Leadership.

The framework

1. 01

   Say what's ending, and say it to the person losing it.

   Before the benefits slide, write down what is actually being given up and by whom: the account someone built over four years, the daily check-in that was also a friendship, the expertise that made a person the one everybody asked. Then say it to them directly, without an immediate 'but'. Leaders skip this because naming a loss feels like inviting an argument, so they lead with the upside instead, and the team hears that the cost they're carrying is invisible from where you sit. Nobody picks up something new while the thing still in their hands goes unacknowledged.

2. 02

   Staff the middle like it's real work.

   The neutral zone needs its own arrangements, temporary by design: which decisions are on hold and which aren't, who approves what in the meantime, what the interim reporting line is, and what you'll deliberately stop measuring for the next eight weeks. Set short-range goals so people can finish something while everything around them is unfamiliar, and shorten your own reporting loop so problems surface in days rather than at quarter end. The failure mode here is silence. Leaders go quiet after the announcement because there is nothing new to report, and a team six weeks into the middle with nothing from you is still, quietly, somewhere else.

3. 03

   Output falls in the middle, and that's physics.

   Old faults return, people revert under pressure to the way they knew, and your strongest performers look ordinary because the competence they spent years building has just been reset. None of that is attitude. If you pathologise it — call it resistance, escalate it, make an example of somebody — you convert a temporary dip into a permanent trust problem, and the next change costs you double. Put the dip in the schedule and in the forecast, tell the team to expect it, and name the date by which you expect it to lift.

4. 04

   The marathon effect — you started months before they did.

   Bridges' name for it is the marathon effect. Leaders begin their own transition the moment they start designing the change, which can be months before anybody else hears a word of it. By announcement day you've finished your ending, made peace with the loss and are impatient for the new beginning, while your team is at the start line only now learning what is being taken away. The frustration you feel at their slowness is a scheduling artefact, not a verdict on them. Assume a lag measured in months, and repeat the reasoning long past the point where you're bored of your own voice.