Leading through change may be the toughest assignment a PR or communications leader ever receives. Just ask my client, a senior communications executive whose organization announced a sweeping restructuring.

She did what great communicators do. She built the messaging platform, prepared the CEO, ran the town halls, and coached anxious managers through conversations they dreaded.

Here is what almost no one acknowledged: her own department was part of the restructuring. She was guiding everyone else through the change while living it herself.

That is the double burden. You carry the organization through the change, and you carry the change itself.

I have written recently about leadership burnout and about the isolation leaders feel at the top. This piece addresses something related but distinct: the hidden weight communications leaders carry when organizational change arrives, because leading it almost always falls to us.

Why Change Always Lands on Your Desk

When restructurings, mergers, leadership transitions, or layoffs arrive, someone must help the organization understand them. That someone is you.

And your audience is wearier than ever. Gartner research found the average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes in 2022, up from just two in 2016. Over the same period, employees’ willingness to support change collapsed from 74 percent to 43 percent.

McKinsey’s transformation research adds a sobering wrinkle. Across years of studies, just 26 percent of organizational transformations succeed at improving performance and sustaining the gains.

More change. Less patience. And a workforce watching how you communicate every move.

The Part Nobody Sees

Here is a question worth asking yourself: when your organization last went through major change, who guided you?

If your honest answer is “no one,” you are in good company. The CEO has the board. Employees have you. Too often, you have no one.

You are expected to project calm you may not feel, to answer questions about a future that includes your own team, and to absorb everyone’s anxiety while managing your own. That is not merely a communications challenge. That is a leadership challenge, and a deeply personal one.

Leading Through Change: Five Moves That Help

1. Name the double burden, to yourself first. You cannot manage a weight you refuse to acknowledge. Say it plainly: “I am leading this change and living it at the same time.” Naming it is not weakness. It is accuracy, and it is the first act of self-leadership.
2. Counsel up on sequencing. Leading through change means advising leadership as well as communicating to employees. If your organization plans four major changes and your people have the capacity for two, your counsel on pacing and priority may matter more than any message you draft. That is strategic advice, not complaint.
3. Communicate for commitment, not compliance. The same McKinsey research found a transformation is more than three times more likely to succeed when leaders communicate a clear change story, and that story is yours to tell. Build listening into every phase. Two-way always beats top-down.
4. Build your support bench. This is where leadership isolation becomes dangerous. Find the peers who understand your seat, the mentor who has lived through worse, or the executive coach whose only agenda is you. Leaders I coach often tell me their greatest relief was discovering they did not have to carry it alone.
5. Lead yourself first. Leading through change demands energy you cannot fake. Protect recovery time. Guard your own calendar the way you guard the CEO’s. And watch for the warning signs of burnout, because an empty vessel pours no calm into an organization.

One Final Thought

The double burden is not going away. If anything, the accelerating pace of change guarantees it will grow heavier.

But here is what I have seen in nearly two decades of coaching PR and communications leaders: those who name the burden, seek support, and lead themselves first do more than survive organizational change. They emerge from it more trusted, more influential, and stronger than before.

So ask yourself once more: who is guiding you?

If the answer is still “no one,” let’s change that. I offer a complimentary consultation. You can schedule it here.