What Technology Leaders Get Wrong About Confidence During Organizational Change
What Technology Leaders Get Wrong About Confidence During Organizational Change
Quick Bridge: If your organization is mid-transformation and you are waiting for complete information before communicating direction to your team, you are making the most common leadership mistake in organizational change. This post is about why the instinct to wait costs you the team's trust, what the actual difference is between leadership confidence and certainty, and what it looks like to move forward when you are still building the plan.
Seventy percent of organizational change initiatives fail.
Not because the strategy was wrong. Not because the plan was unworkable. The research points consistently to the communication layer: what leaders do and do not say to their teams while the change is in motion.
Organizations with excellent change management practices achieve their project objectives 88% of the time. Organizations with poor change management practices: 13% (Prosci, 2026). That is not a marginal gap. It is the difference between almost certain success and almost certain failure.
The single biggest driver of that gap is not the change itself. It is whether leaders communicate clearly about it while it is still being built.
Why Technology Leaders Go Silent During Organizational Transformation
The pull toward silence is understandable.
When transformation is underway and the details are still being resolved, leaders feel exposed. They do not have clean answers. The plan above them has not finished forming. Some decisions have not been made yet.
The instinct: wait until you have something complete to say.
That instinct is expensive.
When a leader goes quiet, the team does not wait patiently for information. They fill the gap immediately. They do not fill it with the most optimistic interpretation. They fill it with the worst version of the story they can construct from what they have observed, overheard, and pieced together.
By the time the leader has something clean to communicate, the team has already built a narrative. That narrative is usually wrong, and it is usually bad. The leader is now not informing the team. They are trying to correct a story the team has already decided to believe.
This is how change fails at the communication layer. Not because the message was wrong. Because the absence of message ceded the space to something worse.
Leadership Confidence During Change: Not the Same as Having All the Answers
There is a distinction that does not get made clearly enough: being uncertain about the details is not the same as being uncertain about the direction.
Leaders who confuse these two things end up in one of two failure modes. Some perform certainty they do not have, projecting confidence about specifics they cannot actually guarantee. Others go silent, treating uncertainty about details as a reason not to communicate anything.
Both fail for the same reason: the team cannot tell the difference between "we do not have the exact timeline yet" and "we do not actually know where we are going."
The leadership move is to separate these clearly and deliberately.
You know where you are going. You know the reason the transformation is happening. You know what success looks like at the end. You know what is staying the same.
What you do not have yet: the exact path. Some downstream decisions. A few process implications still being resolved.
Lead with what you know. Acknowledge what you do not. That sequence is not obvious to every leader, but it is the sequence that keeps the team with you.
"We are moving toward X. Here is why I believe this is right. I do not have every step mapped yet. Here is what we are doing next." That is a complete leadership communication. It does not require perfect information. It requires knowing the difference between your direction and your gaps.
Technology Manager Communication During Organizational Transformation
The data from Prosci identifies visible, ongoing communication as the factor most consistently linked to change success. Organizations with active leadership involvement achieve a 73% success rate on change initiatives. Organizations without it: 29% (Prosci).
This is not about enthusiasm or a single well-crafted announcement. It is about sustained, repeated, directional communication over the life of the change.
There is an old principle that people need to hear something seven times before they understand it. That principle forgets to add: it is seven times per person. A team of ten requires roughly seventy repetitions of the same core message before it has actually landed consistently.
What feels like overcommunicating to the leader is often the first or second time the message has genuinely reached some members of the team.
Vary how you say it. Use your team meetings, your one-on-ones, the hallway. Same direction, different words. The message must be consistent. The delivery does not have to be.
The Three Things Your Team Needs to SEE During Transformation
Communication is not just what you say. It is what you do. A leader who states direction clearly but hedges on every actual decision sends a contradictory signal. The team hears "we are going this way" and then watches the leader wait for permission before taking any step.
Three visible actions matter more than any message.
Make decisions when decisions are needed.
Waiting for certainty is how leaders end up not deciding. And not deciding is a decision. It just reads as absence. When a call has to be made, make it. You will not always have perfect information. The team needs to see that you can function without it. Make the call. Adjust when the situation requires.
Name it when you have adjusted, and say why.
Leaders who change course without naming it create confusion. The team notices the shift. If you do not name it, they interpret it as evidence that the original direction was uncertain, or that the leader is operating without a real plan.
Naming it does the opposite: "We made this call based on what we knew. We have better information now. Here is what we are adjusting." Visible adjustment is not a credibility problem. It is a credibility signal. It tells the team the leader is paying attention.
Keep showing up.
One-on-ones during transformation are not problem-solving sessions. They are the space where team members get to say what they are actually thinking. Your job in those conversations is not to have answers. It is to be present. The team does not need you to have the situation resolved. They need to know you are engaged with what they are working through.
Presence is itself a form of direction. It says: we are in this together, and I am not going anywhere.
The Alternative to Building the Plane While Flying It
The alternative to leading while the plan is still forming is not landing safely and starting over from the ground. Landing is not a neutral option. Landing means stopping the business. No revenue. The organization stops.
You are already airborne because the business took off before this transformation started. You would not be going through a change this significant if you were not already moving. The plane is in the air because you need to keep making money while you rebuild. That is the only reason you are building it while flying.
The team is already in motion. The transformation is already underway. What the team needs from you is not certainty. They need someone who can function at this altitude.
Acknowledge the gaps. Be clear about the direction. Make the next call.
You do not need all the answers to lead your team through this. You need the conviction to move with the ones you have.
Monday Action
Pick one decision you have been delaying because you are waiting for more information.
Ask yourself: do I not have enough information to make this call, or am I waiting for certainty I am unlikely to get before the cost of waiting exceeds the cost of being wrong?
If the answer is the second one, make the call today. Tell your team what you decided and why. If you need to adjust later, you will.
Leading under uncertainty is not about making perfect calls. It is about making calls.
Have you watched a leader handle transformation with real confidence under uncertainty? What did they do differently?
You're great at the work. Let's make you impossible to ignore.
If you are looking for help leading your team through organizational change, consider reaching out. https://www.jessestaffordcoaching.com
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