Your Change Strategy Is Only as Inclusive as the Manager Who Delivers It

Oct 22

12 min read

Why Organisational intent succeeds or fails in everyday management

Organisational change tends to come wrapped in its own language. Operating models, transformation roadmaps and technology rollouts can dominate the conversation, alongside mergers, restructures and consultation periods. But that is the organisational view of change. The employee experiences something quite different.

Those words can make change sound ordered, controlled and almost clinical, but the people impacted by change rarely experience it that way.

I have experienced organisational change from almost every seat in the room.

I have been a manager supporting a team, an employee going through the process myself, a representative listening to colleagues' concerns, an accessibility ERG lead supporting and advocating for employees with accessibility needs and an Autistic person trying to understand what the change meant for me.

Those roles gave me very different views of the same process.

From the centre, there was one change strategy.

Across the organisation, there were hundreds of different experiences of it.

As a leader and manager, people asked me questions I wasn’t equipped to answer.

From the employee perspective, I needed clarity that often did not yet exist, especially as an Autistic employee.

As an employee rep, I saw how two people in the same formal process could receive very different levels of explanation, flexibility and follow-up depending on who their manager happened to be.

A restructure exposes this most sharply because jobs, identity and financial security may all be involved. But the pattern is similar across all aspects of Organisational change, not unique to redundancy.

It appears when a new system is introduced, again when teams are merged, when responsibilities are redistributed, when working arrangements change and when an organisation tries to shift its culture. The formal plan may be consistent, but the local experience rarely is.

That experience changed how I think about inclusion during Organisational change.

Your change strategy is only as inclusive as the manager who delivers it.

This is not to say that managers should carry the whole responsibility. They absolutely should not.

It is simply because strategy reaches the people who are impacted through them.

Change does not arrive in the form of a strategy document

A senior leadership team may approve a carefully written business case, a communication plan, an equality impact assessment and a set of organisational values, but an employee experiences something much more immediate.

For employees, change shows up in much smaller moments. It is the conversation with a manager about what their role will look like next week. It is being given enough time to learn a new system or discovering that an adjustment which worked yesterday no longer fits the new process. A merger can change routines, relationships and expectations almost overnight. Questions matter here too. They can reveal where change is creating problems, but only if people feel able to raise them without being labelled resistant.

The strategy is not the announcement; but the series of interactions that follows.

The manager is not the whole system. But to the person experiencing change, they are often where the system becomes real.

The line manager lottery

My background is in Tech and systems design, so I tend to ask what happens when the design meets reality.

A process can look perfectly sensible on a slide deck, then start to unravel once people actually have to work with it.

The technology itself is only part of the change. How it lands can depend heavily on what happens around it. A manager might make space for people to learn the new system, talk through what will be different and adjust priorities while everyone gets used to it. Elsewhere, the same launch might amount to little more than an email and an expectation to carry on as normal. Same technology, very different experience of change.

CIPD describes line managers as instrumental in implementing organisational policies and developing their teams. That makes their behaviour particularly important during change, when policy, uncertainty and human emotion all meet at once.

The findings from EY's Global Neuroinclusion at Work Study make this even more visible. In its analysis, line manager behaviours accounted for 42% of the Neuroinclusion score, while psychological safety accounted for a further 29%. EY calls the inconsistency a 'line manager lottery'.

Most recently, the 2026 Neurodiversity in Business and Birkbeck report reaches a closely related conclusion: line managers are central to sustainable inclusion, but they need specialist support, clear processes and the confidence to respond effectively to individual needs.

None of this means every manager needs to become an expert in every neurotype.

It does mean that an organisation cannot just delegate inclusion to managers without also giving them the conditions to deliver it.

Why change magnifies exclusion

Change increases ambiguity, cognitive load and the feeling that control is being taken away.

That can affect anyone. For many neurodivergent employees, the impact can be particularly pronounced, though it will never look the same for everyone.

Change can make every day work feel much less predictable. Information arrives quickly, sometimes verbally, and different people do not always give the same answer. Meetings suddenly appear in the diary. Familiar routines start moving around, and people can find themselves working with different managers, tools, locations or expectations before they have really had time to adjust.

Different forms of change create different barriers.

The selection process may reward rapid processing and confident self-promotion.
A technology roll-out may assume that everyone can learn independently from a recorded demonstration.
An organisational culture programme may rely on vague behaviours and unwritten expectations.
A merger may alter relationships and decision routes before anyone has explained the new rules.

Then the employee may be expected to recognise the disadvantage, find the right policy, identify a solution, approach the correct person and explain their needs while their role, competence, identity or security feels uncertain.

Each demand can look small when considered alone.

Together, they can make a supposedly neutral process much harder to access.

Equality of information is not the same as equality of access.

Saying that everyone received the same email or attended the same town hall tells us very little about whether everyone could understand, process and act on the information.

Some people may need written follow-up, whilst others may need information broken into clear steps.

Some may need more time before being asked to respond, and others may need an individual conversation because a broad announcement does not answer the question that matters most to them: what does this mean for me?

Providing those options is not preferential treatment.

It is accessible change delivery.

Silence is not evidence that someone is coping

One of the most uncomfortable lessons from my own experience is how often organisations wait for people to say they are struggling, then treat the absence of a request as evidence that no support is needed.

That logic is especially fragile during change.

The people most affected by uncertainty may also be the least able to formulate a clear request in the moment. They may be processing the announcement, trying to protect their role or professional credibility, worrying about being labelled difficult or incapable, or simply not knowing what an effective adjustment could look like in the new context.

Employees should not have to navigate the organisation perfectly just to get access to support. If they need to work out who to approach, how to phrase the request and when it is safe to raise it, the burden of making inclusion work has already been pushed back onto them.

That is no longer empowerment; it is more about access through persistence.

A manager does not need to diagnose a colleague or anticipate every possible need, but they can, however, make it easier to speak.

Sometimes it comes down to fairly ordinary things. Checking that someone has understood what is changing. Sending the information aftwards so they don’t have to rely on memory. Seeing whether an existing adjustment still make sense in the new setup. Even noticing that someone who would normally contribute has gone quite can matter, without turning that into an immediate conversation about why.

Good management and leadership is rarely about having every answer.

It is recognising when the ordinary process has created a barrier and knowing where to go next.

For disabled employees, this is also more than good practice. Acas guidance makes clear that employers must make reasonable adjustments and ensure that other people do what is needed for those adjustments to work. An adjustment that exists in a policy but disappears during a restructure, system implementation or change to working practices is not effective in practice.

Managers cannot carry what the organisation has not designed

The title of this article could be read as placing the responsibility or blame at line managers.

That is not my argument.

Many managers are themselves directly affected by the change they are expected to deliver. They may receive a script shortly before speaking to their team, told not to speculate, while being given no useful route for resolving the questions that follow. They may be expected to absorb fear, anger and uncertainty while managing their own.

Then, if the experience is inconsistent, the organisation describes it as a manager capability problem.

Sometimes it could be, but often it is a system design problem that has surfaced through the manager.

Managers need authority, not just responsibility.

It’s difficult to support people through change when you are learning about it at the same time they are. Managers need early access to reliable information, clarity about what is undecided and time for proper conversations with their teams. They also need room to adapt the approach when something is creating a barrier. Giving managers responsibility for supporting people, while requiring them to follow a process they cannot change, leaves them carrying accountability without the authority to act.

They also need specialist support that is available at the point of need.

A two-hour awareness session delivered months earlier cannot carry the weight of a complex adjustment question during a live restructure, technology roll-out or operating-model transition.

Training can build confidence, but confidence without process, authority or access to expertise has obvious limits.

Inclusive change cannot depend on individual managerial goodwill.

Good managers matter enormously, but the responsibility is on the Organisation to still make good management possible.

Inclusive change begins before delivery

By the time a manager receives a communication pack, many of the choices that shape inclusion have already been made.

The purpose, pace, technology, governance, training, workload assumptions and measures of success may all have been fixed. If accessibility is considered only at the point of communication, the manager is being asked to compensate for decisions they did not make.

Inclusive change starts with looking beyond the people running the programme. Who else will feel the impact? That means thinking about routines that may be disrupted, relationships that could change and the extra cognitive or emotional load the transition might create. It also means noticing whose voice is missing and giving managers enough room to adapt when the standard approach simply does not work.

People need chance to question assumptions and shape what is being implementated before decisions are final. Asking for their views before decisions have been made is communication, not co-design.

Inclusion must be built into the operating model of the change: its decision rights, timelines, systems, training, communications, support and escalation routes.

What inclusive delivery looks like

Inclusive managers do not remove all uncertainty. That would be impossible.

But they can reduce avoidable uncertainty by:

Be honest when you do not have the answer. Uncertainty is difficult enough without people having to work out whether they are being given the full picture. A simple, “I don’t know yet, but I’ll come back to you by Friday” is often more useful than trying to reassure someone before the facts are clear.

Translating information into impact. They help people understand what the organisational message means for their role, priorities, team and immediate next steps.

Preserving agency wherever they can. Even when the overall decision is fixed, people can still be given meaningful choices about how conversations happen, what support is present and how they provide input.

Making participation real. They create routes for employees to surface impacts, test assumptions and influence implementation. They do not wait until after launch to ask what the programme overlooked.

Ensuring adjustments are part of the process. They do not treat accessibility as a separate conversation to be added only after someone struggles.

Following through. Trust is built less by the warmth of the first conversation than by whether the promised answer, referral or action arrives.

Feeding patterns back into the system. When several people are confused by the same stage, the answer is not simply to hold more individual conversations. The process itself needs to change.

These behaviours sound simple.

Under pressure, they require time, skill and organisational backing.

A practical framework for enabling managers

Before asking managers to lead people through change, test whether they have six essential conditions.

Context. Managers need to understand why the change is happening, what outcome it is intended to create and what is still genuinely unknown.

Clarity. They need to know what is changing, what is not changing and what the immediate implications are for roles, priorities, relationships and ways of working.

Capacity. They need protected time to process the change themselves, learn new systems or processes, hold individual conversations and follow through on what they promise.

Authority. They need permission to adapt how change is delivered, preserve existing adjustments and respond when the standard route creates a barrier.

Support. They need accessible materials, specialist expertise, a reliable source of information and an escalation route that works at the point of need.

Feedback. They need a credible way to surface patterns, challenge assumptions and influence the wider programme when local experience shows that the design is not working.

When one of these conditions is missing, the gap does not disappear. Instead, the manager and the employee experiencing the change have to carry it.

Measure what lands, not only what launches

Organisations often judge change by whether the announcement went out, consultation milestones were met, integration plans were completed, training was delivered, roles were filled, systems went live or financial targets were achieved.

Those measures matter.

They do not tell you whether the change was inclusive.

To understand that, organisations need to look at consistency of experience.

Did employees receive answers to the same questions, regardless of team? Could people use the new system confidently? Were workloads realistic during the transition? Were training formats accessible? Did managers know where to escalate? Could people challenge an error without being framed as resistant to change? Did workarounds, absence or attrition increase in particular groups?

Completion tells you whether an activity happened. Adoption, confidence, trust, accessibility and the distribution of benefits tell you more about how the change landed.

A process can be procedurally consistent while being experientially exclusionary.

In technology, we would not validate a system by looking only at its architecture diagram. We would test how it behaves under real conditions.

Change strategy deserves the same discipline.

That means establishing a baseline before the change, listening to lived experience throughout it, using employee voice while decisions can still be influenced, examining outcomes across different groups and treating repeated local failures as evidence about the wider design.

The gap between intention and experience

This gap sits at the heart of my wider work and my doctoral research: how do leadership behaviours, organisational systems and workplace structures turn neuroinclusive intent into everyday experience?

I am less interested in whether an organisation can write the right policy than in whether a person can feel its effect when they need it.

A values statement can say that everyone belongs.

The employee learns whether that is true when the pressure rises.

When there is little time. When options narrow. When the normal routine disappears. When a manager must decide whether to pause, clarify, adapt or continue regardless.

That is where culture becomes visible.

What people remember

Looking back, some of the most difficult parts of change were not caused by one announcement or one decision.

They came from the uncertainty around it. The inconsistency. The repeated need to translate my own needs into a process not designed with them in mind.

I also remember what it felt like to be the manager expected to provide stability while receiving very little certainty myself.

Both sides of that experience matter.

I do not want managers to become experts in every diagnosis or difference.

I want them to be supported to be curious, clear, consistent and responsive. I want them to know what they can change, where they can get help and what the organisation expects them to do when the standard process excludes someone.

Because if inclusion depends on finding an exceptionally empathetic manager, it is not embedded.

If an adjustment works only because an employee has the energy to keep chasing it, it is not accessible.

And if a change process works best for people who can process ambiguity quickly, understand unwritten rules and advocate confidently under pressure, it is not neutral.

Change does not just test your strategy. It reveals your culture.

Whether the change involves roles, technology, processes, location, leadership or culture, employees encounter it locally before they experience it strategically.

Employees will not remember every slide from the town hall.

They will remember the conversation with their manager.

Whether they were given time. Whether they were heard. Whether someone came back with the answer. Whether an adjustment survived contact with the process. Whether the organisation's stated values were present when they became inconvenient to uphold.

Your change strategy is only as inclusive as the manager delivering it.

And your manager can only deliver what the organisation has equipped, authorised and expected them to make real.

Authored by Ian Baynham

Ian Baynham is an Autistic technology leader, researcher and Co-Founder of Unlabelled & Limitless. His work examines how leadership, organisational systems and workplace design shape neuroinclusive employee experiences, linking lived experience to practical organisational change.