Making Positive Psychology Work

When change keeps coming, your leaders plan harder and work longer to protect their teams, and nobody counts the cost. In this fourth episode of Season 8, The Change Diaries, hosts Katie Beresford, CEO of The Michelle McQuaid Group, and Dr Michelle McQuaid go behind the scenes of the training Michelle has spent the past month running with more than 500 leaders across hospitals, schools, government, aviation and local communities. Michelle shares the five ways leaders respond to change and what each one teaches a team over time (from dodging accountability to waiting to be told), why the leaders who sense and adapt as changes unfold are staying well and getting results, and the nervous system skills, conversation maps and simple heart check that give your leaders a shared language to notice which response they've slipped into and choose the one the moment calls for. 00:57 Michelle describes what she's hearing from leaders in every industry right now: people worn out, no end in sight, and a pace of change our nervous systems weren't built for. 05:58 Michelle unpacks the four most common ways leaders respond to change, controlling, rescuing, avoiding and resisting, and the worry sitting underneath each one. 12:30 Michelle introduces the fifth response, adapting, and why the leaders who sense and adjust as changes unfold are more likely to feel well and to see their changes succeed. 15:39 Michelle explains why leaders can't think their way out of a stress response, and the see, soothe and settle skills that get blood and oxygen back to the thinking brain. 18:30 Katie shares why leaders need to practise these tools when they don't need them, borrowing from how paramedics stay calm at a critical scene. 20:24 Michelle walks through what each response teaches a team over time, from a leader who rewrites everyone's work to one who leaves people waiting to be told. 30:38 Michelle explains how she helps leaders assess their own approach without judgment or shame, using a leader chart and a team chart that are hard to unsee once you've seen them. 33:34 Michelle answers whether adapting is always best: it depends on the context, the resources and how much energy the team has left for this change. Take our free five-minute change survey to see how you're navigating change right now at thechangelabs.com. Want to go deeper? Join our new Change Fatigue Antidote mini-masterclass, live in October, where Michelle teaches the five change approaches and shares the leader and team charts, conversation maps and playbooks, at thechangelabs.com.

Are restructures causing distress and fatigue for your leaders and teams? We've found that whether people feel safe enough to be honest early about how a change is landing is the single biggest difference between changes that succeed and changes that don't. In this episode, Katie takes us behind the scenes of a large educational institution navigating a restructure, senior leadership changes and new psychosocial hazard obligations at the same time. She shares how they used the five HEART factors, honour feelings, engage purposefully, appreciate strengths, reach out and take tiny steps, to break the change into smaller moments, and how their leaders moved from overwhelmed and discouraged to equipped and energised. 00:03 Katie outlines what the institution was facing: a restructure, senior leaders leaving, changing roles and arriving (including a new CEO), and new psychosocial hazard obligations, all landing at once. 04:20 Katie explains how honouring feelings worked in practice: executives committed to talking about hard things, and every team used the four-question safety check chat to name what was working, what was a struggle, what they were learning and what to try next. 08:32 Katie describes engaging purposefully through learning goals set alongside performance goals, so people had something within their control even when the restructure wasn't, and every leader got the same training no matter when they joined. 13:50 Katie shares how appreciating strengths through team mapping revealed superpowers, collision points and gaps, and shifted one of their top hazards, inadequate reward and recognition. 17:57 Katie explains why reaching out for help was hardest for siloed faculties and for senior executives who felt they should have the answers, and how playful practice helped them unlearn that. 21:51 Michelle and Katie connect nervous system regulation to asking for help: the leaders who could settle themselves were the ones who could look up, get curious and find solutions beyond their own group. 25:51 Katie shares how taking tiny steps happened through regular group coaching, starting with the executive team because they're the most contagious people in any workplace. 29:59 Katie defines what success looked like: leaders moving from overwhelmed and discouraged to equipped and energised, a board now engaged, and a way of leading that carries beyond this restructure. Take our free five-minute change survey to see how you're navigating change right now at thechangelabs.com. Want to go deeper? Explore evidence-based tools for navigating change — including our new Change Fatigue Antifote mini-masterclass — at thechangelabs.com.

How are you protecting your team's strengths, confidence and connection as AI tools become part of everyday work? Our research found that burnt out workers who regularly use AI are using their strengths at less than half the rate of those who rarely use it, are carrying noticeably more self-doubt, and are more likely to turn to a chatbot than a colleague when they're stuck. In this episode, Michelle takes us behind the scenes of her own team's two-year experiment with AI, sharing why they set clear boundaries around when to use it, and the simple strengths-mapping exercise now helping people decide what's theirs to own and what's the tool's to run day to day. 00:54 Michelle unpacks three warning signs from the research: burnt-out regular AI users using their strengths less than half as often as light users, carrying more self-doubt, and turning to the bot before a colleague. 05:20 Michelle traces how her team's AI use evolved from early experimentation two years ago to choosing tools and tasks deliberately, guided by a clear policy about what stays human and what doesn't. 09:54 Michelle describes how passive, prompt-and-wait AI use started disrupting her own flow state, leaving her feeling foggy and slower at work that used to feel effortless and energizing. 13:21 Michelle connects the dots between two findings: as strengths use drops off, self-doubt and quiet isolation from colleagues both tend to rise together. 17:03 Michelle unpacks the five-question HEART check the team built for talking honestly about how AI is landing for each person, from naming feelings to celebrating tiny wins. 23:02 Michelle walks through the simple, paper-and-pen strengths-mapping exercise the team uses to decide what's theirs to own on a task and what's the AI's to run. 28:00 Michelle names the real risk behind all of this: not just learned helplessness, but slowly losing capabilities she's spent years building and isn't ready to give up. Take our free five-minute change survey to see how you're navigating change right now at thechangelabs.com. Want to go deeper? Grab the research and explore evidence-based tools for navigating change — including our new Change Fatigue Antifote mini-masterclass — at thechangelabs.com.

One in 3 workers are carrying grief about the changes happening at work — and our data suggests this runs deeper than just sadness: layers of feeling invisible, abandoned, and distrusted by the people making decisions. In this fourth episode of Season 7 — The Change Fatigue Remedy Series — Dr Michelle McQuaid sits down with Dr Margaret Wheatley, renowned teacher, advisor, and author of Restoring Sanity, to explore why leaders often transmit the very fear they're trying to protect their teams from — and what it takes to build an island of sanity where people can find refuge from the chaos, trust each other, and do meaningful work together. Drawing on five decades of working with leaders, Meg shows what it takes to build an island of sanity, why acknowledging grief — not fixing it — is what moves people forward, and how leaders create the conditions for creativity, generosity and kindness to be the norm. 01:37 Meg explains why leadership is harder now than it has ever been — and what fear is doing to people's capacity to create, care and contribute. 04:41 Meg shares why planning for a steady state is no longer possible — and why uncertainty, not pace, is now every leader's defining challenge. 07:05 Meg introduces Islands of Sanity — why leaders need to create a boundried space within their teams where people can find refuge from the chaos, trust each other, and do meaningful work together. 11:40 Meg outlines what makes an island of sanity work: being together, honouring each other, and trusting you won't abandon each other when things get hard. 19:32 Meg reframes where meaning comes from when the old markers no longer hold — and why contributing to others is where most people find their footing again. 27:20 Michelle shares the Change Lab finding that 1 in 3 workers are carrying grief — and Meg unpacks what lies beneath it: feeling abandoned, distrusted and invisible to the people making decisions. 29:21 Meg reframes grief not as a problem to solve but as something to move through together — and why feeling it fully is what allows people to move forward. 33:56 Meg shares a practice for transforming the grief or loneliness you're carrying alone into a sense of shared human experience — and why it's the most powerful tool she teaches. SEE HOW YOU'RE NAVIGATING CHANGE Want to go deeper? Explore evidence-based tools for navigating change — including our self-paced certificate in leading the heart of change — at thechangelabs.com. For more of Meg's wonderful work and books visit: https://margaretwheatley.com/

What if what's defeating us isn't the speed of change but the complexity — multiple crises amplifying each other in ways that no forecasting tool was ever built to handle? In this third episode of Season 7 — The Change Fatigue Remedy Series — Dr Michelle McQuaid sits down with Dr Margaret Heffernan, professor of practice at the University of Bath and author of Embracing Uncertainty, to explore why the focus on efficiency leaves organizations more fragile when complexity hits — and why we need to prioritize optionality instead. Drawing on her work with organizations navigating the polycrisis, Margaret introduces the shift from just-in-time to just-in-case thinking, the early warning system every workplace needs, and what it looks like to trust ourselves and each other in the midst of unpredictability. 01:36 Margaret explains why we struggle with uncertainty — and why the promise that data and models can deliver certainty is oversold. 05:00 Margaret outlines what the world's best forecasters say about how far ahead anyone can reliably predict changes — and what that means for our strategy plans. 08:04 Margaret makes the case for optionality over efficiency: when a surprise comes along, running too lean leaves you more fragile. 12:41 Margaret explains the polycrisis — multiple crises amplifying each other — and why supply chains built for maximum efficiency have become a liability when complexity hit. 19:29 Margaret introduces the shift from just-in-time to just-in-case thinking — and the shares examples of how this builds resilience in workplaces. 26:22 Margaret describes what a language of uncertainty sounds like for leaders: not an admission of defeat, but naming what's complex and opening the conversation to options. 28:03 Margaret outlines the practice of naming your assumptions after a decision — and agreeing in advance on the signals that would tell you the plan isn't playing out as intended. 32:09 Michelle shares what the Change Lab research found at the organisational level: making help-seeking the norm and breaking change into tiny steps so teams can sense, learn, and adapt. Take our free five-minute change survey to see how you're navigating change right now at thechangelabs.com. Want to go deeper? Explore evidence-based tools for navigating change — including our self-paced certificate in leading the heart of change — at thechangelabs.com.