Leading When Change Feels Threatening

Lavoie — Leading When Change Feels Threatening (McKinsey Talks Talent, Sep 2026)

▶ Watch on YouTube · McKinsey & Company · 32:38

Why do people resist change? And what can leaders do when fear is holding a team back?

Leaders often focus on resistance to change, but resistance isn’t the full story. Fear of loss is a huge part of transformation, too, when roles, routines, and relationships are redefined.

On this episode of McKinsey Talks Talent, McKinsey Partner Johanne Lavoie shares her latest research on how leaders can support their teams through times of strain with Senior Partner Brooke Weddle, Partner Bryan Hancock, and Global Editorial Director Lucia Rahilly. They discuss why leaders who understand fear, rather than punish it, end up with more resilient teams that make sharper decisions and exhibit stronger performance under pressure.

— channel description, McKinsey & Company (chapter list and links omitted)

TL;DR

A ~33-minute episode of McKinsey Talks Talent on the McKinsey & Company channel, published 29 September 2026. The guest is Johanne Lavoie, a McKinsey partner who trained as an electrical engineer and works with leadership teams. The hosts are Lucia Rahilly (who introduces herself as the show’s host), Brooke Weddle and Bryan Hancock. The episode discusses an article by Lavoie that is referred to but not named. The captions are auto-generated, with proper nouns corrected at acquire time.

This is a change-leadership episode, not an AI episode. AI enters at three points (see Where AI comes in). The page is in the wiki because those points frame AI-driven restructuring as a problem of fear, trust and constant change, and because of the leader competences Lavoie says AI will not supply. No figures are given. The description’s claim of stronger performance under pressure rests on Lavoie’s client work, two interviews with former Navy SEALs, and the unnamed article.

1. Under threat, people fall into reactive patterns (1:31–3:16). In a high-stakes leadership meeting “you can feel it. The tension rises because there’s no easy answer.” Some people get aggressive, some withdraw “on a spreadsheet… the safety of the intellect and the number,” and some seek harmony. The financial problem on the table triggers a psychological one: “not a threat to your physical survival but… a threat to my status, my credibility, my belonging, my competence.” The prescription: “if I could meet people in the fear as opposed to judging the behavior, then we’re going to have the right conversation.”

2. People don’t resist change; they react to fear of loss (3:31–6:07). A leader who says change fails “because people are resisting it” is “putting the accountability on them.” She suggests two moves:

• say first “what will not change and how will the change reinforce what we value”;
• name the risks and ask “what do we need to be willing to let go?”

Her example is a hospital executive, a nurse by training, who holds a monthly “funeral meeting” about projects being stopped or deprioritised: what was learned, what was liked, what is carried forward. “Fear needs to be processed. If you don’t create a space for it, it will go into resistance.”

3. Restructuring is actual loss, not only anticipated loss (7:07–10:43). Hancock raises it: restructurings and layoffs “are like everywhere.” Lavoie: how the leavers are treated matters, and so does how the people who stay are treated. They need moments of “simply listening… without trying to fix them”, because “strong emotions… fear, loss, grief heal in connection.”

4. Change is constant, so strain accumulates (12:04–15:33). “We used to have change, then you could actually have a period and then another change… You can’t manage the change today. The change is constant.” Without recovery between changes, strain piles up: “Let’s put a well-being activity on top of this. That’s not going to fix it.” Her remedies:

• a team “nest” where people can recharge while being held to high accountability;
• team rituals such as pre-mortems and post-mortems;
• teaching people to regulate their stress;
• leaders as storytellers, pattern recognisers and system designers.

5. Safety and accountability are not a trade-off (20:56–22:11). Asked whether nests conflict with holding people accountable: “It’s a false tension… the more you turn on the heat, the more you need psychological safety.” A CEO she quotes: “If you have really high aspiration, you need a depth of foundation of trust” to hold it up.

6. Three axes for a team (23:07–26:21). “I’m not a big fan of team building for the sake of team building… You build the team as you work together.”

1. A shared understanding of current reality, using a team diagnostic: top three strengths, three things holding the team back.
2. A shared narrative: teams aligned on numbers often are “not aligned on how you get there.”
3. Trust-building moves in the moment: “If there’s tension in a room, name it. Cuz when you name it, you can tame it.”

7. The CEO’s role (26:21–30:33). From “driving the results to creating the environment that will deliver the results”. The CEO pays attention to what in the system is producing stress and resistance, and is “the master storyteller.” Weddle recounts a CEO who shared his change narrative with his top leaders and asked for feedback. Lavoie calls this “disciplined humility”; in her example a CEO came back the next day to apologise publicly for a badly answered question. “What differentiates a decision from a choice is the fear… We’ll talk about data and we want the data to solve the answer. It’s not going to solve the answer.”

8. Navy SEALs (30:33–32:22). From two former SEALs interviewed for the research: performance depends on investment in “mental, physical, emotional, spiritual health and support, and that includes their families.” On high-stakes missions: “you don’t communicate… my job is to enroll them in the mission.”

Where AI comes in

Three passages, all framing AI as the reason change no longer arrives in episodes:

• Weddle’s question (10:47–11:34): restructuring “is actually more dynamic than it’s ever been because of AI,” and organisations need “a change narrative that balances this notion of abundance and growth” with “the real fear that people have about this moment and what AI could potentially mean from the perspective of their job and their livelihood and their value. So how does this notion of listening… really scale?” Lavoie’s answer is section 4 above.
• The competence claim (15:11–15:23): “Leaders need more emotional intelligence and pattern recognition and systems thinking and storytelling in a world of AI, because AI is not going to do it for you.” She repeats it at 29:14: the world “will trigger human emotion. AI is not going to solve that for us.”
• The closing analogy (31:58): “AI has nonlinear outcome right now. How do we enroll people? How do we create that psychological safety so that we can turn on the heat without having a brittle environment that will break?”

Dynamic-capabilities reading

• strategic-renewal/organizational-culture. The whole episode is about the cultural conditions for change: psychological safety, trust, rituals that process loss, and leaders who regulate their own reactions. It treats these as performance infrastructure, not as well-being add-ons.
• contextual/internal-barriers. Fear of loss is the barrier named. Lavoie’s point is that “resistance to change” mislabels it, and that the label puts accountability on the people being changed.
• digital-transforming/redesigning-internal-structures. Restructurings and layoffs, made “more dynamic than ever because of AI”, are the setting for sections 3 and 4. The proposed structures are team rituals, nests, and the CEO as designer of the system that produces results.

Related in this wiki

• BCG — Is your AI rollout built to fail? (Aug 2026): a behavioural-science account of change failure by phase, with “People don’t dislike change. They dislike being changed” and identity threat as what makes AI change different.
• HBR (Jun 2026): why employees hide their AI use, traced to trust and psychological safety.
• Brynjolfsson on McKinsey Talks Talent (Aug 2026): the same show and hosts, on AI and entry-level employment. It contains “this is a design problem” and Weddle’s engine one, engine two.

Linked entities and concepts

• Entities: McKinsey & Company (channel), Lucia Rahilly (host), Brooke Weddle and Bryan Hancock (co-hosts; entity pages created with this ingest, their second appearance).
• Concepts: durable-skills (the leader competences AI “is not going to do for you”), systems-thinking (the leader as system designer).
• Dangling (single-source mention, deferred): Johanne Lavoie. Her article is referred to throughout but not named; not ingested.

Debates and supersession

• No evidence shown. The episode presents Lavoie’s research only through examples: a hospital executive, a fast-growth company, a CEO, two former Navy SEALs. The description’s outcome claim (“more resilient teams that make sharper decisions and exhibit stronger performance under pressure”) has no figures behind it in the episode. Read it as practitioner guidance.
• The AI claim is an assertion. “AI is not going to do it for you” is stated, not argued. It joins a long list of sources naming human competences that AI will not replace; see durable-skills.
• No supersession.

What was actually ingested

The full auto-generated English track: 312 segments, 0:00–32:34 of 32:38, with 12 creator chapters. Four voices, no speaker labels; attributions are reconstructed from context and direct address (“what you’re saying, Brooke”). The hosts address Lavoie as “Joan” / “Joe” in the ASR, probably Jo. No stills: the video is a four-way video call with a name card.