Before action on the next significant initiative, set aside time to pause long enough to surface the capacity question and be willing to sit with the actual answers:

• Are we actually resourced for this level of change right now?

• What's sitting underneath the surface that needs room before we can move forward?

• What would it take for the people carrying this work to feel available for it?

You don't need the “right” answers. You need the real ones.

If you're in a messy, intense season right now, that's not a sign something has gone wrong. Discomfort that's real is often the clearest indicator that something important is actually happening.

Hard conversations are the mechanism through which the future of work gets built. I've watched it happen, again and again.

Sincerely,

Bree

P.S. If this essay landed close to home, you might be ready to stop pushing through and start asking better questions about your own space for big changes. The good news is it's possible to expand your capacity. Book a call and let's talk about what that looks like for you.

P.P.S. If this resonated, I go deeper on the reset and recovery before we rise idea in my TEDxDuluth talk. Watch it here → Recovering from Work: The Leadership Revolution We've Been Missing

This week's did you know…the Trust Recession is growing…

According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in businesses, government, and media is declining across the board, with only 17% of Americans trusting entities to do what's right most of the time. 

It's being called a "trust recession" — and research shows just 38% of customers will forgive a company for a mistake, even when the company tries to make it right. Most leadership and customer experience problems are trust problems in disguise, and that the path forward starts with getting the basics right: accuracy and ease before personalization and AI.

Source: The 'Trust Recession': Why Trust In Customer Experience Is Failing, Forbes

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