What Nobody Tells Gut-Based Leaders About Change
I've sat across the table from a lot of nonprofit executives navigating change. Program restructures, leadership transitions, new funding models, mergers. My big insight is that the ones who struggle most aren't the ones who made the wrong decision. They're the ones who made the right decision and then couldn't figure out why their team didn't follow or couldn’t figure out how to get the team to move at all.
Change doesn't fail because the strategy was wrong. It fails because leaders underestimate how much their people need to be brought along and overestimate how much their team sees what they see. This is especially true for leaders who lead from the gut. We just finished our annual reviews at The Spark Mill and two of my co-workers had this to say, “I think Sarah is able to visualize an end goal more clearly than some of the rest of us, so it can be difficult to keep up when she is already 5 steps ahead. Having to translate that vision that she already sees but is still foggy to us can be a blindspot." And "Sarah often already sees the end which makes it hard to keep up, but it is also a gift because it offers an opportunity to see ahead in our work and think differently about how to approach it."
If this sounds familiar, then this might sound familiar too…You walk into a situation, read the room, connect a few dots, and land on the answer before anyone else has finished asking the question. While it is an asset, under the conditions of change, that same instinct can work against you — because you've already processed the change internally and moved on, while your team is just now hearing about it.
So what does leading change well actually look like? In my work, I keep coming back to five things.
1. Get clear before you communicate.
This sounds obvious, but it's harder than it sounds. Before you say anything publicly, sit with the change. Can you explain it in one sentence? Do you actually believe in it? Write down what's changing, why it's happening, what stays the same, and what you genuinely don't know yet. If you can't answer those four things, you're not ready.
2. Give people a story, not a slideshow.
Gut leaders often share the conclusion without the path that led there. But people don't follow conclusions — they follow stories. Your change story needs four beats: here's where we were, here's what we realized, here's the path we're choosing, and here's what that means for us. The mission is your through-line. If this change doesn't connect back to why you all showed up in the first place, that's worth examining before you go any further.
3. Your presence during change is not optional.
When things get hard, gut-based leaders often retreat into problem-solving mode and oftentimes, alone. And that absence — even when it's strategic — reads like abandonment to the people watching. You don't have to have the answers, you just have to show up. An informal check-in, a personal message, a moment before the meeting starts where you say I know this is a lot — those things do more than any all-staff email. Your job during change is to be steady while everyone else finds their footing.
4. Resistance is data, not drama.
Gut leaders feel pushback as friction to push through. But unaddressed resistance doesn't disappear — it goes underground, where it's much harder to work with. Almost every time I see resistance on a team, it's signaling one of three things: I don't understand, I don't trust this, or I'm afraid of what this means for me. Each one needs a different response. Your job isn't to convince people faster. It's to diagnose which one you're actually dealing with.
5. Name what changed — and mark the moment.
This is the one leaders skip most often. You're already three steps ahead, but your team needs you to look back before everyone moves forward. Change doesn't stick until it's named. You don't need a ceremony, but you do need honesty. We did something hard. Here's what we built. Here's what it cost. Here's why it matters. Specificity is respect. Not 'we navigated change well' but we restructured our intake process mid-year and kept serving clients through all of it.
The trap isn't that you lead from the gut, it's that change requires slowing your internal process down long enough to bring people with you. The leaders who navigate change well aren't the ones who feel less. They're the ones who've learned to share the path.
So here's my question for you: which one of these five is hardest for you? That's usually where the work is.