The Grossman Group and Harris Poll's 2025 Change Tipping Point survey asked 905 full-time U.S. employees and 256 VP-level-and-above business leaders a deceptively simple question: how much major change can an organization actually absorb in a year? The gap between the two answers is the clearest explanation I've seen for why so many well-designed change initiatives quietly fail.
The Gap Is the Story
Employees report they can realistically absorb one to two major changes a year. Leaders expect three to four over the next two years (The Grossman Group / Harris Poll, 2025, p. 4). That's not a small planning error. It's roughly double the load employees say they can handle, planned for, budgeted, and communicated as though it were sustainable. One in four major changes fail outright, with employee-reported consequences including burnout, dissatisfaction, workload spikes, and turnover (The Grossman Group / Harris Poll, 2025, pp. 4, 14–15).
AI makes this worse in a specific way. It's the most frequent type of major change organizations are running right now, and also the hardest to implement, driving roughly one-third of strategic and process transformations (The Grossman Group / Harris Poll, 2025, p. 4). Organizations aren't just asking people to absorb more change in general. They're asking people to absorb more of the specific kind of change that's proving hardest to land well.
Leadership Presence Changes the Odds
The 5.5x figure is worth pausing on. Change is 5.5 times more likely to fail without visible leadership and effective communication (The Grossman Group / Harris Poll, 2025, pp. 4, 20). Effective communication on its own triples the likelihood of success, and clear, credible messaging can as much as double it (The Grossman Group / Harris Poll, 2025, pp. 4, 18). Leadership presence in this data isn't a ceremonial add-on to the change plan. It's one of the largest single variables in whether the change lands.
And yet leaders consistently overestimate how well they're doing it. Ninety-nine percent of leaders believe they communicated change well, while only 75% of employees agree (The Grossman Group / Harris Poll, 2025, p. 21). That 24-point perception gap means a leader can feel confident about their communication while a quarter of their workforce is experiencing something different. Self-perception isn't a reliable gauge here. It takes a feedback loop that actually tests received impact, not intended impact.
What Leaders Commonly Misread
The default response to failed change is to improve the plan, add a project layer, or repeat the message louder. Employees assess change through a different filter entirely: whether they feel heard, supported, involved, and able to make sense of what the change means for them specifically. A better slide deck doesn't answer that. A leader who is present, consistent, and honest about what's uncertain does.
What This Means, and What It Doesn't
This data doesn't prove that any particular leadership development approach, including Leadership Stability™ work, causes change initiatives to succeed. What it validates is the mechanism: change capacity is not infinite, and sequencing, sensemaking, and leadership presence are part of execution, not soft additions bolted onto it afterward. A leader who can regulate urgency, clarify tradeoffs, and communicate credibly under pressure increases the organization's ability to metabolize change instead of merely enduring it. Whether a specific leader can do that consistently, especially across their third or fourth major change of the year, comes down to whether they still have the internal capacity left to lead it well.
Why the Perception Gap Persists
The 24-point gap between leaders who believe they communicated well and employees who agree isn't primarily a communication-skills problem. It's a feedback problem. A leader delivering a message experiences their own intent, clarity, and effort. An employee receiving that message experiences only what actually landed, filtered through everything else competing for their attention that week. Without a structured way to test received impact rather than assume it, that gap has no natural mechanism to close. It simply persists, quietly, through initiative after initiative, while leadership continues to believe the communication side of change is handled.
What Structural Churn Adds to the Picture
The change-absorption gap isn't happening against a stable backdrop. The World Economic Forum estimates that 22% of current jobs will be affected by structural churn by 2030, with 170 million jobs potentially created and 92 million displaced (World Economic Forum, 2025, pp. 5, 18). That's a forecast of surveyed employer expectation, not a guaranteed outcome, but it describes the environment change initiatives are landing in: not a single transformation against a steady baseline, but recurring identity, role, and capability transitions layered on top of whatever change program is already underway. Sequencing and leadership presence matter more, not less, against that backdrop.
The Practical Takeaway
If your organization is running three or four major initiatives while your people can realistically absorb one or two, the fix isn't necessarily fewer initiatives. Sometimes it is. More often, the leverage is in sequencing, honest communication about what's changing and why, and leaders who are regulated enough to stay visible and credible through the entire arc of the change, not just the kickoff. That last piece is where most transformation plans quietly run out of leadership capacity before they run out of budget. A leader who is already stretched past their own limit is the least equipped person in the building to close a 24-point perception gap, no matter how good the communications plan looks on paper.