I once coached a leader, Miranda, who sat at the center of a major merger. She had been in the room for months, working through the details with senior leaders. By the time she could tell her team, the deal wasn't news to her. It was the new normal, and she had already made peace with it.
Her team was hearing it for the first time.
That gap is one of the most overlooked challenges in leading change. You've had months to process. They have had minutes. The distance between those two timelines can quietly undermine trust if you don't see it.
The trap of being ahead
When you're early to a change, you adjust. You work through the questions, the unknowns and the what-ifs, and eventually you reach a calm that feels like clarity. Then you walk in to share the news, and that calm can come across as dismissal.
She felt the pull to say, "It's all going to be fine." It's the natural thing to say. But her team wasn't asking for reassurance. They were asking what this meant for them: their roles, their futures, their relationships with the people they worked alongside every day. "It will be fine" answered none of that. To people with real questions, it sounded like she wasn't listening.
The constraint of what you can't say
She faced a second challenge. As a leader in the deal, she was bound by confidentiality, and she could only share so much. She couldn't offer every answer, and she couldn't make promises she wasn't sure of.
Many leaders think the choice is between saying everything and saying nothing. It isn't. You can be honest about what you don't know and clear about what you can't share yet. You can also be fully present with the emotions in front of you. Empathy doesn't require full information. It requires showing up.
What we worked on
In our coaching, we focused on a few shifts:
Step back into their starting line. Before the conversation, she reminded herself where her team was: day one of the news, not month six.
Name the feelings before the facts. Acknowledging uncertainty, anxiety or even frustration told her team their reactions were valid.
Be honest about the limits. Saying "I can't share everything yet, and I know that's hard" built more trust than a polished, vague reassurance.
Commit to what she could control. She promised regular check-ins and to share updates the moment she was able. Small, reliable commitments gave people something solid to hold.
Listen more than she talked. Her team needed room to ask, react and process.
The takeaway
Your timeline is not your team's timeline. The more closely aligned you are with the people you lead, the more important it is to remember that they are starting from a different place than you are.
Empathy in times of change isn't about having the answers. It's about meeting people where they are, not where you've already arrived. When you do, you give them something better than false comfort: the confidence that you're with them while the answers unfold.
A question to sit with: The next time you're ahead of your team on a change, what will you do to step back to where they're standing?
If you are leading a team through change, you may also like Managing Change as a Leader: Why Honesty Beats Calm. And if you are ahead of your team on a change right now, book a session with me and we'll work through it together.
