It’s a pattern many leaders have seen before. Plans are in place, the new system is ready, the rollout timeline is locked, the announcement gets made. And then, slowly, nothing quite takes hold the way it was supposed to.

It’s tempting to call this a strategy problem, but the culprit is almost always something far more human, says Dr. Bailey Parnell, an internationally renowned leadership expert.

“The hardest part of any organizational change is the people. Full stop,” she says.

Bailey is the founder and CEO of SkillsCamp, a soft skills and leadership development company. With a Doctorate in Education in Learning and Organizational Change, Bailey has spent more than a decade designing leadership programs for organizations including Microsoft, GE Aerospace, and the Government of Canada. She has also partnered with the United Nations, the NFL, and governments worldwide.

Bailey’s diagnosis of why change fails starts with an important distinction many miss.

Change Is the Event. Transition Is the Work.

Most organizations focus so heavily on executing the change itself that they forget the goal isn’t to make the change happen. It’s to achieve a full and complete transition, Bailey says.

In her keynote, “Thriving Through Change”, Bailey references psychologist Nancy Schlossberg’s Transition Theory that states change is the event, while transition is the psychological process people go through to adapt to it.

Organizations often get the change part right but completely skip the transition, meaning they haven’t factored in the emotional state people need to be in to receive change well. That depends on how change is communicated and how supported people feel throughout the process, Bailey says.

“I say ‘feel’ because perception is reality here. You can have all the support structures in the world, and if people don’t feel supported, it won’t work,” she continues.

The consequence of skipping transition isn’t just that people feel unsupported in the moment — it’s that the change never actually lands. New software gets used grudgingly or worked around. Restructured teams revert to old dynamics. The “change” technically happened, but the outcome never materialized.

The Window Leaders Don’t Know They’re Closing

To achieve a successful transition, the change process has to start a lot earlier. “The groundwork, such as seeding communications, building psychological safety, or helping people understand the ‘why’ should start long before the ‘what’ arrives,” Bailey says.

Humans are not biologically built to love change. Without sufficient warning, we jump to worst-case scenarios. That’s how our brains work. So, if leaders skip that crucial step of laying the groundwork, they lose the window to shape how their people receive the change.

“What you get instead is rumour, resistance, and a culture of ‘us versus them’ that can take years to repair,” Bailey says.

What is True Change Leadership?

For far too long, the onus of change has been on the individual, Bailey says, and not enough on leadership. That ratio needs to be flipped.

Skilled change leaders understand that change is relational. They know their people and understand the type of communication and support they’ll need before, during, and after the transition, which is far more than a couple workshops.

“They’ll role model mindset, receptivity, and adoption,” Bailey says, “and create psychological safety for getting it wrong.” They turn their team into a support system for each other and recognize that their own leadership development is part of the equation.

“Leaders who are growing themselves will naturally pass that on to the people they lead,” Bailey adds.

The M.O.R.E. Framework: A Playbook for Change-Friendly Teams

Bailey’s approach to building change-ready organizations centres on M.O.R.E.: Mindset, Optimism, Resilience, and Each Other.

Mindset

A growth mindset is foundational. It reframes uncertainty from something threatening into something navigable. Without it, the other three elements have no stable ground to build on.

Optimism

Optimism shapes how you interpret what’s happening and whether you feel like you have agency in the outcome. Bailey says this element is often the most misunderstood, but there is a distinct difference between optimism and relentless positivity.

“Effective change communication requires holding multiple truths at once,” she explains. “You have to name the benefits of the change, yes, but also the concerns you’ll actively address, what people are legitimately losing, and what was working before and isn’t changing.”

Leaders who skip those harder conversations lose credibility fast, because people feel unseen. The good news, Bailey adds, is you can engage all of it optimistically, with honesty and with hope. That’s skilled leadership.

Resilience

Resilience is both the capacity to endure difficulty and a practical set of skills for thriving in the face of it. It’s a set of learnable behaviours, Bailey says.

“The most adaptable people I know are deeply grounded in their own presence and tied to outcomes rather than outputs,” she says. “When you’re anchored in your purpose and clear on what you’re trying to achieve, you can flex how you get there without feeling like the ground is shifting beneath you.”

Each Other

Each Other is the most underestimated of the four, Bailey says. Humans are relational beings, and the social dynamics of a team change everything.

Research has identified three types of people that can corrode a team’s collaborative efforts: the “slacker” who withholds effort, the “downer” who is persistently cynical, and the “bully” who attacks ideas without offering solutions.

Any one of these can drag a whole team down. But the reverse is equally true. “When we genuinely try to understand what a change means for the person beside us, we stop dismissing their reaction and start actually supporting them,” Bailey says. That shift, from tolerance to genuine care, is what fosters team resilience and collaboration.

How to Start Building a Change-Friendly Mindset

To start building a change-friendly organization, Bailey recommends a simple exercise. The next time something at work doesn’t go as planned, pause and examine how you’re narrating it to yourself.

“Are you treating it as permanent, pervasive, and personal? Or as temporary, specific, and actionable?” she asks.

And when something goes well, do the reverse — own it, identify what you did that contributed to it, and find ways to make it repeatable. The internal narrative we carry about setbacks and successes quietly shapes how we experience change.

“How a leader shows up is role modeled and absorbed by everyone around them. It’s one of the most strategically effective tools available,” Bailey says.

Change is Always on the Agenda

For modern business, change is no longer a discrete event, but the entire agenda — a catch-all term for what humans have always done: adapt, evolve, and dance together with the only real constant there is.

“My goal has never been to help organizations simply survive that dance,” Bailey says. “It’s to help them thrive in it.”

When change is managed well, engagement goes up, innovation goes up, and trust between people and their organizations deepens. Teams develop muscle memory for navigating difficulty together, and people feel genuinely supported. That’s what happens when leaders stop managing change and start leading transition.

Bring Dr. Bailey Parnell to Your Organization

Most organizations know change is coming — the question is whether their people are ready for it. Dr. Bailey Parnell’s keynote, Thriving Through Change, gives leaders a science-backed playbook of practical strategies to build change-ready teams and come out the other side with higher trust, stronger culture, and people who are genuinely thriving.

Contact us to learn more and how to book Bailey to speak at your next event.