27 October 2026 | 6 minute read
Senior leaders are often on two change curves at once, the one they're leading and the one happening to them. It's sharpest when the change you're announcing dismantles something you built. The first curve is public. The second isn't allowed to show and often isn't even recognised as a loss. This edition is about what it costs to perform acceptance you haven't reached, why your team can tell, and how to lead the unwinding of your own work without disowning it or defending it by stealth.
Picture a chief operating officer three weeks out from announcing that the asset management platform is being retired. The new CEO's rationale is sound, the numbers stack up, and she's had a hand in shaping what replaces it. When she stands up in front of her leadership group, she'll be calm and credible.
What nobody in the room will hear is that she's the one who championed that platform five years ago. She argued for the budget, defended it through two rough implementations and put her name on the benefits case. Some of the people in that room only came round to it because she asked them to trust her. Now she's leading its decommissioning, in front of the same people. She'll present the decision as someone who's made peace with it. She hasn't. She found out in August.
She's a composite rather than one person, but I've seen versions of her in mining, government and financial services, and I'm seeing her more often this year. A new CEO resets the strategy. A change of government reverses the policy. An AI capability makes last decade's flagship investment look slow and expensive. There's a growing number of senior leaders being asked to dismantle, in public, something they built, and the pace of change is only adding to the list.
#1 Two curves, one face
You'll probably know the change curve. It grew out of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's work on grief in the late 1960s and has been adapted for organisations many times since. It describes five stages, moving from denial and blaming others, through self-doubt and confusion, to acceptance and finally moving on. Examples often show leaders sitting at the far end of the curve while their people are bunched in the dip, a reminder that leaders hear first, so they move first.
That part is well understood. What the model doesn't account for is that senior leaders are frequently on two curves at the same time. On the change you're leading, you've had the briefings, the data and a seat at the table, so you might well be at stage five. On the change happening to you, the one unwinding your own work, you may have had a few weeks and very little say. You're at stage three, wondering whether you should have seen it coming, or stage two, privately furious that years of effort are being written off in a slide.
Only one curve gets airtime.
Try this: Draw two curves on a page. On the first, mark where you are on the change you're leading, and note when you first heard about it and how much say you had. On the second, do the same for the part of this change that's happening to you. Look at the gap in time and influence between the two marks. That gap is what you're carrying.
Insight: You can be ahead of your team on one curve and behind them on the other.
#2 The loss nobody names
When a change costs someone their role, the organisation at least recognises it as a loss. There's a conversation, a process, sometimes a package. When a change dismantles your work, there's none of that. Your title is intact, your salary is intact, and you've probably been asked to lead the thing. On paper, you've lost nothing.
What you have lost is harder to put on paper. Part of it is credibility. You made a case, people believed it, and now you're making the opposite case to the same audience. Part of it is identity, because senior people tend to become known for what they built, and you're being asked to take apart the thing you're known for. And part of it is the story you've told yourself about your own judgement… was I wrong then, or is everyone wrong now?
Because none of that looks like loss from the outside, it often doesn't get treated as loss from the inside either. Leaders in this position tell me they're "fine about it" and "being pragmatic", and they mean it. Then they lose their temper in a meeting about something minor and can't work out why. Unrecognised grief doesn't skip the curve. It just goes through it at whim.
Try this: Write down, specifically, what this change is costing you that will never appear on an official form. Not "it's frustrating", but the actual losses: the credibility you spent on the original case, the part of your reputation built on it, the people who followed you into it. Naming the loss accurately is what lets you start moving through it.
Insight: A loss you won't name still gets grieved.
#3 Performed acceptance
So you do what capable people do. You present the stage-five version of yourself and park the rest for later. I call this performed acceptance, and when the change is unwinding your own work, it's one of the most expensive things a leader can do.
The first cost lands on your team. People are remarkably good at detecting the gap between what a leader says and what a leader feels, even when they couldn't tell you how they know. When your words are at stage five and your energy, your patience and your shortened fuse are at stage two, they don't hear acceptance, they hear spin. And spin keeps people at the top of the curve longer, because it tells them the real conversation is happening somewhere they're not invited.
The second cost is harder to see, and it's yours. A curve you haven't been through doesn't disappear, it leaks. A pattern I keep seeing is that the leader with the least tolerance for their team's resistance is often the one carrying the most unprocessed resistance of their own. The frustration with people who "just need to get on board" is, more often than you'd think, a leader policing in others the reaction they haven't allowed themselves.
In the legacy case, there's a sharper twist. The people pushing back hardest are usually the ones who believed you last time. They learnt the platform, defended it to their own teams and built their expertise around it… because you told them it mattered. Their resistance is, in part, loyalty to a position you used to hold. Treat them as the problem and you teach them that trusting you was a mistake, a lesson they'll apply to whatever you ask them to back next.
Suppression travels downhill.
Try this: The next time someone's pushback irritates you more than it should, pause before you respond and ask yourself one question: is this their resistance, or mine? Then list the three people who backed the old way most strongly, and talk to each of them one-to-one before the next announcement.
Insight: Your team can't move past a stage you're pretending you've finished.
#4 Two ways it goes wrong
When leaders haven't worked through their second curve, I tend to see one of two patterns. Both are understandable, but both are costly.
The first is disowning. To prove they've moved on, the leader becomes the loudest critic of the thing they built. The old platform was "clunky", "a product of its time", "never really fit for purpose". It feels like decisiveness, but it reads as rewriting history, and it leaves everyone who backed the old way looking foolish for having followed you. It also undermines the new direction, because your team has just watched how you'll talk about it in five years' time.
The second is defending by stealth. The leader says all the right things in public and slow-walks the decommissioning in private. The timeline slips, the data migration needs "a bit more work", the old system keeps running "in parallel, just for now". Nobody can point to a moment of resistance, but the change doesn't happen, and the team reads the gap perfectly well.
Disowning is stage five performance. Defending by stealth is stage one and two acted out with plausible deniability. Neither is a character flaw. Both are what an unprocessed curve looks like at a senior level.
Try this: Run two checks. First, reread the last thing you said or wrote about the old way and ask whether the person who championed it five years ago would call it fair. Second, look at the decommissioning milestones you own and count how many have slipped more than once. A harsh word about the past or a twice-moved date is a pattern.
Insight: Disowning and defending are the same unfinished curve.
#5 Holding both curves on purpose
The answer isn't to offload your own frustration onto your team. They need you steadier than they are, and they're entitled to that. The answer is to stop pretending the second curve doesn't exist, starting with yourself.
Name both curves, privately first. Be honest about where you sit on each and how long you've actually had with each one. The distance between the two is a fair measure of how much performing you're doing.
Separate the decision from your judgement. A call that was right with what you knew five years ago can be the wrong call now, and both things can be true. Until you can say that to yourself and believe it, you'll swing between disowning and defending.
Find somewhere to go through the second curve that isn't your team. A peer outside your reporting line, a coach, a partner who'll listen without trying to fix it. For people in the early stages; listen and only listen, no fixing, no arguing, no agreeing. That applies to you as well, and you'll need someone to do it with you.
Say one true sentence. You don't need to share the details to be honest that this one is personal. Something like "I backed the old platform, and with what we knew then I'd back it again. What we know now is different, and I'm still getting used to that myself." That costs you very little and buys a great deal. It tells your team real conversation are allowed and encouraged. It also gives the people who believed you last time permission to let go without feeling foolish.
Use your history rather than hiding it. You know better than anyone why the old way was built, what problem it solved and what it got right. That makes you the best-placed person in the organisation to say what's worth carrying across and what isn't, and to recognise when your team's resistance is protecting something that matters. Resistance is information.
Then lead the change you're leading. Two curves, held deliberately, will always beat one curve performed.
Try this: Before your next announcement or update on the change, write three sentences.
The first describes where you are on the change you're leading.
The second describes where you are on the change happening to you.
The third names what the thing you're changing got right, that's worth carrying forward.
If the second is hard to write, have that conversation with someone who won't be in the audience before you stand up. If you can't write the third, you may still be disowning it.
Insight: Two curves held deliberately beat one curve performed.
A question to sit with: which change are you presenting as settled even though you know it’s unresolved in your own mind?
Key Takeaways
Senior leaders are often on two curves at once, the change they lead and the change happening to them, and they're usually at very different stages on each.
The second curve is hardest to see when the change dismantles something you built, because nothing about it looks like a loss from the outside.
Performing acceptance you haven't reached reads as spin, and spin slows your team's own progress.
Unprocessed change leaks, often as impatience with the very resistance you haven't let yourself feel, and in the legacy case that resistance often comes from the people who trusted you most.
The two common failure modes are disowning your past work and defending it by stealth. Both damage credibility for the new direction.
The fix is to hold both curves deliberately: separate the old decision from your judgement, work through the personal curve somewhere safe, say one true sentence, and use your history to decide what's worth carrying forward.
Frequently Asked Questions
Isn't composure part of the job?
Absolutely, and composure isn't the issue. Composure is being steady while being honest that something is hard. Performed acceptance is claiming a position you don't hold. Teams trust the first and see straight through the second.
Shouldn't I just admit the original decision was wrong?
Only if it was. Leaders often confuse humility with disowning. If the call was sound on the information available at the time, saying it was a mistake isn't honest, and it tells your team that past commitments can be rewritten whenever it suits. If the decision genuinely was wrong, say so plainly, once, and move on. Either way, the test is accuracy, not self-punishment.
How much should I disclose to my team?
Less than you might fear. One true sentence acknowledging that the change affects you too is usually enough. Your negotiations, your feelings about specific people and your private doubts about the decision stay with you and whoever is helping you work through them.
What if I genuinely think the new direction is a mistake?
Then you're not on a change curve, you're in a disagreement, and that needs a different conversation. Make your case upward, before you announce anything. If you're overruled, decide whether you can lead it in good faith. If you can, your one true sentence becomes something like "this isn't the path I'd have chosen, and I'm committed to making it work." What you can't do is announce agreement and then relitigate in the corridor. Your team will notice, and they'll copy it.
What if my own situation is confidential?
Then say nothing specific and do the work elsewhere. The principle still holds. The second curve has to go somewhere, and a coach's office is a far better place for it than your tone in the Monday meeting.
My team seems to be taking it well. How would I know if they're not?
Look for evidence rather than mood. Silence in the room isn't acceptance, and the people who invested most in the old way often say the least. Check whether people have had enough information, enough time and any hand in shaping the change. If the answer to all three is no, the calm you're seeing probably isn't the whole story.
Additional Resources
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (1969), the origin of the stage model the Change Curve builds on.
About Louise
Louise Zawada is an executive coach, change strategist and leadership mentor based in Perth, Western Australia.
She works with senior leaders and executive teams navigating complex organisational change, helping them close the gap between strategy and execution by strengthening executive judgement, reducing leadership friction and improving the quality of conversations that drive performance.
Her work spans mining and resources, government, infrastructure and corporate organisations, where she coaches leaders to make better decisions under pressure, build trust through uncertainty and lead change with greater confidence and clarity.
Louise is the creator of the Leadership Friction framework and writes regularly on executive judgement, organisational legibility and the behavioural evidence that determines whether strategy becomes action.
If you're leading a change that's also unwinding something you built, this is the heart of the work I do in the Confident Change Leader, six months of 1:1 coaching for senior leaders who need to lead the public curve well while getting through the private one. Reply to this email and we'll find a time to talk.
Change leadership · Resistance · Executive coaching · AI and leadership · Leadership under pressure