The Hidden Cost of an Unsupported Leader.
What organisations lose when the people carrying change are left to carry it alone.
Executive Summary
The leaders and managers driving change in your organisation are doing some of the most demanding work of their careers and often without adequate support.
The cost of that gap is rarely visible on a dashboard, but it shows up in stalled programmes, disengaged teams and leaders who quietly burn out.
Research from McKinsey, Deloitte and the International Coaching Federation makes a compelling case: investing in the people carrying change is one of the highest-leverage decisions an organisation can make.
Great Oaks provides that support through executive coaching designed specifically for leaders navigating change, grounded in hands-on transformation experience, and focused on helping leaders think more clearly, act more decisively, and lead more effectively when it matters most.
The People Nobody Thinks to Support
When an organisation embarks on significant change, considerable thought goes into the plan. Stakeholder maps are drawn, communications cascades are built, project governance structures take shape, budgets are allocated, milestones are set, and progress is tracked.
What receives far less attention is the person standing in front of their team on a Monday morning, fielding questions that they can't fully answer, projecting confidence they don't entirely feel, and trying to lead others through uncertainty while navigating their own.
These are your leaders and managers. And in most organisations going through transformation or change, they are doing this largely alone.
McKinsey estimates that roughly 70% of change programmes fail to achieve their stated goals. Harvard Business Review points consistently to the same root cause: not strategy, not technology, not process, but the behaviour and capability of the people leading change day to day. Yet the coaching and development of those same people remains, in many organisations, an afterthought.
What We're Actually Asking of Them
It is worth being honest about the scale of what we ask of leaders during transformation. At any given moment, a manager navigating significant change is expected to:
Hold the line for their team: remaining visible, credible and steady when they don't have all the answers, and when those above them may not either.
Translate complexity into clarity: taking decisions made at senior levels and turning them into something meaningful, motivating and actionable for the people they lead.
Manage themselves under pressure: staying emotionally regulated, constructive and forward-facing in the face of ambiguity, setbacks and competing demands.
Influence without clear authority: building alignment across teams and functions that may have different priorities, fears or agendas.
Deliver on the day job: because transformation doesn't pause business as usual. The targets, the customers and the operational pressures don't go away.
This is not ordinary leadership work. This is leadership at its most exposed. And the assumption that people can simply absorb this, on top of everything else, without specific, targeted support is where many change programmes quietly begin to unravel.
Where the Cost Shows Up
The costs of leaving leaders unsupported during change are real. They are just rarely attributed correctly.
In team disengagement. Research from Deloitte identifies change fatigue as one of the leading drivers of workforce disengagement, and the single biggest amplifier of that fatigue is a lack of support and clarity from direct managers. When a leader is struggling, it doesn't stay contained. It travels throughout the organisation.
In stalled momentum. Transformation programmes lose energy not because the strategy was wrong, but because the people responsible for sustaining it ran out of road. Without a space to think, recalibrate and problem-solve, leaders default to survival mode, and survival mode does not drive change forward, in closes minds and only gets the basics done.
In attrition. The leaders most likely to leave during a period of significant change are often the most capable ones, the people who have options, and who will exercise them when they feel unsupported or undervalued. Replacing a senior leader mid-transformation is one of the most expensive and disruptive things an organisation can do. The cost of coaching is a fraction of it.
In the loneliness nobody talks about. Senior leadership during change can be an isolating experience. The people around a leader have vested interests. Peers are navigating their own pressures. Line managers are consumed with delivery. There is often, as one leader described it to me, "nowhere to go when you haven't got the answers and you're the one who's supposed to." That isolation has a cost. It shows up in decision-making, in relationships, and eventually in results.
The Case for Investing in Change Coaching
The International Coaching Federation found that organisations that invested in coaching during periods of change reported measurably higher rates of goal achievement, stronger team performance and improved communication across the business. PwC's Global Coaching Survey put the median return on coaching investment at approximately 700%.
But the most compelling case is not a statistic. It is a simple analogy.
You would not send a leader into a complex negotiation without preparation. You would not expect a team to adopt new ways of working without training and guidance.
Yet we routinely ask leaders to navigate some of the most psychologically and operationally demanding moments of their careers, driving change, holding teams together, sustaining momentum under pressure and assume that capability will either already be there, or will somehow emerge in the doing.
Sometimes it does. Often, it doesn't. And the organisations that come through transformation in better shape than they entered it are, consistently, the ones that invested in the people doing the carrying.
What Effective Change Coaching Looks Like
Executive coaching for leaders in the middle of transformation is not “generic personal development”, and it is not therapy. It is something more specific and more demanding than either.
It creates a confidential space, often the only one a leader has during change, to think clearly, challenge their own assumptions, and work through the challenges that keep them awake. That space has a value that is hard to quantify and easy to underestimate, until you've experienced what it's like to lead without it.
It is honest in a way that most other relationships during change cannot be. Colleagues might have their own agendas, direct reports look to their leader for reassurance and line managers are focused on delivery. A coach has none of those constraints and the willingness to challenge the narrative with curiosity rather than ego, and with the leader's genuine development at the centre, is what creates real movement.
It is forward-focused and outcome-oriented. Each conversation is anchored in what the leader is trying to achieve, what is getting in the way, and what they need to think or do differently to make progress. The emphasis is always on clarity and forward motion.
And crucially, it is experienced. HBR research on coaching effectiveness consistently identifies relevant professional experience as one of the most important factors in impact. A coach who has sat in a director's chair, navigated transformation at pace and led through uncertainty brings something to the conversation that cannot be learned in a coaching classroom. The leaders being coached know the difference and it changes the quality of the challenge they're willing to accept.
The ripple effect matters too. A leader who is thinking more clearly, leading more confidently and managing themselves better under pressure doesn't keep that to themselves. It travels through every conversation they have, every decision they make, and every person they lead.
For HR Leaders: This Is Your Lever
If you are an HR Director, People Partner or L&D leader in an organisation going through significant change, the question of how your leaders are supported is one of the most important questions to address and not just because it is a pastoral responsibility. It’s because the capability and wellbeing of the leaders carrying your transformation programme is one of the most direct determinants of whether it succeeds.
Making that case internally, securing the investment, and finding the right support is how HR functions further demonstrate genuine strategic value during transformation as the people who understand what the change required actually needs and make sure that the organisation gets that support to succeed.
The Question Worth Sitting With
If your organisation is in the middle of change right now, I'd ask one question:
Who is supporting the people who are carrying it?
Not the programme and not the strategy. The people. The manager who is holding their team together, the senior leader who is three months into a restructure and hasn't had a real conversation about how it's going for them. The high-potential director who is being stretched further than they've been before and has nowhere to think out loud.
Change that sticks is built on people who are genuinely equipped to lead it. That doesn't happen by chance. It happens because someone made the decision to invest in them.
Great Oaks offers executive coaching for leaders and managers navigating change, combining hands-on director level transformation experience with a coaching approach that is honest, forward-focused and built around your specific situation. If you're in the middle of transformation and want to explore what that could look like for your leaders, let’s talk.
Great Oaks Transformation.
Strong Roots. Bold Growth. Lasting Change.
References
McKinsey & Company — Why do most transformations fail? A conversation with Harry Robinson, McKinsey Transformation Practice (2019). Available at: mckinsey.com. The article notes that academic research consistently shows roughly 70% of corporate transformations fail, with leadership buy-in and change narrative among the primary root causes.
Deloitte Insights — 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report, based on a survey of more than 9,000 business and HR leaders across 93 countries. Key findings cited: one in three employees experienced more than 15 major organisational changes in the past year; 68% reported lower wellbeing; 50% reported decreased engagement; and only 27% of leaders said their organisations manage change effectively. Available at: deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends.html
International Coaching Federation (ICF) — Global Coaching Client Study (2009). Key findings cited: 70% of coaching clients reported a positive change in work performance; 72% reported improved communication skills; businesses utilising coaching reported measurable improvements in teamwork, communication and overall organisational culture. Available at: coachingfederation.org
