What is Change Management?
Let me explain what change management is and why I believe it is the number one skill school leaders and teachers aspiring to leadership must master to navigate an educational landscape that is constantly shifting under our feet.
If you have spent any time on my website, social media, or videos, you have probably heard me say this before: education has not prepared us with the same caliber of change management training as other fields like healthcare, technology, human resources, or business. In those industries, managers know the term. Many organizations even have entire departments dedicated solely to the work of change management.
In schools, we lead constant change but are rarely trained to understand it using the research and frameworks that explain how people and organizations actually respond to change.
So what is change management, exactly?
Change management is a formal, research-backed discipline grounded in psychology, organizational science, and behavioral research. At its core, it is the structured practice of helping people successfully move from “how things are now” to “how things need to be next.”
If you are a school leader, you know that in practice, this can be very difficult to actually do.
Said in a more accessible way for education, change management is a management practice, and I would argue a leadership strategy, that focuses on the human side of change: how people understand change, react to it, adopt new behaviors, and sustain new ways of working over time. Decades of research across industries show that when change is managed intentionally, initiatives are far more likely to succeed.
In schools, change management is the difference between announcing an initiative and actually seeing it take hold in classrooms, teams, and systems. More specifically:
It is the difference between surface-level compliance and genuine adoption. It is an approach that supports positive morale and contributes to a healthy school culture.
It is what helps school leaders anticipate resistance instead of being blindsided by it, pace change instead of overwhelming people, and build trust while still moving work forward.
It is also what can help prevent school leaders from becoming overwhelmed and burned out, and faculty and staff from feeling so depleted that they want to flee for a new job.
Most importantly, change management gives us something far more reliable than instinct alone. It replaces “hoping people will get on board” with a disciplined approach to how change is introduced, led, and sustained.
Research in education mirrors what many of us feel intuitively: change in schools is complex, layered, and often poorly matched to the strategies used to lead it, if strategies are used to lead it at all. But let’s be honest. How many of us have relied, or are currently relying, solely on our charisma and vision to move people and programs along?
A widely cited research publication from RTI International, Managing Change in Education: Practical Strategies to Improve Change Outcomes in K–12 by Laurie Baker and Joseph Edney (2018), offers one of the clearest frameworks I have seen for understanding why change in schools feels so hard, even when the change itself is well intentioned.
Have you ever paused, alone or with your leadership team, to think about the different layers of change before you started leading it?
What I mean by that is this: have you ever stopped to consider what kind of change you are actually leading? Have you sat with your team to talk specifically about the following?
Where does the change come from? Is it a planned change, which includes strategic initiatives, new curricula, schedules, and programs? Is it an emergent change that reflects continuous adaptation, improvement cycles, and evolving practice over time, often with no clear endpoint? Or is it a response change, arising from crises, compliance mandates, emergencies, or political and public pressure?
Each type of change necessitates a different approach.
You also need to identify whether your change is structural or cultural. Structural change affects systems, schedules, roles, policies, and tools. Cultural change affects beliefs, trust, norms, professional identity, commitment, and mindset.
Again, the answer to whether a change is structural or cultural demands a distinct leadership approach.
And how about the scale of the change?
Some changes involve fine-tuning small daily practices. Others involve incremental adjustments. Some require modular transformation at the grade level, department, or program level. Others demand full system transformation across a school or district.
Most educators are navigating multiple types of change at once, without shared language, frameworks, or training to distinguish between them. That is not a personal failure. It is a training gap.
Not managing change because no one ever taught you, is why educators often feel exhausted, cynical, or resistant even when change efforts are thoughtful and well intentioned.
As a school leader, or a teacher aspiring to leadership, which of the following terms could you clearly define right now?
- Change saturation
- Change fatigue
- Employee resistance
- Change readiness
- ADKAR
- Adoption versus compliance
- Sponsor support
- Organizational heat mapping
If only a few of these concepts feel familiar, you are not behind. You were simply never taught the science of change.
Bringing the discipline of change management into classrooms, leadership offices, and school systems is not about adding jargon. It is about giving educators the tools to reduce burnout, navigate resistance with confidence, and lead change in ways that actually stick.
My goal and mission are to ensure that both experienced educators and the next generation of school leaders develop true mastery of change management so they can lead with clarity, steadiness, and confidence in environments that demand constant adaptation.
According to Prosci’s longitudinal research across thousands of initiatives, projects with effective change management are up to seven times more likely to meet or exceed their objectives than those without a structured change approach. Education should not be the exception to that rule.
I want to support schools and leaders in learning change management strategy, methodology, and technique.
This commitment is what led me to create Change Labs, immersive workshops and trainings designed specifically for educators and school leadership teams. Schools bring me in for summer retreats, leadership off-sites, and in-year professional learning to build shared language, diagnose change fatigue, and develop practical strategies for leading initiatives with intention rather than urgency alone.
For individual leaders, I also offer a growing collection of research-grounded digital resources designed to support real decision-making under pressure, from navigating resistance to assessing change readiness and managing fatigue.
Whether through hands-on workshops or self-paced tools, my work is focused on one thing: helping educators lead change without losing themselves or their people in the process. ▲▲
