Why Your Team Navigates Change Alone
And What Happens When They Stop
Your team is already trying to figure out where they stand. The question is whether they're navigating with a real map or a distorted one.
How do you make sense of everything going on around you?
You look to others.
Not consciously, usually. You don't walk into a meeting and think "I need to compare my emotional state to my coworkers right now." But you do it anyway. You read faces. You notice who seems calm and who seems rattled. You clock whether your boss is acting normal or performing normal. And from all of that, you draw conclusions about how you should feel.
This is not a weakness. It's how humans are wired.
Leon Festinger figured this out in 1954. His social comparison theory, published in Human Relations, is one of the most cited papers in social psychology. The core idea is simple and hard to argue with. When we don't have objective standards to evaluate our own opinions and abilities, we evaluate by comparing to others. We use people around us as a yardstick to understand where we stand.
Seventy years of research later, nobody seriously disputes this. It's foundational. And it explains something I see in every single workshop I facilitate with teams going through change.
The Problem Nobody Talks About
Your team is already doing this comparison. Every day. In every meeting. On every Slack channel. They're looking around, trying to figure out where they stand relative to everyone else.
But they're doing it silently. And they're doing it with terrible data.
Think about what your team actually sees when they try to orient themselves during a period of change. They see curated Slack messages. They see polished meeting performances. They see people who are struggling but performing fine because that's what professionals do. They see LinkedIn posts from peers at other companies who seem to have it all figured out.
None of that is real. Or at least, none of it is the full picture.
So everyone navigates change in isolation, using distorted signals as their comparison points. The actual landscape of how people are doing remains completely invisible.
This is the hidden cost of change that never shows up on a project plan. It's not that people resist change. It's that they can't accurately calibrate where they are in relation to everyone else. And without that calibration, they either overestimate how behind they are (and panic) or underestimate the struggle around them (and lose empathy for their teammates).
What Happens When You Make It Visible
A couple of weeks ago, I ran a short session on staying human through change. About a dozen people in a room, most of them navigating different kinds of disruption at work. AI adoption. Restructures. New leadership. The usual buffet.
Each participant built a LEGO model representing the one change taking the most energy from them right now. Then they shared what they built and what it meant.
Nothing groundbreaking so far. People felt heard. That matters, but it's not the moment that shifts everything.
The shift happened next.
We placed all the models on a bar. A physical spectrum. "I've got this" on one end. "I'm swirling" on the other. And a middle ground we called "Some days yay, some days nay."
Each person had to pick up their model and physically place it on the spectrum. No hiding. No performing. Just an honest placement.
What emerged was a real picture of where everyone actually sat.
This is Festinger's social comparison theory made literal. Instead of silently comparing themselves to curated signals, everyone in the room got accurate data. Real data. The kind that's almost impossible to get in a normal work environment.
The Three Things That Happen Simultaneously
When a group sees the honest landscape, three shifts happen at once.
First, validation. The person in the middle of the spectrum looks around and sees eight other people right there with them. They're not uniquely struggling. They're not behind. They're exactly where most people are. The relief on people's faces when they see this is visible and immediate.
Second, orientation. Someone is closer to "I've got this" on a similar type of change. Now there's a model to learn from. Not a LinkedIn post from a stranger. A real person in the room who has navigated something similar and come out the other side. Festinger called this upward comparison, and when it happens with accurate data instead of curated performance, it motivates rather than demoralizes.
Third, generosity. Someone is struggling with something you've already moved through. You can see it. Literally see it in where their model sits. And something activates. You realize you have something to offer. Festinger called this downward comparison, but it doesn't feel like looking down. It feels like recognizing that your experience has value to someone else.
None of these three things happen when comparison stays silent. All three happen almost instantly when the real landscape becomes visible.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
Here's the part that most leaders miss. The decline of trusted relationships at work makes this problem worse every year.
Gallup found that among hybrid workers, the percentage who said they had a best friend at work dropped from 22% in 2019 to 17% in 2022. For workers under 35, the decline was even steeper. And Gallup's own data shows that the connection between having a work friend and feeling committed to a job has actually grown stronger since the pandemic. The people who need trusted relationships the most are the ones least likely to have them.
That matters here because a trusted friend at work is the natural correction to distorted social comparison. When you have someone you're honest with, you get real data. You say "I'm drowning" and they say "Yeah, me too" or "Here's what helped me." The comparison becomes accurate. The calibration works.
But when that trusted relationship doesn't exist, and increasingly it doesn't, people are left navigating change with nothing but performance data from coworkers who are also performing.
That's how you get a team where everyone thinks they're the only one struggling. Where everyone assumes they're behind because nobody else seems rattled. Where the real conversation happens in the car on the way home instead of in the room where it could actually help.
Sometimes a Workshop Doesn't Solve Change
I want to be honest about something. The session I described didn't solve anyone's change. Nobody walked out with a new AI strategy or a reorganized team structure or a roadmap for the next quarter.
What they walked out with was clarity. An accurate picture of where they stood in relation to others navigating similar disruption. The knowledge that they weren't alone. The realization that their experience, wherever it sat on the spectrum, was legitimate and shared.
Karl Weick, the organizational theorist who developed sensemaking theory, argued that people construct meaning through social narrative. We don't make sense of ambiguity alone. We do it by talking about it, comparing interpretations, and building a shared understanding of what's happening.
The problem is that most organizations make this kind of honest, collective sensemaking nearly impossible. The meetings are too structured. The culture is too performative. The stakes feel too high to say "I don't know how I feel about this yet."
So the sensemaking goes underground. Everyone builds their own private story about the change, and those stories never get compared, corrected, or integrated. The organization ends up with a dozen different interpretations of reality, none of them tested against each other.
That's what the spectrum placement fixes. Not forever. Not comprehensively. But in that moment, with those people, the private stories become visible and the collective picture finally emerges.
Sometimes that's exactly what's needed to see the path forward.
The Takeaway for Leaders
If your team is navigating change right now (and whose isn't), the question isn't whether they're comparing themselves to each other. They are. Festinger proved that seventy years ago and nothing about human nature has changed since.
The question is whether they're comparing with real data or performing data.
If they're doing it silently, with curated signals, they're making decisions based on a distorted map. They'll either underestimate the challenge and lose patience with teammates who are struggling, or overestimate how far behind they are and disengage.
If you can find a way to make the real landscape visible, even briefly, three things happen. People feel validated. People find models to learn from. And people discover they have something to offer.
That's not a team building exercise. That's a navigational correction. And most teams are overdue for one.
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