When Change Champions Burn Out

The Hidden Cost of Driving Change and Transformation

Issue 242, December 11, 2025

She was exactly the kind of employee every leader dreams of when launching a change initiative or an organization-wide transformation.

When the organization’s leadership announced the initiative eighteen months ago, she volunteered immediately. She learned the new processes faster than anyone else. She became the steady go-to for confused colleagues, the calm presence in tense project meetings, the translator helping others make sense of where things were heading. She reassured, coached, encouraged, explained, and re-explained when frustration surfaced and resistance boiled over.

Last month, she resigned.

In her exit interview, she was candid: “I believed in this project more than anyone. And that belief nearly destroyed me. I spent eighteen months being relentlessly positive while absorbing everyone else’s negativity. I defended decisions I didn’t fully agree with. I pretended progress was being made during periods when everything felt stuck. I put my own thoughts and feelings aside to maintain positive momentum, and I just can’t do it anymore.”

She didn’t quit the work. She didn’t quit the mission. She simply stopped carrying a burden that others kept ignoring or didn’t want.

Her story isn’t unusual. Change champions, early adopters, transformation architects, and implementation team members carry burdens that go largely unseen and unmeasured. They are expected to sustain belief, clarity, and movement regardless of the personal cost.

In today’s ever-shifting marketplace, organizations must adapt to survive. But the pace, friction, and disruption of ongoing change can make the individuals steering change and transformation vulnerable to burnout. The work can be exciting and intellectually rich, yet organizational inertia and politics can grind down even the most dedicated advocate. Shifting priorities, slow decisions, and cultural undercurrents compound this pressure over time. Burnout among change champions may be one of the least understood, and most consequential, risks in change and transformation. Despite its lack of definition and recognition, those champions number in the many across projects, large and small, and across every type and size of organization. They are the reason change and transformation succeed, and without them, the majority of efforts would fall flat.

As we wrote earlier this fall, burnout in executive ranks is also becoming more prevalent due to the growing complexity, quantity, and speed of inputs and decisions. If you missed that three-part series, explore it and learn. Our change champions represent one more population showing signs of unsustainable strain.

The Invisible Labor of Driving Change

At 2040, we draw an important distinction between visible change and transformation work and invisible change and transformation labor. Visible work consists of project plans, technology implementations, training, milestones, town halls, meetings, and dashboards. Invisible labor is emotional and psychological: absorbing resistance, sustaining optimism, translating complex decisions into meaningful clarity, and upholding belief in outcomes that remain uncertain.

This invisible labor isn’t peripheral; it is the glue that makes the visible work possible. Yet it rarely appears anywhere on a roadmap or budget. It is assumed, not supported.

A 2024 Journal of Applied Psychology study found that employees tasked with advocating for organizational change experienced significantly higher emotional exhaustion than peers, even when performing the same type and volume of work. Researchers identified a specific condition: advocacy strain, the psychological toll of championing change while absorbing the resistance of others.

The advocacy strain operates differently from conventional stress. Change champions aren’t exhausted because they’re doing more tasks. They’re exhausted because they must maintain a positive belief while actively carrying the doubt, uncertainty, and emotions of everyone else.

As sociologist Arlie Hochschild established in her foundational work on emotional labor, we often manage emotions to serve social expectations. In change and transformation, management becomes extreme. Change champions suppress authentic reactions so others can navigate theirs. We reward those who absorb everyone else’s experience but rarely acknowledge what it costs them to do so.

The Positivity Trap

Organizations rarely say, “You must always be positive.” They don’t have to. The expectation is implicit: champions should be upbeat, confident, and unwavering, especially when others are not. This creates what we call the positivity trap, the pressure to project enthusiasm even when there are legitimate questions, risks, or operational realities that deserve honest discussion.

In the newly released expanded edition of our book, The Truth About Transformation: Leading in the Age of AI, Uncertainty, and Human Complexity, we explore how authenticity, not cheerleading, is what allows humans to adapt to change. People don’t need forced hope or optimism. They need trust, transparency, and space to metabolize uncertainty as they redefine themselves in their professional roles and move through transition.

Yet the positivity trap forces change champions into emotional performance. They smile through doubt. They suppress dissonance. They reassure others while internally questioning the feasibility of deadlines or direction. They become the emotional shield protecting the organization from discomfort. Because if discomfort isn’t managed, the human factor can quickly ensure the failure of any project or effort.

A change agent at a client recently shared his own experience, which captured the challenge perfectly and became the inspiration for this week’s article: “I was supposed to make everyone feel confident. I had concerns about the timeline, but raising them would have made me look unsupportive. So I stayed positive, even when I believed we were setting ourselves up for significant failure. At some point, I couldn’t tell the difference between what I really thought and what I was supposed to think.”

This isn’t hope or optimism. It’s emotional containment dressed as enthusiasm. And containment is not leadership; it is unpaid emotional currency that keeps everyone else comfortable. Performance erodes trust; authenticity builds it. The problem is that emotional performance is rewarded, while honest leadership is often treated as resistance.

Absorbing Resistance: Becoming the Lightning Rod

Resistance to change is normal. In fact, resistance is a healthy human response because it reflects fear of loss, disorientation, and identity threat as individuals move through transition cycles towards acceptance. Someone must receive that resistance, interpret it, and help others navigate it. That “someone” is almost always the change champion. Employees don’t direct frustration toward distant executives. Often, they have never even met them in person, or if they did, they would be unable to express potentially negative thoughts without the fear of repercussions. They direct their frustration, then, toward whoever is closest to the change: the advocate in their daily meetings, the colleague walking them through new expectations, the person trying to help.

Over time, change champions accumulate a disproportionate emotional load simply by being available. They are the closest target to the disruption. And every conversation requires emotional processing: listen, validate, redirect, stay calm, don’t take it personally, don’t contradict leadership, don’t make promises, and don’t reveal doubts. This drain is cumulative, not episodic. Each encounter deepens fatigue when multiplied across tens or even hundreds of employees. Over months, it becomes overwhelming and unbearable.

The Translation Burden

Change champions are the interpreters, acting as a bridge. Leadership speaks in strategic abstractions: competitive positioning, digital maturity, and capability building. Employees live in practical questions: What will my job look like? Will my workload increase? Why did we choose this path? Does leadership understand our reality?

Change champions must translate between these two very different worlds. They distill lofty vision into operational reality while communicating front-line needs back up in ways leadership will understand and receive constructively.

This translation is cognitively taxing. It requires holding multiple perspectives simultaneously while anticipating how messages will land across different audiences and calibrating truth without eroding momentum. When leadership’s messaging is overly optimistic, vague, or disconnected from reality, this burden becomes intolerable. The champion must defend decisions they did not help shape while preserving credibility with colleagues they understand deeply. When the champions themselves lose faith in what they’re translating, their identity pays the price.

Identity Investment and Vulnerability

Change champions don’t simply support change and transformation; they identify with it. Their professional reputation becomes entangled with the initiative’s success. At first, this alignment is motivating. Champions feel proud, visible, and purposeful.

But as challenges mount, complexity deepens, and resistance escalates, identity investment becomes vulnerability. Champions publicly defend outcomes they privately question. They take responsibility for the choices they did not make. If the change stalls or fails, they risk being perceived as the face of that failure.

They bet their reputations on variables beyond their control. We call it leadership, but it is often a transfer of risk without a transfer of influence. Burnout is often framed as an individual weakness or lack of resilience. In reality, it is the byproduct of identity entanglement without reciprocal support or authority.

The Support Deficit

Here is the paradox: organizations often invest significant resources to support those who need to change, while assuming the champions need nothing. Training programs help those struggling to adapt. Communication campaigns reassure the hesitant. Extra coaching supports frustrated or confused teams. Adjustment periods accommodate overwhelmed employees. Meanwhile, change champions, who absorb resistance and sustain belief, are expected to cope without assistance because they “seem fine” or “are naturally positive.” Their composure is misinterpreted as immunity rather than performance. In most organizations, resilience is assumed until it breaks, and then it’s blamed on the individual who carried too much for too long.

Champions become isolated, unable to reveal doubts to peers who are also struggling, or to the organization’s leadership who, as the executive sponsors, expect unwavering advocacy. The emotional isolation that this situation and set of expectations creates, for any individual in any role, is one of the strongest precursors to burnout.

Protecting the Protectors

Recognizing change champion burnout as a distinct risk allows organizations to rethink how they support the very people holding change and transformation together. Here’s what helps, not in theory, but in practice.

Create safe spaces for honesty. Champions need protected venues where they can express concerns without jeopardizing credibility or fearing reprisal. This could be small peer cohorts, confidential advocacy retrospectives, or facilitated check-ins that explicitly welcome candid reflection. Confidentiality and trust become critically important for genuinely creating a safe space.

Distribute the emotional load. Responsibility should be rotated or shared so that no single individual continuously absorbs resistance. Emotional labor must be treated as a resource with limits, not an unlimited well. No strategy would spend money recklessly, yet we spend human belief as if it were inexhaustible.

Acknowledge emotional labor as real work. Include it in expectations, job descriptions, recognition, and resourcing. Validation alone reduces isolation and identity strain. Acknowledgement begets authenticity and aids in avoiding the positivity trap or complete ignorance that the emotional work is real.

Give champions genuine influence. If they are accountable for belief, they must have a meaningful voice in decisions they’re expected to defend.

Monitor well-being, not just output. Resilient performance is not the same as wellness. When someone always “seems fine,” it is a signal to check in, not an excuse to check out.

The Organizational Stakes

Burning out change champions isn’t just a wellness issue. It is a strategic threat in this time of constant change. These individuals hold cross-functional relationships with peers whose support is needed. They understand the change or transformation most deeply. They translate vision into action and bring the vision to life. When they disengage or leave, capability disappears. Momentum collapses. And their departure sends a powerful negative signal: if the strongest advocates are exhausted, skeptical teams conclude that the change or transformation itself may not be viable.

Champions are the emotional infrastructure of change. When that infrastructure erodes, so does change and transformation. You can replace a process. You cannot easily replace the trust and relationships that the person built across the organization.

Your Experience Matters

Have you served as a change champion? What frustrated you the most? Were you supported? If you lead transformation, how are you protecting the people carrying the heaviest burden?

Change doesn’t fail because people resist it; it fails when organizations underestimate the cost carried by the people trying to make it real.

We’d love to hear your insights. Share with us on Substack or connect with us on LinkedIn.

To dive deeper into the human psychology underlying change adoption, identity, resistance, leadership, and transformation under uncertainty, explore our archive or pick up a copy of The Truth About Transformation. Understanding the human factor is not the side of change; it is the change.