Change Management is about Trust through Communication

In this episode of Apex Performance, Dr. Anthony Simmons explores one of the greatest challenges facing leaders today: navigating change while maintaining trust, alignment, and organizational performance. Drawing from his experience as a Navy leader, executive coach, and scholar practitioner, Dr. Simmons shares practical strategies for managing both planned organizational change and unexpected adversity.

The conversation dives into change management, leadership communication, organizational culture, emotional intelligence, resilience, crisis response, team performance, and strategic leadership. Dr. Simmons explains why most change initiatives fail, not because of the change itself, but because leaders fail to clearly communicate the vision, purpose, impact, and path forward. He introduces powerful frameworks for creating alignment, building trust, and helping teams navigate uncertainty with confidence.

Listeners will also learn why emotional stamina, resilience, discipline, and authentic leadership are essential during periods of disruption. Through real-world examples from business, higher education, and military leadership, Dr. Simmons demonstrates how leaders can transform adversity into opportunity while strengthening team engagement, accountability, and performance.

If you're a leader, executive, manager, entrepreneur, or professional navigating change in today's fast-moving world, this episode offers actionable insights for leading through uncertainty, building resilient teams, and creating sustainable success during times of transformation.

Transcript

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Do you ever feel like you're doing all the right things, but success still doesn't last? If you're struggling with trust, or performance that feels harder than it should, then this podcast is for you. Here's your host, executive leader, and scholar practitioner, Dr. Anthony Simmons. Again, I'm Dr. Anthony Simmons, and I'm so excited and honored to welcome you to another episode of the Apex Performance Podcast, where all pathways are semated and authentic relationships through what I call the common act. While I continue to offer these accelerated pathways to excellence, today's episode will address organizational change, its change management, and also it will talk about strength and adversity. We are looking at managing deliberate and unplanned change. I will highlight two pathways, the intentional change process, and also I will talk about how to deal with adversity during crisis. The deliberate process will pivot on communications while adversity is all about resiliency and emotional stamina. You know, as in any team-oriented engagement, change management and strength in adversity starts with authentic relationships. And as I have repeatedly stated, any human-driven endeavor involves that common act. We have to show appreciation, we have to communicate, and we have to display trust. Now, amid change, this common act keeps organizations connected on its impetus, implication, and impact. Appreciation is illustrated by leaders communicating the need for change, which is the domain of change, so that members understand the parameters of change and trust is realized through transparency and alignment so that people are really on the same page where the vision statement aligns this process and also illustrates the purpose as resident in what we call a living charter. Now, let's look at life. According to Chuck Swindle, life is 10% of what happens to us and 90% of how we react to it. To me, this translates to having a 90% chance to overcome adversity, which I find to be favorable terms. So let's discuss how to maneuver within this 90% space. Let's capitalize on this 90% opportunity to do well. I would submit that we are in a time of uncertainty, which is tantamount to change. And this change is driven by what I call vocal conditions, which is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Also, these conditions are multiplied by other actors such as AI intervention, budget belt tightening, which is due to restricted resources, skill fading amongst employees, and also the fact that business leaders are infatuated with the bottom line in today's time. And also there's a strong need for multi-skilling. So given the situations and conditions there, I felt it was appropriate to move this episode to the front on my standalone topics. Now, the problem we're facing is not so much change itself, but rather it's organizations are not strategically communicating these changes and the associated impacts. They're not modifying their charters to address the ramifications such as trade-offs and also the roles and responsibility changes that are required. Now, with change being constant, there is a propensity for adversity. So teams must exhibit a strength during these adverse situations. Although common in military operations, but in some business endeavors, unplanned changes will happen also. And this change will lead to crisis response. And if business leaders don't become more transparent about even the plan changes, then crisis response will become the norm, which is something we definitely don't want. That's why we have to be really strong and communicating. But at any rate, the key to effective crisis response is exhibiting strength in adversity. We must build resiliency through actionable control and emotional awareness. This emotional awareness must be bolstered by what I relate to as emotional stamina, the ability to endure these circumstances without losing your composure. So this urgent change is best managed through contingencies and adocracies. In the military, we call these ad hocracies and contingencies branches and sequels. They help us to manage risks and also to pivot to different alternatives if the case presents itself. And also provides a vehicle for improvement and to achieve a greater good. And the key to all of this is discipline. We have to have discipline on what we do every day, which we have to have good habits and practices. This is the key to success and also to have emotional stamina. This is the catalyst to once again to maintaining that composure that I spoke of earlier. So we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit. Aristotle. Now, as I pivoted to my embola for this, I like to think as a Navy operator, opportunities I had to manage changes in strategic vision and force structure, I found to be the fun stuff. But what I found to be the measure of true leadership was the opportunity to operate in pressurized and adverse environments. I felt that was what defined me as a bona fide leader. Displaying operational agility and technical resiliency was the norm in those conditions. So as crisis response surrounds resiliency, as I mentioned in my previous episode, Commander Sea, I discussed how I used to apply leadership in depth. What I did mean by that is I built resilient teams to operate in pressurized environments. And these teams were also built to navigate adversity and during crisis. And these teams was, as a matter of fact, they were just built from confident leaders who I had, you know, spent time and effort into I had just as much, as not more confidence in their abilities as I had a doubt of myself, which I think is sort of missing today in a lot of applications. So as we discuss these conditions that we're facing and all these different leadership strategies, I was listening to a podcast. It was Mike Sindler, and it was talking through a Robert Plank podcast, and they was explaining the difference in military leaders and say they're known for exhilarating other calmness and composure under pressure. And he was talking about how they possess unique skills for developing leaders for crisis response. He emphasized that the ability to lead under pressure extends beyond the battlefield, also as they are equally adept in complex, dynamic operational settings. And he also points to their quick decision making and resiliency in the face of adversity and high-stake environments as being paramount to their success. He concluded that the attributes that are embodied by these leaders has also proven to be invaluable in other applications, such as business, consulting, executive training roles. As great leaders, they understand the importance of empowering others and how to foster teamwork and also provide clear direction and even in the most uncertain times. Now, as I move forward through this episode, I would like to talk more about some of the overarching challenges that we're facing. So let's start with analytics and belt tightening, and as I feel both are driving leaders to chase the bottom line while they're keeping the real underlying drivers of change close to their vest. Organizations are becoming more careless in explaining the impetus for change. In previous episodes, I discussed Jack Wells. I like to talk about his four E's, which is execute, energy, energize, and edge, where he always felt that edge was the hardest one for leaders to embrace. So I speak of edge, I feel that leaders of today are lacking the edge to communicate change, and because of this could become the barrier to organizational excellence. And when a team is unclear on its purpose, then we know that chaos ensues. So withholding critical information necessary to manage change will eventually devolve deliberative processes into crisis management. Additionally, some leaders have a clarity to justify poor performance and misalignment or broken processes by immediately ordering change. I think it's incumbent amongst the leaders to first they need to reassess the situation in place for a potential solution while erring on the side of making marginal adjustments, you know, by significant changes. So I was reading on Essex Bending School contributor David Slush, where he suggests that leaders have a tendency to blame employees' resistance when real issues is really leadership blind spot. So he called it hero complex. He's the bottom line: leaders need to let it be more about something other than themselves. So leaders are they tend to recruit allies to support change when they really need experts to understand the problem, not one who endorses the solution. They already have pre-planned in their own minds there. So they need to stay grounded in the organizational purpose and the culture writ large there. They need to ask how did the strategy impact the situation? And what have we done for process improvement? What's the landscape or what other vision we need in order to potentially drive change? Now let's talk about how do we really get to processes where we can successfully implement the proper change. And we have to start by saying, I feel all change starts with what I mentioned earlier, great leaders, which is about being authentic and they have to represent the steward of change. So change must be communicated. As I mentioned earlier, we talk about a living charter. What is this a living charter? It's a charter that's pretty much dynamic in nature because sometimes we deal with situations that don't necessarily align to what we previously had envisioned. So once these changes implemented, we need to have these charters in place to help drive that change in order to help us empower others so they are informed to be a part of the change process writ large. Now, strong organizations and top-performing teams do not fear change. They prepare for it. They use adopted charters and shared vision in order to get everyone in alignment. And I like to relate this to what I call the coaching culture where the leaders invest in learning and reflection. They have the agility to become part of the organization's DNA. Leadership coaches, they know how to turn internal weaknesses into strengths and external threats into opportunities. So they know how to achieve the agility to respond to the knowns and the unknowns. The bottom line is deliberate change must be strategic. Leaders must be integral in managing the change process, which starts with them personally communicating the change narrative. They should present the vision and kick off the change. And one of the tools that I like to refer to is a RACIA used by the Project Management Institute. And it stands for responsible, accountable, consultant, and informed. What it does is help define roles. Also, it prevents communication bottlenecks, and overall it improves efficiency. Also, as a compliment to the Project Management Institute, I was reading the article about success for change requires emotional mastery. Talk about 70% of the initiatives fail not because of tech, but because leaders underestimate the emotional side of change. They don't get the social awareness piece. And this has to be gained through transparency or caring or what I call appreciating, demonstrating appreciation, as I talked about in the Common Act. It allows organizational members to envision the impact of change and also to understand what the future state will entail. Now, according to Sandra Worty, when she was speaking for the change enthusiasm global, she talked about change requires teamwork, which collective intelligence. She indicated that people don't resist change, they resist being unseen in the change through empathy, safety, co-creation. And that ties into demonstrating appreciation. Now, as I unwrap the nucleus of this discussion about change management, I'd like to introduce Stephen Dennis' Five Elements to Strategize the Story of Change. I was introduced into this reference during my doctoral scholarship, in particular in my leadership communications course. So communication, how fit, and is that term for this story of change. First of all, he talked about the domain of change. This is the reason why change happens and how pivotal this change happens to be. He feels that leaders must transfer their vision and some people call it the pain points associated with that vision to their constituents without any distortion in the messaging process. Now, the second element is the problem itself. It's the compelling argument that justifies the change and the need for the change. It's really why the problem exists, why do we need to make change? We have to understand the root cause that helps measure this magnitude and endurance of the situation. Because team members, they are more encouraged to take measure steps to effect change if they have a clarity of purpose. Now, once the purpose is clear, then they like to move into the future state. What the change look like once it has been implemented. We have to understand how the problem move people not necessarily fixed. We have to be transparent as we know the value of change is the fuel that actually powers the change within itself. And then once we understand what the future looks like, then we have to ask how do we get there? What does the process entail? How are we going to come together as a team? How do we gonna maneuver? How do we gonna build a team of co-equals? How do we gonna institute empathy and trust? How we're gonna design a system that allows us to mitigate some of the associated risks and how we're gonna bring the constituents of the movers of the change closer to the problem. So we have to do this through empowering team members and also gain energy and in doing enthusiasm, as I've mentioned, throughout this whole collective effort approach to making things happen. That's why it's so important to really understand what it is we're getting after. That's the key to empowering people. It goes back to what I talked to earlier about building a team of disciplined players so you can move through any process and limit the amount of risk that's involved and also help you to navigate some of the unknowns. So this serves as a bigger purpose than the organization leaders itself. So we have to be able to really, we send the ideal all the way through fruition. Now the final step is to me the most important one. Is this change really worthwhile? Is it bigger than oneself? Does it enable growth and development for everyone involved? Does it benefit the overall cause? And is it devoid of what we call instrumental harm to others? And that's some of the risks that we have to consider. And the goal should be to exceed the organization and also should be able to represent a matter where everyone is actually enthusiastic about. So that's other five elements of change, which I find to be very powerful. Regardless of those elements that you have there, we have to have leadership coaches because I feel they are natural change agents and they're able to facilitate these environments that allow change to happen in a collective sense, and they're able to really manage deliberate change to encourage and team members to do things, to co-creating, you know, roadmaps to realize this change. They know how to communicate the vision in a succinct manner. They know where they are going and also they know why they are going there and how the change will impact those involved. So now let's pivot to strength in adversity. So I'm going to start with a story, and I'm just going to read the line. It says, so much of life is how you respond to adversity. That was Carol Lawson. She's the Duke Women Basketball Coach. And that was on 15 February on 2026 during the Carolina basketball game when her team got off to a tough start. And also, I would just be hard-pressed to identify any successful individual who path was not illuminated by an adverse experience that was used in order to get better. I see adversity as a time to create opportunities to display strength and experience growth. I feel that it allows organizations to learn and improve. I was listening to Notre Dame football coach Marcus Freeman. Some felt his team was snubbed from the NCAA tournament, and he had a different take on it. You know, his answer was that no, this situation afforded us the opportunity and a tool to get better. And we must learn from the situation that created the fate. It's not so much they didn't make it into the tournament, they had to learn how to look at the underlying actors and to emphasize the things they could have done better. So he didn't want to give up that opportunity to learn that valuable lesson. So having said that, I there's an old saying that people like to say, don't cry over spilled milk. But I like to always add to that saying, I have no problem with people not crying over spilled milk, but I also say be sure to clean up your mess so you don't fall on the same spill again. Now, genuine leadership, I feel, is measured by how your team responds to adversity. I feel we're all good when we're winning. However, though, we must take the bad with the good. True leaders are at their best, I feel, when the game is on the line. This is when it's critical for the leaders to shoulder the responsibilities. They must develop what I call the deep bench of confident leaders for what I call the leadership and depth in order to reduce burnout and provide forcible backup during crisis response of these high-intense situations. Leader must be ubiquitous. I'm gonna use this word ubiquitous through others. That's me everywhere all the time through others. And that's all about having a team around you that's just as capable, is not more capable than yourself. And also we have the model of example. Like I say, external behavior is shaped by internal feelings. We must move inwardly before moving outwardly. We have to use restraint during adversity by selecting not to run. For instance, I never felt the need to run to a scene of a casualty. So we have to have restraint in order to not run to those scenes of adversity or casualty because crisis response is the time when we have to be most composed, as I talked earlier about emotional stamina. This is the time when I felt my concentration level was the highest internally, and also my engagement with my team members was the lowest, which is sort of ironic in a lot of cases. But I thought it needed to be low at that time because they needed to be at their highest level of engagement and detail, which cannot happen if I'm in their head. So once again, emotional intelligence stamina is the key to managing high-state conditions without getting excited. This is very invaluable as a skill set. So let's look at how intensity combat engagement is a crisis response. I think if you really have a disciplined team, you could take these conditions and they could fancy as routines. Just through discipline and sufficient repetitions that's bounded by good habits and practices. I was listening on some messages from the 49ers coach, the late Bill Walsh. He once said that discipline prepares one for adversity. And I feel this discipline is underscored by good habits and practices, which allows teams to respond with instinct during these adverse situations. So you can sort of turn that into sort of routine practices. So now we move through a lot of the concepts and ideas. Let's share a few stories here. I like to think that it's too often that there's a disconnect between those who envision change and those who are impacted and enduring the change process. The problem is those is looking at the numbers obviously are not aligned and they don't appreciate the ones who actually have to drive the results. So, as previously stated, I feel expected change, it mandates authentic leaders who have the edge of the capacity to communicate the story of change. Now, let's move into a few scenarios that I recently experienced pertaining to some of the missteps and communication that exist in today's time. Oftentimes I get into some high-level discussions as I move through some of my executive coaching or consultant roles, with some with colleagues and some with just professionals writ large there. One I like to recall it's a lot going on with I talked earlier about the belt tightening in universities and looking at the bottom line there. And I was talking to a friend of mine, and he came in on this. Terms that conditions I do a lot of research in his profession in his profession. He's like been a professor for over three decades. So he came into his new role a few years ago and with some terms and conditions that allow him to focus more on research than classroom efforts. So as they move forward and some of the strategies and the vision for the institution changed, he's ran into what's a quagmire now regarding his teaching hours versus his research hours. Technically, the way the contract was written was for him to focus more on research and not any classroom time because of the constraints they have with teachers. He's been in the classroom, but he looks back at his contract and he said, Look, I've been teaching to help the school, but you guys owe me for this time because it was not a front of my contract. But, anyways, it came to an impasse. And as I was speaking to him about it, he just said, bottom line, we have accountants running the university now, and obviously they're no longer committed to research based on when they hired me, and they just don't want to be up front. And I said, hold up there. That's exactly what I'm dealing with now in this space pertaining to change management and people not communicating their vision. And also, fast forward, I was talking to another friend who happens to be in the leadership role at a university where he's responsible for grading the professors. And he came to a situation. He was trying to work his way through the evaluation process, and we were discussing how to grade professors who've been, you know, teaching for 25 plus years, and they only had to perform in the classroom, and now they have what we call the trifector. They need to do service, they need to be professors, and also they need to do research. So, and they want to grade them on those three areas, but that has not been the criteria. So my conversation with him, well, first had to be careful. I mean, I it's uh pretty much uh not satisfactory that the university did not roll out the new vision. This is something that the provost, I feel, should have communicated in the vision statement, and also there should have been a time or roadmap that allowed the professors to embrace those additional requirements if they selected to do so. In any regard, it goes back to as I talked about the future state in Dorn Farm to no one, and I was telling them if you get on bad grades, then I don't think that would be a, you know, a fair assessment because they didn't have time to really understand the new vision, and the new vision has not been communicated. So those are just two scenarios. And recently here locally, I'm in the Chesapeake, Virginia area, I was just reading through the local newspaper, as I always do, and I came upon an article that was in the Virginia Pilot with I saw where O Dominion, the university president, had been voted, received a vote of no confidence from the faculty. And it was mostly based on because the school had made a maneuver to shorten some of the traditional courses, the online courses, and cut the timeline in half. And I sort of saw what they were doing because I work in higher education, so they was really trying to align to some of the workforce requirements or the conditions we're in right now. And also they have to be competitive with other universities. They're trying to pace that. So it's so important sometimes for us to have that charter and also have a shared vision in order to avoid some of these challenges and allowing these to be routine change management practices that are devolving into crisis just because we are not communicating them. Now, moving into a scenario with Apple Computers, John Skelly there, he had failed to move Apple in a different direction because he could not communicate his goals to his team members there. So despite implementing structural changes into systems and new processes to stimulate buy-in, his team continued the status quo because they had no roadmap or direction of the company regarding, say, the origin of the change, the problem that was at hand or the future state and the benefits and associated challenges. Scully, he failed to make his vision palpable. So it ended up causing a crisis there within his organization. So then lastly, I looked back on my career at the Navy, and I just keep this very simple because the Navy always transitioned from a mission perspective. So we did a lot of open ocean stuff, and we had the long-range strike missile. We was really good and on the sea warfare because of submarine threats. And then when that threat went away, we sort of pivoted more into the Latura area, more like in the brown water aspects and got into the land attack weapons and what have you. And what the reason I share that story earlier, I talked about sometimes we have to reassess what's in place before we make that marketed change. So I bring this issue forward because when we had to pivot back into the blue water with the China threat there, we had to become a depth again in anti-submarine warfare. And the first thing was like, we're just gonna rewrite the doctrine. I said, I don't feel like we need to rewrite the doctrine, just go back and look at what we once had in place. Let's try to practice it and make some tweaks to it and then bring it back into relevance there. So, I mean, because we did it before, so there's no reason for a grave change. And then in the last piece, what the Navy has to do with force structure. And again, regarding force structure, it was a numbers game. Again, we looked at, we have what we call fit and feel, where your fit is about skills and your feel is the numbers. And we didn't take a holistic look where we got too much driven by the feel or the numbers per se, and we made cuts based on those feels, then we end up that we had ships that were sort of compromised when it came to operational readiness. We have to look into that again. So once again, it just distills down to we have to have a vision and a new charter to see how the overarching organization is impact. And as I mentioned in my five elements, we have to make sure it does harm to no one. It puts everyone in a better state of readiness, whatever that change may be. Now, let's look at the future of change management. So we have to understand that making changes is not as much the problem as communicating these changes. I mean, if change is not strategically communicated, then change management will regress into crisis management, which can lead to fail management. If we don't institute what I call the common act, if we don't show appreciation, communication, and trust, then our human resources will become exhausted. So when prioritizing and scoping these changes, uh, whether it's from belt tightening and other initiatives, we must have a charter that precedes this change. You know, the first step is not always to find a new model. Rather, we must uncover why their persistent model exists or why did it fail, is it personnel related and so forth. So we must discuss the vision and the outcomes up front. As high performance teams, they have living charters to accompany change. They like to mark transitions and provide the direction for new conditions with purpose, time-bound mission roles, and they know that decision rights have to be explicit. So information sharing not only streamlize the change process, it enables buy-in from the team and also it enables collective actions. When goals are properly communicated, those impacted will execute the goals in an enduring and enthusiastic manner. And it also can be a test to one's resolve and strength to excel in adversity. So executing unpopular conditions become more routine when we do communicate. So remember, in dark times, the eye begins to see as the old rookie. Also, we must look at any obstacle we face and say, I am better than you. Obstacles must be building blocks, and vulnerability should be strengths. That's Michelle Obama in her effort light years. And also, calm is contagious. It spreads. When one person remains steady, present, and deliberate, it stabilizes those around him or her. So not controlling outcomes, rather, controlling presence defines the essence of leadership under pressure. That's Mark Devine, courage out the fear. I was on LinkedIn, March 21st, 2026. So hey, please subscribe to the next episode of Apex Performance Podcast, where key game-changing insights on accelerated pathways to excellence is right there at your fingertips. Thank you, and I'll see you next time. So that's it for today's episode of Apex Performance. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts will end a chance to win a grand prize drawing worth $5,000 for a private VIP day with Dr. Simmons himself. Be sure to visit ApexPerformance Podcast.com to pick up a free copy of your gift and ask your questions for Dr. Simmons in your own voice, and he'll answer you back privately in his. Then join us on the next episode.