Episode 4: Change management, resistance, and the cost of doing it "right" | Karen Michael-Cox

Karen Michael-Cox once stepped off the board of a charity to take the CEO seat for six months. In that time she led a nine-month transition to decommission half the service, with safeguards for every patient and staff supported into new roles elsewhere in the sector. By her own description, it was a textbook example of change. She was doxed on social media anyway, and became the target of an internal campaign from the therapists whose service was being wound down. It took her three years to process what happened. Her diagnosis, looking back: the resistance was rational, rooted in fear for their clients and their own jobs, even with runway and support in place. Karen's career started in South Africa during the HIV epidemic in the late 1990s and took her through international development, a rebuild from scratch in the UK (starting as a three-day-a-week administrator), the NHS, and the seventh largest police force in the country. It was years before the charity role, in her first proper leadership position, that she had the realisation she still leads by: you can't fit people into boxes, and you can't make them believe or behave a certain way. That's when she stopped calling herself a change manager. We talk about why resistance is a signal rather than something to shut down, why senior leadership teams are often the real source of resistance, the difference between effective trust and cognitive trust, and why a sound plan alone was never going to be enough. A conversation for anyone leading change, absorbing the backlash for doing the right thing, or trying to work out why logic alone never seems to land. 0:00 Why we can't stop challenging each other's beliefs 0:58 Meet Karen: from HIV policy work in South Africa to UK leadership 2:41 Losing the right to work, and climbing back from a three-day-a-week admin role 3:27 Why strategy worked in international development, and stopped working in the UK 5:23 The delivery architecture is broken 7:27 The four cogs with no engine 8:35 The transformation director as the engine of change 9:50 Whose change is it really? 10:54 Why resistance usually starts with senior leadership 12:49 Stepping off the board to turn a charity around 14:02 Textbook change, and then the backlash 16:05 What the resistance was actually about 17:16 From change manager to manager of change 21:41 The three role stressors killing your team 24:19 Effective trust versus cognitive trust 28:14 Advice for anxious CEOs: slow down Follow Applied Change: Instagram:   / appliedchange   TikTok:   / appliedchange   Facebook:   / appliedchangeltd   LinkedIn:   / applied-change-ltd   X: https://x.com/applied_change Website: https://appliedchange.co.uk/