By Mickie Murrell, MBA — Chief HR Strategist, Ask Mickie, LLC
It never looks like a crisis when it starts. A founder steps back. A company doubles in size over eighteen months. Ownership transfers to the next generation. A restructure gets announced with a clean org chart and a confident all-hands meeting. On paper, everything is moving forward. In the hallways, or on Slack, or in the parking lot after shift, something else is happening entirely. People are watching. They're reading between the lines of every announcement, every personnel change, every conversation their manager avoids. And they're making decisions about their future based not on what leadership says is happening, but on what they experience happening. This is where organizations lose people they can't afford to lose. Not because the transition was wrong, but because no one was managing what the transition felt like from the inside.
The Problem Nobody Puts on the Agenda
Every leadership team plans for the operational side of change. New reporting structures. Updated job descriptions. Revised budgets. Those are the tangible pieces, and they get the attention they deserve. What rarely makes the agenda is the human infrastructure underneath all of it. How will managers — many of whom are processing their own uncertainty — communicate changes they don't fully understand yet? What happens when policies written for a 40-person company are suddenly supposed to govern 120? Who's making sure that the compliance requirements in your new state, your new structure, or your new ownership model are actually being met? And the question that matters most: who is paying attention to the gap between what leadership intends and what employees actually experience? That gap is where turnover starts. Where engagement quietly drops. Where your best people begin having conversations with recruiters — not because they're unhappy with the company, but because they've lost confidence in the direction.
Why Good Leaders Struggle Most During Transitions
Here's the paradox. The leaders who care deeply about their people are often the ones most at risk during organizational change. Because they want to reassure. They want to project confidence. They want to shield their teams from uncertainty. And every one of those instincts, applied without structure, can backfire. Reassurance without transparency breeds skepticism. Confidence without clarity feels performative. Shielding people from hard truths doesn't protect them — it isolates them from the information they need to stay committed. I've seen it in manufacturing plants and corporate offices alike. A well-intentioned leader says, "Nothing is going to change for you." Three months later, everything has changed, and the team's trust is gone — not because of the change itself, but because of the gap between what they were told and what they lived. The issue isn't that these leaders lack ability. It's that leading through change requires a different skill set than leading during stability. And when you're in the middle of it — managing your own role, your own uncertainty, your own relationship with the people above and below you — objectivity is the first thing to go.
What Transitions Actually Put at Risk
The visible risks of organizational change are well understood: project delays, budget overruns, temporary dips in productivity. Most businesses plan for those. The risks that reshape a company are the ones nobody tracks on a dashboard.
Cultural fractures. When different managers interpret the same change differently, employees in one department experience a completely different organization than employees in another. Over time, you don't have one culture — you have several, and they're pulling in different directions.
Compliance gaps. Growth into new states, new structures, or new ownership models triggers employment law requirements that didn't exist before. Multi-state compliance, FMLA obligations, ADA accommodations, OSHA standards, wage and hour regulations — the list expands with every change, and the penalties for getting it wrong don't wait for you to catch up.
Leadership credibility erosion. Every inconsistency during a transition — a policy that contradicts a promise, a role that doesn't match the job description, a decision that seems arbitrary — chips away at the trust that took years to build. And trust, once lost in a transition, is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild.
Quiet attrition. The employees who leave during transitions rarely make noise about it. They don't file complaints or stage walkouts. They update their resumes, take a call from a recruiter, and give two weeks' notice that catches everyone off guard. By the time you see the turnover data, the damage is months old.
The Strategic Value of Distance
There's a reason the best-managed transitions — the ones where the organization comes out stronger, not just intact — almost always involve someone from outside the day-to-day. It's not about capability. It's about perspective. When you're inside a transition, you're operating with incomplete information, competing priorities, and personal stakes. You know your people, which is an enormous strength in normal operations — and a blind spot during change. You may underestimate the impact on a team because you trust their manager. You may overestimate buy-in because the people around you are nodding in meetings. An experienced HR strategist brings something leadership teams can't manufacture internally: the ability to see the organization as it actually is during the transition, not as everyone hopes it is. That means identifying where communication is breaking down before it becomes a grievance. Auditing policies against the new reality before a compliance issue surfaces. Coaching leaders through conversations they've never had to have before. Creating alignment not through corporate messaging, but through the kind of structured, honest dialogue that makes people feel included in the process rather than subjected to it.
Change Doesn't Break Organizations. Unmanaged Change Does.
Some of the strongest cultures I've ever worked with were forged during transitions. Not because the change was easy, but because leadership had the support to handle it with intention. When employees see that their concerns are heard, that decisions are being made with structure and fairness, that the organization is investing in getting the transition right rather than just getting through it — they don't just stay. They engage more deeply. They become advocates for the new direction rather than skeptics of it. That's not a guaranteed outcome of change. It's the outcome of well-managed change. And the difference between the two is whether someone with the experience, objectivity, and strategic perspective to guide the process is in the room when it matters.
The Question Worth Sitting With
If your organization is in the middle of a transition — or approaching one — the question isn't whether your leadership team can handle it. Of course they can. They've handled hard things before. The better question is: "should they be handling it alone?" Not because they need to be rescued. But because bringing in experienced, impartial HR leadership during a transition isn't an admission of weakness. It's the same strategic thinking that leads you to bring in an accountant for an audit or an attorney for a contract negotiation. You're not paying for someone to do what you can't. You're investing in the distance, the expertise, and the structure that produces a better outcome for everyone — leadership included. The organizations that come out of transitions stronger are the ones that recognized, early, that change management isn't just an operational exercise. It's a people exercise. And people deserve the same level of strategic investment as every other part of the business.
Mickie Murrell is the founder of [Ask Mickie, LLC](https://askmickie.info) and a fractional HR strategist specializing in organizational transitions, change management, and strategic HR leadership for growing and evolving businesses. With 20+ years of Fortune 500 and operations experience — including M&A integrations, ESOP transitions, and multi-state scaling — she helps leadership teams navigate change with clarity, compliance, and confidence.
If your organization is facing a transition and could benefit from experienced HR guidance, reach out directly: (937) 397-3428 | mickie@askmickie.info.