Why reputation is critical to change
Organisations are restructuring at their fastest rate in four years as employee trust in leadership is falling. This makes how change is communicated fundamental to the success of any transformation. Get it right, people feel ownership and part of its success. Communicate after the decision, then be ready to be on the defensive.
At the Starfish Search Transformation Network event yesterday, I had the chance to talk with change leaders on the difference that strategic communications can make. We started by agreeing on how organisations normally approach change. Leaders agreed the vision. HR defined the policies. Then the communications team briefed to announce it.
This sequence means that by the time communications starts, the process of designing change is finished. Colleagues are being told about change with communications used to broadcast leadership decisions, rather than enable consultation and ownership. At best, colleagues are sceptical that change is possible. At worst, they will outright resist because their insight and experiences were excluded.
This becomes important when you consider the latest IC Index 2026 findings that only half of UK employees trust their senior leaders, down nine points in a year. Four in ten said they felt supported to adapt at a time when organisations are restructuring at their fastest rate in four years. Whether public, private or charity sector, organisations are asking people to absorb more and more change at a time when they trust leadership the least.
Trust has never been harder to win - or maintain - with fundamental impact on change adoption. There are three forces with lasting impact on how information is received:
Polarisation of politics with real implications for charity, social housing and local government organisations at the front line of delivering services.
Fragmentation of media with information shared in ways that ignore the ‘old’ demarcation of internal and external communications.
AI is reshaping where people go to and verify information shared.
As I have written before, in a low trust world, we need leadership to abandon big gestures and focus on small-t trust that is earned through specific, consistent actions that colleagues can see and verify. Deeds, not words, repeated until they can be believed. This is fundamental and why, for change to be a success, communications has to be approached differently.
The shift is make communications part of designing change so that reputation and behaviour enables implementation rather than being an afterthought. By bringing colleagues who are critical to delivery into the process, they are able to shape the process and own the outcome. As we talked about in yesterday’s session, it points to recognising that colleagues are adults with agency over how change will happen rather than being treated as children.
A recent example of where this approach made real difference was at Clarion Housing Group where I worked with the Group Executive Team and Director of Change to reset communications around organisation wide change. Having become a byword for fear around job security, change was into a colleague-led dialogue through an internal change newsroom with a schedule of live leadership Q&As, peer learning and co-created resources. From a standing start, in three months, we had over 9,400 colleagues engage with change communications including an average 200 joining monthly check-ins to discuss and identify future change.
The insight for leadership is that for change to be effective, strategic communications must be part of how it is designed. This starts with defining the reason that colleagues can believe change is for, and will benefit, them. This narrative must then be activated through behaviour, including being open to having difficult conversations and sharing feedback as change is introduced. Finally, to build trust, leaders need to focus on action, delivering tasks that colleagues can see, explaining what the results mean, then repeating.
Successful change doesn’t rely on better announcements, but a different way of applying communications.
Natalie Orringe, Strategy + Impact
