This Too Shall Pass

Some of your most experienced employees have learned that waiting is a perfectly rational response to change. Your organization taught them that.

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

"This too shall pass is not a character flaw. It's a learned response. And the organization that taught it can also teach something else."

June 23, 2026

Some of your most experienced employees have learned that waiting is a perfectly rational response to change. Your organization taught them that.

There's a phrase I hear in almost every organization I work with, usually said quietly, sometimes with a small shrug. It comes from the people who've been there the longest, the ones who've watched leadership change three or four times, who've lived through the last big initiative and the one before that.

This too shall pass.

It's not said with malice. It's not even said with cynicism, exactly. It's said with the calm confidence of someone who has seen this movie before and knows how it ends. They've watched announcements be made and forgotten. They've watched task forces be formed and dissolved. They've watched consultants come and go, taking their PowerPoint decks with them. And they've learned, through patient observation, that the smartest thing they can do when a new change is announced is nothing at all.

Wait it out. Keep your head down. Don't volunteer for anything. Don't change how you do your work. Within six months, sometimes sooner, the initiative will fade. Leadership will move on to the next thing. And you'll have saved yourself the trouble of learning something you didn't need to learn.

I want to name something slightly uncomfortable here. These are not your worst employees.

These are often your most experienced ones. Your most loyal ones. The people who've been around long enough to understand how the organization actually works. They're not resisting because they're difficult. They're not waiting because they're disengaged. They're behaving rationally, based on data the organization has given them over many years.

What the organization has taught them

Every change initiative that gets announced and then quietly abandoned teaches people something. Every restructure that gets reversed teaches them something. Every strategic priority that gets walked back the moment results don't come fast enough teaches them something.

What it teaches them is this: leadership talks about change more than it actually delivers it. Initiatives are often political signals rather than committed strategies. The cost of waiting is usually lower than the cost of engaging. And the people who do engage, who throw themselves into the new thing, sometimes end up looking foolish when the new thing quietly disappears.

That's not paranoia. That's pattern recognition.

In more than thirty-five years working with leaders and organizations, I've seen this dynamic in companies of every size and in every industry. It's not unique to bureaucracies. It's not unique to slow-moving sectors. It shows up wherever leadership has, over time, communicated that initiatives are temporary, that commitment is conditional, and that the rules will change before the work is done.

And here's the uncomfortable part. By the time you're standing in front of your organization announcing your next change, you're not just communicating about that change. You're communicating against the backdrop of every change announcement that came before. Including the ones that happened before you got there.

The cost of not knowing this

When leaders don't recognize this dynamic, they misread what's happening in front of them. They see passive engagement and assume their people are committed, when in fact their people are waiting. They see compliance and assume buy-in, when in fact their people are biding their time. And they're often surprised, sometimes months later, when the change quietly fails to take hold, and no one can quite explain why.

The explanation is usually that no one fully engaged in the first place. The change rolled out. People did the minimum. The reports said implementation was complete. But underneath, very little had actually changed, because the people who needed to change had decided, reasonably, to wait.

The cost of this isn't just one failed initiative. The cost compounds. Every change that follows the wait-it-out pattern teaches your people that the strategy works. Which makes the next initiative even harder to land. Which makes the one after that harder still.

What to do about it

I want to be honest — there's no quick fix for this. If your organization has a long history of starting changes and not finishing them, you can't undo that history with a single well-delivered announcement. The credibility you're working with is the credibility you've earned, and earning new credibility takes time.

But there are things you can do.

The first is to acknowledge it. Out loud. Directly. The leaders I've worked with who've made the most progress here are the ones who name the pattern explicitly. They say something like, I know we've announced changes before that didn't go the distance. I understand why you might be skeptical. Here's what's different this time, and here's how you'll be able to tell.

That kind of honesty is rare. It's also disarming. It signals that leadership is paying attention to the same reality your people are paying attention to. And it sets up an implicit contract. You're saying, watch what we do. Judge us by our follow-through. We'll earn this.

The second is to actually follow through. That sounds obvious, but it's the part most organizations get wrong. Not because they're insincere, but because the next shiny initiative comes along, or the executive sponsor leaves, or the budget gets reallocated, or the quarterly results get tough and attention shifts. Following through, when following through is hard, is what builds the credibility that makes the next change easier.

The third is to celebrate what you finish, not just what you start. Most organizations are good at launches. They're far less good at completion. The people who actually delivered the change, the ones who carried it across the finish line, often don't get acknowledged because by then leadership's attention has moved on. That sends a powerful signal about what the organization actually values.

The deeper point

Your people's response to your next change is shaped by your organization's history with change. You don't get to opt out of that history. You inherit it.

If your people are waiting instead of engaging, the question isn't what's wrong with them. The question is what has the organization taught them about how to behave when change is announced. And what would it take to teach them something different.

This too shall pass is not a character flaw.

It's a learned response. And the organization that taught it can also teach something else.