Leading Through Organizational Change

I was sitting in the company parking garage looking at a meeting invite that had just landed. Fifteen minutes out. Ambiguous title. The kind that doesn’t tell you anything on purpose.

The most conspicuous thing about it wasn’t who was on it. It was who wasn’t.

You know that specific flavor of dread. The one where you can’t tell if you’re grateful it’s short notice, because at least you don’t have time to spiral, or if that’s exactly the problem.

What followed was an announcement. Some kind of change, real but vague, wrapped in a lot of “interim” with none of the definition that word is supposed to earn. No end date. No org chart. Just a placeholder title and a room full of people doing math in their heads about what it meant for them.

Not long after, I sat through a corporate training on change management. It was clean. Well-built, even. It told you exactly what to do once the change lands: communicate the new structure, rally the team, move forward with clarity.

Here’s what stood out most. There was nothing about what to do before that. Nothing about the actual months I was going to spend in the space between the announcement and the answer. No name for it, no tools for it, nothing.

That space has a name. It’s called liminal space, and if you’ve ever lived in it, you already knew that without the vocabulary. It’s the corporate purgatory of “interim,” of titles in flux, of not knowing if the thing you’re bracing for has already happened or hasn’t started yet.

These are the two tools I wish I’d had in that parking garage.

The First Job: Sort What’s Actually Yours

Most people in liminal space spend their energy on the wrong things, not because they’re careless, but because nobody ever taught them to sort it. Everything feels equally urgent when you don’t know what’s coming.

This is where the C-I-A model earns its keep. It’s a streamlined descendant of Stephen Covey’s Circles of Concern and Influence, and yes, we call it C-I-A because it’s more memorable than “circles of concern.” (The acronym does more work than the original name ever did.)

Three categories, and you sort everything into one:

Control. What’s 100% yours to decide. Your words. Your tone in the room. How you show up to the next ambiguous meeting.

Influence. What you can move without owning outright. Team morale. How a stakeholder reads the situation. Whether the narrative in the hallway stays productive or curdles.

Accept. What’s simply not yours. The restructure itself. The timeline leadership hasn’t committed to. Someone else’s decision to leave, stay, or say nothing.

In my case: I couldn’t control the interim label or when it would resolve. I could influence how my team read the ambiguity, whether they spiraled or steadied. I could control exactly one thing without question: how I chose to lead through months with no finish line in sight.

Sorting that early would have saved me weeks of energy spent on the “Accept” pile, wondering, guessing, running scenarios that were never mine to run.

The Second Job: Manage What’s Happening Inside You

C-I-A sorts the external reality. It doesn’t touch what’s happening in your head at eleven at night when you’re replaying the fifteen-minute-notice meeting for the fortieth time.

That’s a different job, and it’s the one the corporate training skipped completely.

The STEAR model (Situation, Thought, Emotion, Action, Result) is a simple way to trace how you get from a fact to a consequence, and where you actually have a say in the outcome.

Situation. Just the facts, no story attached. An ambiguously titled meeting invite arrived fifteen minutes before it started.

Thought. What you make that mean. “This is bad. I’m being cut out of something.” Or: “This is above my pay grade to worry about.”

Emotion. Whatever the thought produces. Dread. Anxiety. That specific hollow feeling of being unmoored with no timeline.

Action. What you do because of the emotion. Withdraw. Overprepare for a threat you can’t name. Stop showing up fully in the meetings you do have access to.

Result. What that action creates. If you pull back, you often get the exact thing you were afraid of: less visibility, less trust, less influence, right when you need all three most.

Run it again with a different thought at the second step, and the whole chain changes.

Situation: Same invite, same fifteen minutes, same conspicuous absence.
Thought: “I don’t have the full picture yet, and I don’t need it to lead well right now.”
Emotion: Steadier. Still uneasy, but not frozen.
Action: Show up fully anyway. Ask good questions. Keep leading the parts that are actually still yours.
Result: You stay visible during the exact window when most people go quiet. That’s usually when it counts most.

The situation didn’t change. The thought did, and that changed everything downstream of it.

Two Jobs, Not One

Most change management content treats “handling change” as a single skill. It isn’t. There’s the strategic work of knowing where your energy actually belongs, and there’s the internal work of managing the story you’re telling yourself while you wait. Skip the first and you burn out chasing things you never controlled. Skip the second and you can sort your circles perfectly and still fall apart at eleven p.m.

The training I sat through addressed neither, because it assumed the change had already landed and the ambiguity was already resolved. It never accounted for the months in between, the part where nothing is decided and everyone is quietly recalculating their worth in the org chart.

If you’re in that stretch right now, some version of “interim” hanging over your team with no end date attached: start with C-I-A. Sort what’s actually yours before you spend one more hour on what isn’t. Then use STEAR on whatever’s keeping you up at night. Not to talk yourself out of the discomfort. Just to make sure the story you’re telling yourself is one that gets you somewhere, instead of one that costs you the visibility you’ll need when the ambiguity finally lifts.

It always lifts eventually. The only real question is who you were in the room while you waited.