Leading through transition is its own kind of weight. So is going through it yourself.
Whether you are navigating your own transition or holding steady while your people navigate theirs, the experience of a leader is different, and it is rarely supported. &Koh works with leaders and teams to make transition visible, manageable, and survivable, so that change leaves people more capable rather than more depleted.
The two things being asked of you
When an organisation goes through change, leaders are asked to do two hard things at once, and usually given support for neither.
The first is to lead others through it: to deliver a message you may only half believe, to hold the official line while privately carrying the weight of what it means for real people, to keep a team steady when you have few answers yourself.
The second, often at the very same time, is to go through it yourself: your own role changing, your own team dissolving, your own sense of who you are at work quietly coming apart, with no one above you checking how you are landing.
Doing both at once, while appearing composed, is one of the loneliest positions in working life. It has a cost, and that cost is rarely named.
When it's your own transition
Leaders are expected to be the steady ones, which means a leader's own ending often goes unacknowledged, including by the leader themselves. You are still holding others, so you don't stop to notice that you are also falling.
The loss is real: of role, of standing, of the team and the way of working that gave the job meaning. The dissonance is the same one anyone in transition feels, the gap between what is ending on paper and what is ending inside you, but it is sharpened by the expectation that you keep performing steadiness for everyone else.
You don't have to. There is space here to put your own transition on the table, work through what is hard to say, and find your own footing again, without an audience and without having to hold anyone but yourself.
When you're leading others through it
Leading people through transition well is a skill, not a personality trait, and almost no one is taught it. The instinct is to focus on the new beginning, the plan, the reassurance, the optimistic town hall, and to skip past the endings and the uncertain in-between that your people are actually living in.
But that in-between is where the real work sits. When endings go unacknowledged, teams carry an invisible load: unspoken grief, eroded trust, a quiet disconnection that shows up later as disengagement, attrition, and a productivity drag no one quite traces back to its source.
&Koh helps leaders attend to the whole transition, not just the announcement: how to acknowledge endings honestly, how to hold a team through the uncertain middle, and how to build the kind of transition agility that means each change leaves people more capable of facing the next one, rather than more depleted.
Teams in transition
A team going through change is not a collection of individuals having the same experience. People land differently: some are knocked flat, some go frantic, some keep showing up to a role that has already changed, some withdraw while still in the room. Left unspoken, these differences pull a team apart at exactly the moment it most needs to hold together.
Working with a team directly makes the unspoken visible. Using hands-on, visual methods, people can put what they are actually experiencing on the table, see how the team as a whole is moving through the change, and find a shared, honest way forward. It works precisely because it does not rely on people finding the right words on the spot, which makes it inclusive of every kind of mind on the team.
If you want to understand how this work happens, the methods and what they surface, you can read more here. [Our Approach]
The cost no one is accounting for
If you are responsible for people going through change, you already see the part that goes unmeasured: the colleague who has quietly checked out, the team that never quite recovered its trust, the capable person who left six months after a restructure for reasons no exit interview captured.
Every transition handled as a logistics exercise, rather than a human one, leaves the same residue in real people: grief that goes unspoken, trust that erodes, attention spent managing uncertainty instead of doing the work. We call it the grief tax, the accumulating cost of transition that no one designed for. It is paid first by people, and then, inevitably, by the organisation.
And it is measurable. Unsupported transition is associated with a productivity loss in the region of 20 to 30 percent, lasting 12 to 24 months after the change. That figure is not an abstraction. It is what it looks like when a workforce of real people is left to carry their endings alone.
The point is not that change is avoidable. It is that this cost is. When transition is made visible and supported, the same change can leave people more capable rather than more depleted. That is the difference between change that quietly extracts from your people and change that builds their capacity to face the next one, and it is better for them and for the organisation at the same time.
[Read the findings →]
For people-leaders who want the full picture
Quiet Grief, Hidden Costs — a briefing for senior leaders and people-professionals on the grief tax: what unacknowledged transition costs an organisation, why it goes unmeasured, and how to design change that builds capacity rather than draining it. [C-suite briefing - Quiet Grief, Hidden Costs :: A C‑Suite Briefing on Transition Dissonance]
Ways to work together
Coaching for leaders. One-to-one, neuroinclusive support for a leader navigating their own transition, or wanting to lead their people through change well. Shaped entirely around your situation. [Get in touch →]
Team sessions. Working directly with an intact team or cohort to make transition visible and navigable together, using hands-on, visual methods, such as LEGO Serious Play that include every kind of mind. [Get in touch →]
For organisations. Bring this work in across a change programme, a restructure, or a redundancy process, so that transition is designed for rather than left to chance. [Get in touch to design something →]
Change will keep coming. Whether it depletes your people or builds them is a design choice. &Koh helps leaders and teams make transition something you move through with agency, not something that quietly costs you for years.
[Get in touch] · [Our Approach]