I have been in a lot of rooms where a leader told me it was not the right time.
Not the right time for an honest culture assessment. Not the right time to ask employees what they were really experiencing. Not the right time for anything that might surface uncomfortable data, because the organization was already dealing with enough.
I understand the instinct. When a merger has just closed, or a new CEO has just arrived, or a return-to-office mandate has just landed with a thud, the last thing most leaders want is more information about what is going wrong. They want to manage the situation. Get through the transition. Ask the hard questions later, when things are more stable.
In 25 years of studying organizational culture, I have watched that logic play out hundreds of times. And I can tell you what happens on the other side of it.
The leaders who waited for stability during a Culture Disruption before listening to their people found that the people who most needed to be heard had already left or had gone quiet in a way that looked like compliance but was actually disengagement. The exit interviews told the story afterward. They rarely changed anything.
The leaders who kept listening during the disruption, who maintained honest, structured feedback channels even when the data was uncomfortable, who used what they heard to guide their decisions rather than manage their narrative — those were the ones whose organizations came through with their cultures intact.
The trust reserve
I think about culture stability in terms of what I call the trust reserve. Every organization is either building it or depleting it, through thousands of small interactions. How feedback is handled, how managers treat people when the pressure is on, how honestly leadership communicates when the answers are uncertain.
When a disruptor hits, organizations draw on whatever trust reserve they have accumulated. If it is full, the employees who are uncertain about what comes next have a foundation of experience that tells them: this organization has kept its word before, and there is reason to believe it will keep it now.
If the trust reserve has been running low, if feedback has gone unacknowledged, if survey data has been collected and never visibly acted on, if leaders have been saying the right things but employees have not felt them, the disruption does not cause what follows. It just reveals it.
What the research shows
Gallup’s research shows that 42% of turnover is preventable, exits that employees themselves say could have been avoided. Compensation is a factor, but it is not the only one. Manager behavior, communication quality, and whether employees felt genuinely heard during hard moments are consistently close behind. (Gallup, “42% of Employee Turnover Is Preventable but Often Ignored,” updated February 2026.)
Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that between 2022 and 2025, manager engagement dropped nine points, from 31% to 22%, while individual contributor engagement held relatively flat. Managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. The implication is direct: culture does not break at the organizational level. It breaks at the manager layer, in the daily interactions between people and the leaders closest to them. During disruption, that layer absorbs the most pressure. The HR leaders who hold culture together are the ones who recognize this and protect it.
What the leaders who got it right actually did
The pattern I have seen consistently in organizations that hold culture through disruption is not a better change management framework or a more sophisticated communication strategy. It is simpler than that.
They communicated before they were ready. Not waiting for the announcement to be polished, but getting in front of their people before the rumor mill does. One leader I spoke with recently described convening a mandatory company-wide call before the press release on her company’s acquisition went live, with all parties present, with open Q&A, and with an explicit commitment to honesty about what was unknown. “If we didn’t know the answers,” she said, “we just said so.” That transparency in the moment of maximum uncertainty was not a risk. It was the most trust-building thing the organization did in that period.
They listened before they built. The most durable HR strategies I have seen come out of leadership transitions are the ones built from what the workforce actually said, not what leadership assumed was true. A people leader stepping into a global role spanning 23 countries during a restructuring spent her entire first 90 days in listening mode, meeting every country leader, every functional leader, every executive, before designing a single program or policy. Everything that followed came from what she heard. The strategy was credible to the workforce because it was built from the workforce.
They made accountability a daily practice, not a crisis response. The organizations that hold culture through disruption are almost always the ones where accountability, owning mistakes, naming what went wrong, moving toward the solution rather than around it, was already a cultural norm before the disruption hit. You cannot install that kind of culture during a merger or a leadership transition. You can only draw on what was already there.
What I tell HR leaders who are in it right now
Your employees are not waiting for the transition to be over before forming their conclusions. They are forming them now, based on what they observe about how leadership handles uncertainty. The gap between what you believe they are experiencing and what they are actually experiencing is almost certainly larger than you think, and it is growing.
The most valuable thing you can do right now is not a better communication plan. It is an honest assessment of what your employees actually believe about this organization, not what you hope they believe, not what last year’s survey said, but what is true right now. That assessment, taken seriously and responded to visibly, is what closes the gap.
Third-party tools like Most Loved Workplace® certification exist precisely to support that kind of honesty, providing HR leaders with structured, validated employee listening that surfaces what is actually happening and gives leadership something to build its response around.
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