Heidi Rolston has spent her career building employee experience, learning, and leadership programs at companies that move fast and reinvent themselves often. As Head of People at Descartes Labs, and previously VP of Learning, Diversity, and Inclusion at Hootsuite, she has watched leaders launch transformations with confidence and then quietly stall when the cost of change became real.
On Reimagining Company Culture, Heidi made a point that does not appear in many leadership decks: change requires sacrifice, and pretending otherwise is one of the fastest ways to lose your employees' trust. This piece pulls together what Heidi described and what HR leaders can do when they are the ones holding the line on a transformation.
Why Change Initiatives Fail When Sacrifice Goes Unspoken
Most transformation announcements emphasize opportunity. The new strategy will create growth, the new structure will speed decisions, the new technology will free people from low-value work. What rarely gets named is what people will lose: comfortable routines, longstanding relationships, projects they cared about, sometimes their roles. When those losses arrive without acknowledgment, employees experience the change as betrayal rather than progress.
According to Harvard Business Review research, employee willingness to support major change initiatives dropped from 74 percent in 2016 to just 43 percent by 2022, driven largely by change overload and the sense that leaders underestimate what transformations cost the people executing them. Heidi's point is that naming the cost is not pessimism; it is the foundation of credibility.
What Leaders Get Wrong About Change
Heidi described a familiar pattern. A senior team commits to a bold direction, communicates the vision in clear language, and then assumes the rest of the organization will catch up. When resistance shows up, leaders often interpret it as a communication problem rather than what it actually is: a legitimate response to losses that have not been acknowledged.
What does "sacrifice" really mean in a transformation?
It can mean shutting down a product line that a team built over years, rewriting a process that gave certain employees disproportionate influence, or asking people to retrain into work they did not sign up for. It can also mean executives giving up the structures that made their own jobs easier. Heidi's framing is that sacrifice is not a one-way street, and transformations stall when leaders ask employees to absorb costs they themselves are unwilling to share.
Why does change management still feel theoretical to most managers?
Because most managers are handed a deck and a timeline and told to execute. They are not given the practical tools to surface concerns, run difficult conversations, or coach their team through grief and uncertainty. Without those tools, managers default to either over-selling the change or quietly distancing themselves from it, and neither builds the trust the transformation needs.
What Actually Sustains Change Through the Hard Middle
Heidi's experience across high-growth companies points to a few principles that hold up when the easy enthusiasm of launch gives way to the messy work of execution.
Name the losses publicly
The most credible change communications acknowledge what people are giving up. That includes specific projects ending, specific roles changing, and specific relationships shifting. Generic talk about "embracing change" without specificity reads as dismissive. Specificity reads as respect.
Visible leadership sacrifice
If leaders are asking employees to give up routines, structures, or status, the leaders need to give up something visible too. That can be a familiar reporting structure, a long-held project, or a personal habit that no longer fits the new direction. Transformational leadership requires public skin in the game; without it, the sacrifice ask falls flat.
Build feedback loops that actually move decisions
Change initiatives generate concerns at every level, and most of those concerns never reach the people who could act on them. Building structured channels for honest input, and visibly using that input to adjust the plan, is what separates real consultation from theater. Organizational change efforts that ignore feedback loops tend to repeat the same mistakes in the next transformation.
Pace the change to human capacity
McKinsey's research on transformations consistently finds that companies overestimate how much change an organization can absorb at once. When leaders stack multiple major initiatives without sequencing, employees burn out, decisions get rushed, and the early wins erode. Employee engagement data is one of the cleanest signals leaders can use to decide whether the organization has capacity for the next thing.
Where Employee Relations Fits Into Change Work
Transformations always generate friction, and that friction needs somewhere to land. If employees do not have a structured way to raise concerns about how change is being executed, those concerns turn into rumor channels, exit interviews, and external posts. AllVoices supports the change-management work with tools designed for exactly this period of organizational stress.
The employee engagement solution gives People teams a real-time read on how the workforce is experiencing the change, and the pulse surveys tool lets leaders test specific questions about the transformation rather than waiting for the next annual survey.
Why pulse data matters more during change
During transformations, sentiment shifts in weeks, not quarters. A team that felt aligned in March can feel abandoned in May if a leadership decision lands poorly. Frequent, focused pulse data lets People leaders catch those shifts in time to intervene, rather than discovering them in regretted attrition six months later.
Frequently Asked Questions About Change Management
Why does change management get so much resistance?
Because most resistance is not opposition to the goal; it is opposition to how the change is being executed. Employees who understand the why and have a credible voice in the how are far less resistant than those who feel the change is being done to them.
How do you know when an organization is at change capacity?
Watch for rising sick days, slipping deadlines, increased turnover among high performers, and a drop in pulse engagement scores. Any one of those is a signal; all four together mean the organization is past capacity and needs to slow the next initiative.
Should HR lead change management or partner on it?
Both. HR owns the people systems that make change land, including communication, training, and feedback loops. The business owns the strategic direction. The transformations that succeed treat HR as a co-architect, not a downstream service provider.
How do you handle employees who openly oppose the change?
Listen first. Open opposition often surfaces real risks that quiet employees are afraid to name. The goal is to understand whether the concern is about the goal, the execution, or the personal cost. Each requires a different response, and dismissing all of them as "resistance" loses important information.
What is the role of middle managers in change?
They are the translation layer. Senior leaders set direction, but middle managers convert that direction into team-level actions, conversations, and decisions. Investing in middle managers' capacity to lead through ambiguity is one of the most impactful moves a People team can make during a transformation.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Heidi Rolston's argument is that change requires sacrifice, and the leaders who name that openly earn the trust to ask for it. The leaders who pretend change is costless lose credibility the first time the cost becomes visible, and that lost credibility takes years to rebuild.
For HR leaders, the practical work is to build the infrastructure that makes honest change conversations possible. That includes manager toolkits for difficult discussions, pulse data that catches sentiment shifts early, and intake systems that surface concerns before they become quiet attrition. It also means being the function that pushes back when leadership asks for too much change too fast, because protecting organizational capacity is part of the job. Drawing on McKinsey research on radical reinvention, the data is consistent: companies that pace change to human capacity outperform companies that do not.
If your team is in the middle of a transformation and needs better visibility into how employees are absorbing the change, AllVoices gives People leaders the feedback infrastructure to make adjustments before sentiment turns to attrition. Request a demo to see how integrated pulse surveys and feedback support change initiatives at every stage.
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