I have been thinking a lot lately about change.
Not in the formal, strategic-plan, project-charter, implementation-timeline kind of way. Although, of course, those things matter. They just don’t seem to even get their time to shine, as change seems to happen to us so quickly now that we aren’t even getting the chance to run to the dusty strategic plan on the shelf and see what it says about the path, we said we were planning towards.
You go to work. You say your goodbyes to your workmates at whatever time you can get away. You go home, make dinner, maybe drive someone to practice, maybe answer a few emails, maybe actually put your phone down for the night.
Then you come back the next morning, grab your coffee, open your laptop, and find out that the person you said goodbye to yesterday no longer has a job.
Or the department you led yesterday no longer exists today.
Or your star employee is leaving for your biggest competitor.
Or a new AI tool gets introduced, and suddenly people are asking which parts of the work still belong to humans, which parts can be automated, and what that means for the people who built their careers around doing that work well.
This is the world of work we are in now.
It is fast. It is emotional. It is not always planned. And it is not always kind enough to wait until we are ready.
For a long time, we have talked about change management as though change has a beginning, middle, and end. Something is the way it is. We unfreeze it. We change it. We refreeze it.
I understand that model. There is still value in having a process.
But I do not think that is enough anymore.
The future of work is not asking us to manage one change at a time. It is asking us to build the capacity to keep adapting while the next change is already coming around the corner. Or it on top of the change we just experienced the day before.
That is why I have started thinking about this as adaptability management.
Adaptability management is not about eliminating change management. It is about recognizing that the pace, volume, and emotional weight of change have shifted.
Gartner’s research has shown that only about one in three leaders say their last change initiative achieved healthy adoption by employees. That should make us pause.
Because that tells me this is not just about better communication plans. Not about more town halls. No performative communication. It’s not a slide deck about why, with guesses as to what this could mean for people – their jobs, their life’s work, their passions.
It is about whether people have the capacity, confidence, trust, and reflexes to move through change without becoming completely depleted by it.
Gartner has also started using the language of “change reflexes,” which I find really interesting. Their research suggests that when employees apply the right change reflex to the situation they are in, they are much more likely to adopt change in a healthy way, and their well-being is stronger too.
This is important. The work is not simply to convince people to change. The work is to help people build the reflexes, confidence and ability to actually adapt.
I think this is where we need to have a much deeper conversation about leadership.
In the environmental scans we have conducted, employers talk about adaptability. They want adaptable students. Adaptable employees. Adaptable leaders. Adaptable teams.
But I am not convinced we have spent nearly enough time teaching people how to be adaptable.
We hoped people learned it during COVID. We watched everyone figure it out in real time. Kitchen tables became offices. Bedrooms became classrooms. Parents became teachers. Leaders became crisis communicators. Everyone just kept adjusting because there was no other choice. And we said “We will be more resilient. This will teach resilience.”
Did it?
Did we ever really stop and ask what that taught us?
Who adapted well? Who struggled? What helped? What broke? What did leaders learn about themselves? What did teams learn about each other? What did people need that they did not have?
Just saying it, doesn’t make it true. Telling people to be resilient and then leaving them alone to carry the weight of whatever comes next is not a strategy. It’s a hope.
For me, adaptability starts with grounded confidence.
How do we instill confidence?
The kind of confidence that comes from knowing who you are. Knowing what you are good at. Knowing how you respond under pressure. Knowing where you bring value. Knowing what gives you energy and what drains you.
This is where adaptability management connects so deeply to strengths-based leadership.
When people understand their strengths, they have language for who they are at their best. They can see patterns in how they think, work, relate, decide, lead, and respond. They can understand why certain things energize them and why certain things exhaust them.
When leaders understand their own strengths, they lead with greater certainty about where they will soar and where they will need to lean on others.
When they understand their team’s strengths, they stop seeing people only through job descriptions and start seeing the actual capacity in the room. The tools they have to respond to the required adaptation.
If your organization had to shift tomorrow, you would need to know who you have around you.
If half your team were gone tomorrow, you would need to understand the strengths of the people who remain in order to continue on.
If AI changed part of your service model, you would need to know who can think strategically, who can communicate the shift, who can build trust, who can create a process, who can ask the hard questions, who can make sense of the data, and who can help people feel steady enough to move forward.
This is not fluff; it is just a one-day seminar brought in from a consultant (yes, I get it, I’m that consultant). This is strategic team building. Organizations that understand this will flourish. Ones that don’t will pull the crab that has reached the heights of the bucket back down to the bottom for the sake of not being “outperformed” in chaos.
And it is absolutely part of the future of work.
Gallup’s research continues to show us that engagement matters. Their recent global workplace research shows employee engagement has dropped, and the cost of disengagement is massive. Their strengths research also shows that when organizations invest in strengths-based development, engagement, performance, and retention can improve. Resilience improves.
That is the connection I think leaders need to pay attention to.
If we want engaged people, we need leaders who know how to coach, communicate, develop, and build trust.
And if we want people to adapt in a world that keeps changing, we need to help them understand who they are inside the change.
People do not adapt well when they feel invisible. If we want adaptable organizations, we need seen people. They need to know that they matter. That the skills, abilities, approaches and intelligence that they bring make a difference. They do not adapt well when they feel like a number on a spreadsheet.
They do not adapt well when they are constantly being asked to absorb more without understanding where they fit, what they bring, why they are doing this or how they are supposed to contribute next.
Their uniqueness is what can make them stand strong in the winds of change.
So how do we lead through this constant disruption? How do we build teams that pay attention to what is coming, not just recover from what already happened?
How do we help leaders become more grounded, more self-aware, and more capable of leading people through constant adaptation?
That is the conversation I want to open through the next disruptors series.
This is the reality of the current workforce. The future of work and your team’s performance will depend on your ability to adapt. Through the speed of disruption. The unknowns, the next political shift, worldwide pandemic, power outage, generative artificial intelligence or who even knows what next!
It is about what happens when the workplace keeps changing, and people are still expected to show up, contribute, care, perform, and somehow keep adapting.
That is why I am calling it adaptability management. The practice of helping leaders and teams know who they are, understand what is changing around them, and build the capacity to keep moving with purpose.
The future of work is not waiting for us to be ready.
The question is not whether more change is coming. It is whether we are building the kind of leaders, teams, and organizations that know how to adapt as it does.
Interested in the conversation?
Join us on Tuesday, June 23, 2026 from 12:00-1:00pm.
