Photo by 二牛 万.
Long ago, in the very early days of RSG, we used to meet with every single boss ahead of a private program. In person. Individually. We’d go to a company’s offices, camp out in a conference room and talk to every manager. You can learn a lot about a company’s culture by talking to the bosses.
At the end of an intake day, we’d head to the kitchen to drop off coffee mugs or water glasses. And then the CEO would walk in. Uncanny. CEOs can’t help themselves. You just met with all their bosses. They saw you holed up in that little room. Of course they’re curious to hear how it went.
Hot reads and cold reads
Cut to 2018. We were in the kitchen of an AI startup. Putting a day of glassware into the dishwasher. When we heard footsteps. The CEO. Right on time.
“Hey, um, how’d it go today?”
“It was good,” we assured him. “Your people were lovely and patient and gracious with their time. And we’re excited to work with them in a few weeks.”
“OK, that’s good. That’s good. It’s just…well, it’s just that what we’re doing here is at the far end of what’s ever been done. The technology we’re building doesn’t exist yet. Every day, our people need to work in enormous ambiguity. Can you help them with that? The ambiguity, I mean.”
“Look,” we said. “We work with a lot of startup leaders who are building the plane while flying the plane. And people can do it. It’s hard but there’s a ton that managers can do to help teams innovate along the way. But while they’re doing that, while they are out there on the edge of what’s possible, stop fucking with the seating chart.”
The color drained from his face. “Who told you about the desks?”
We explained that no one had mentioned anything about desks. It was a metaphor for how humans need stability. That they can tolerate high ambiguity and high change, but they need a lattice. Something steady. Like keeping the snacks in the kitchen consistent if there’s a bunch of uncertainty in other areas of their work.
“Wait, what happened with the desks though?” one of us asked.
He explained that during a major crunch for a big client, they decided it would be better if two of the teams that were collaborating sat closer together. So the senior leadership team had HR reassign desks and the team completely and thoroughly lost their shit. The execs felt like the engineers were being babies. So they pushed forward with the change. They’re just desks. And, anyway, they reasoned, it made more sense for the teams who were working closely together to sit together. That’s not so abnormal. And it’s not such a big change to move to the other side of the office.
Changes afoot
We’re talking to bosses that in the midst of change or anticipating change or managing change with a change-fatigued team. Bosses who feel like it must just be their org or their industry or their team.
Against this backdrop of non-stop change, the folks at Gallup just released their State of the Global Workplace report for 2025. It is a 141-page PDF with the lofty tagline of Understanding Employees, Informing Leaders. If you don’t have time to sort though it, the breathless Gallup finding is that employee engagement scores are down but not for individual contributors. The profound engagement drop-off is with the managers. And not only are the managers less engaged, they also report drops in manager well-being.
Uh oh.
When people are being uncharitable, they often talk about promotions into management as “10k of pay for 20k of headache.” That, yes, you get more money. But you also have to deal with a lot more bullshit. That 20k of headache is all over the Gallup report.
The people tasked with communicating and smoothing and managing change are tired. Tired of turnover and hiring booms and hiring busts. Supply chain disruptions, anticipated AI overhauls. Remote work, flex work, shrinking budgets, shrinking teams. And re-orgs that just won’t quit. And if you’re wondering if it’s just your industry or region, remember, this is a global workplace report. Managers all over the world would like you to please stop fucking with their desks so they can get anything the fuck done. If one more exec pastes one more link about workplace dips in productivity, the managers are going lose it.
And faced with a crispy-fried management layer, a lot of senior leaders have started worrying about their team’s capacity to absorb change.
No, you can’t opt out
Oh we get that you might want to. We’ve definitely met bosses who try. “I’m not saying it’s the wrong change, it’s actually change that needs to happen. But I don’t think my people can take it. They’re burnt out on the whole concept of change, and need things to stay still for a while.” And honestly? Relatable.
But it doesn’t work that way. Like, by all means be intentional and considerate about how it’s rolled out, be compassionate with the people most impacted. But if it’s a change the org needs to make, and you do those things, and you still can’t make it happen, you’re cooked. Every organization needs the ability to change in response to new opportunities and threats. And that’s an ongoing operational need, no matter what the last five weeks have been, or the last five years. No one looks at the ruins of their failed organization and says, “Well, at least we didn’t change too much.”
That doesn’t mean that all change is equal, though, and it certainly doesn’t mean that all change is righteous. Over the long term, capacity for change is a renewable resource in organizations, but in the short term it’s possible for bad choices to stress the reserves. So if you know that you’re entering a market, or a fiscal quarter, or a…years-long historical period that’s likely to demand a lot of capacity for change, the first thing to do is to stop squandering it.
Your new open enrolment process for benefits might make sense in isolation but is that where you want to be spending capacity right now? Your homegrown app for booking hotelling desks and phone rooms still has a few bugs, are you sure about that Q2 rollout plan? Your re-org. Your new comp structure for the sales org. That RTO_v4_final_REVISED_2025.v2.pdf file on your desktop. The new seating chart.
Any of these might be the change that absolutely needs to happen, in which case don’t let us push you off of it. But a leader worried about their team’s capacity for change should start here. If you need your team to be able to make big important changes in the next little while, then now is not the time to deplete their reserves on the unimportant bits. Does that create some operational debt down the road? Maybe so. Management is a tricky gig.
Build deeper reserves
If the first step is to stop draining the reserves, step two is to build those reserves up. Most people’s appetite for change, whether it’s exciting and new or just existentially necessary, moves in lockstep with their overall sense of workload capacity. And so it turns out that One Weird Trick to building capacity for change is that it’s actually just…building capacity.
Professions with a long history of studying burst capacity, like hospital nurses for instance, consistently come back to the finding that 80% utilization is an important threshold. When nursing ratios are set up for 80% patient care, nurses can absorb surprises, cover off for each other, keep their own skills current, and do good work. Absenteeism drops, patient outcomes improve. We’ve known this for a long time. The findings are similar for nuclear plants. Air traffic control staffing isn’t calibrated against a typical day, but against a 90th-percentile busiest day. There’s…y’know. There’s a pattern here. And if your team can’t handle more change, we’ll bet you a dollar that they’re running hotter than that.
If you’re not in a place where you can staff up, though, the other way is to reduce load. We know. You hate this idea. Like, you’d love to. But this is impossible. In fact you’re already being asked to do more with less and if you put up your hand and ask to do less with less, you’ll be the next one out of a job. And then your colleagues would have to do even more with even less and they’re already working too much and like, have you seen the state of the world out there?
We know. And we’re not pretending it’s easy, or straightforward. We’re just telling you it’s math. In grade school you probably learned that 1+2=3. And work will teach you, over and over and over again, that when you ask too few people to do too much work, the result is lower productivity, higher burnout, and an utter collapse of adaptability.
That CEO years ago needed a team that could handle a lot of change and ambiguity, and so do you. Not a single leader we’ve talked to this year has described the state of their business as steady, or boring, or predictable. Not one. And Gallup seems to agree. So yes, look for opportunities to increase capacity. Look for work you can put down to build up some reserves. But while you’re doing all that, please stop messing with the seating chart.
— Melissa & Johnathan
