Before It Gets Better, It Gets Worse

Most change initiatives don't fail because the plan was wrong. They fail because leaders panic at exactly the wrong moment.

Keith Laplante

Thirty-five years leading inside organizations (TD Waterhouse, BMO, HomeEquity Bank) and advising alongside them (Accenture, ExperiencePoint, The Refinery Leadership Partners). Facilitated leadership programs at Harvard, Duke, and Stanford. Read more about Keith

"Most change initiatives don't fail because the plan was wrong. They fail because leaders panic at exactly the moment when conviction matters most."

June 16, 2026

Most change initiatives don't fail because the plan was wrong. They fail because leaders panic at exactly the wrong moment.

Here's a pattern I've watched play out more times than I can count.

A change initiative is announced. The case for it is solid. There's some initial resistance, but leaders push through, communicate well, and start to see movement. People are engaging. Training is happening. The new system is going live. There's reason to believe it's working.

And then performance drops.

Productivity slows. Errors creep in. The complaints get louder. The people who seemed on board start to wobble. The skeptics, who'd gone quiet, start to feel vindicated. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone says the words that doom the whole initiative.

Maybe we moved too fast. Maybe this wasn't the right call.

I want to be very direct about this. In more than thirty-five years of working with leaders through change, the performance dip you're describing isn't a sign the change is failing. It's a sign the change is happening.

The performance dip is normal. It's also predictable.

When you ask people to do something new, they get worse at their jobs before they get better. They must abandon competence they've built up over years and replace it with awkward, unfamiliar competence. They're learning new tools, new processes, new relationships. They're operating without the muscle memory that used to make their work feel easy. Of course, productivity drops. Of course, mistakes happen. Of course, frustration rises.

Think about anyone you've ever watched learn something new. A new sport. A new language. A new instrument. They didn't get better in a straight line. They got worse first, sometimes for a long time. The dip is part of the learning, not a sign the learning isn't working.

The same is true for your team. The same is true for your organization. The same was true for you when you stepped into your current role.

What's different in a change initiative is that the dip is happening to many people at once, often visibly, often in ways that affect business results. So, leaders feel pressure to respond, and the responses they often reach for make everything worse.

What leaders typically do, and why it backfires

When the dip hits, the instinct is to tighten controls. More oversight. More reporting. More pressure to hit numbers. The thinking goes that if performance is dropping, leadership needs to intervene.

What this actually does is communicate something to your people that you almost certainly don't intend to communicate. It tells them that the dip is unacceptable. That mistakes will be punished. That the learning curve they're on is being treated as a performance problem.

As a result, people stop learning. They go back to the old way of doing things, the way they were good at, because the cost of being seen as struggling is too high. The change initiative dies, not because the change was wrong, but because the leadership response made the learning impossible.

I've watched organizations spend extraordinary amounts of money on change initiatives that failed exactly here. Not because the strategy was wrong. Not because the technology was flawed. But because leaders responded to a predictable, manageable dip in performance by sending signals that turned a temporary slowdown into a permanent reversal.

What to do instead

The leaders who navigate the dip well do three things differently.

First, they name it in advance. Before the change even starts, they tell their people clearly that performance is going to drop, that things will feel harder before they feel easier, and that this is normal. They take the surprise out of it. When the dip arrives, no one panics, because everyone was told to expect it.

Second, they hold steady when it arrives. They resist the urge to tighten controls or send pressure signals. They communicate confidence in the change and patience with the learning. They make it safe to struggle.

Third, they pay attention to what the dip is actually telling them. Sometimes the dip reveals real problems that need fixing. Training that wasn't adequate. Tools that don't work as promised. Support that's missing. The dip is data. Leaders who listen to it can make small adjustments that smooth the path forward. Leaders who treat it as a referendum on the change itself miss the signal entirely.

The hard part

The hardest thing about the performance dip isn't navigating it operationally. It's holding your nerve while it's happening.

You're going to have people in your organization, sometimes very senior people, telling you the change isn't working. You're going to see numbers you don't want to see. You're going to feel the pressure to do something, to react, to intervene. And the right answer, more often than not, is to keep going.

That requires conviction. It requires the kind of leadership presence that says, calmly and clearly, this is exactly what we expected to see, we're not changing course, and here's what we're doing to support people through it.

Most change initiatives don't fail because the plan was wrong. They fail because leaders panic at exactly the moment when conviction matters most.

The dip isn't the problem.

How you respond to it very often is.