The Silent Killer of Every Reorg, and How Leaders Beat It

The best leaders Shawn Maurice has worked with shared one rare skill: not having all the answers.

"They knew how to move a team through change without breaking it," the former Executive Director of HR at Dell and CHRO of Boomi writes in a widely shared LinkedIn post. "Calm is contagious. So is panic."

She argues a team mirrors its leader's state, so steady leaders treat their composure as a tool, not a temperament. The data backs her up.

Only 32% of leaders tell Gartner their last change landed well, and those who get it right grow revenue twice as fast.

The problem is stress, not strategy

Most change is run like a project, with timelines, town halls and talking points. Yet 79% of employees say they have low trust in their organisation's ability to change, and roughly three in four HR leaders say their managers are not equipped to lead it.

Worse, only 41% of managers say they will change their own behaviour to support a shift, so the people meant to carry change often stall it. 

Steady leadership under pressure, she suggests, comes down to five habits:

• Regulate yourself first, because a team mirrors its leader's state
• Make it safe to speak up, so energy goes to the problem rather than to self-protection
• Tell the truth about what you know and what you do not
• Push decisions down, because autonomy under pressure builds ownership
• Anchor every change in a reason worth caring about.

The science is on her side

Emotional contagion is well documented, and teams really do catch a leader's mood.

Psychological safety, the felt sense that speaking up is safe, has moved from a cultural nicety to what analysts now call the leadership skill of 2026, as chronic stress reaches roughly half the global workforce.

Naming uncertainty out loud lowers the brain's threat response, and autonomy buffers pressure rather than adding to it.

Meaning matters as much, because people will absorb loss when they can see the point of it.

She brings a fresh credential to the argument. A VP of HR and Talent Development with more than 20 years across hypergrowth and M&A, Shawn has just earned a Lifestyle Medicine and Wellness Coaching Certification from Harvard Medical School. Her conviction is blunt.

"Performance that burns people out isn't performance," she writes. "It's borrowed time."

From managing change to leading it

For the C-suite, that reframe is the point. Recovery, sleep, movement and mindset are not perks bolted onto the edges of work but, in Shawn's words, "the operating system underneath it".

Treat resilience as a performance system and change stops being imposed on a workforce and becomes something it can absorb.

People do not resist change itself, she notes, they resist "change that feels like loss with no meaning attached." That is the line between managing change and leading through it. Teams on the right side do not just survive turbulence. They come out stronger and, by Gartner's maths, grow faster too.