I'm always looking for a good leadership lesson in the midst of normal, everyday, mundane life. I'm afraid I found one the last two weeks right outside my front door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We live in a small HOA neighborhood with narrow streets \u2014 so narrow there's no real street parking. People try anyway, half a vehicle up on the sidewalk, half on the street. It's a fire hazard waiting to happen, which is probably why our HOA is notorious for threatening violations on anyone who parks there. There are guest spots scattered through the neighborhood, but that's a story for another post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This summer, it was time to seal the streets. Since the streets are maintained by the HOA and not the city, our property management company handled the coordination. And to be fair, the plan looked solid on paper: an email with maps, instructions, even color-coded directions for how to enter and exit the neighborhood while the work was underway. Clear plan. Should have been simple execution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Until the contractors showed up a day early and started without telling anyone. They were halfway through Day One's work before the property management company even found out. Cue a flurry of frustrated back-and-forth emails \u2014 and, in the middle of it, homeowners and renters were told: don't drive on the freshly sealed side of the street for 24 hours, use the other side instead. They'd come back the following week to finish the second side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here's what those two days actually looked like: mayhem. Cars driving on the wrong side, undoing the work as it dried. The mail truck \u2014 the actual mail truck \u2014 drove straight through the barricaded section to maintain the normal route. As they say, \"Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night,\" apparently, but somebody forgot to loop in the mail carrier about neighborhood paving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I watched it happen again the second week and found myself defaulting to the obvious: I guess people just don't read their email. But then leadership guru John Maxwell's line came to mind, the one I quote often \u2014 \"everything rises and falls on leadership.\" So walking to the grocery store tonight (since I couldn't drive my own car out of my own driveway because of said paving), I asked myself what was actually going wrong here. A few things stood out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first is that the second week was worse than the first \u2014 which is the real tell. Whatever the property management company tried after Day One clearly hadn't worked, and yet their fix for Week Two was\u2026 the same thing, again. Another round of emails. No one from the company on-site directing traffic. No flyers on doors for the people who don't check email. When your first attempt at communication fails, doubling down on that same channel isn't persistence \u2014 it's a refusal to diagnose the actual problem. Leaders circle back and find a different approach; they don't just repeat the last one louder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second thing is that an announcement isn't the same as preparing people for change. This is where my PROSCI change management training from years back keeps surfacing in my head. Their framework, ADKAR, walks people through change in five stages: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement. An email is, at best, an attempt at Awareness. It says nothing about why<\/em> the change matters (Desire), doesn't confirm people actually understood the plan (Knowledge), and does nothing to help them follow through in the moment (Ability) or stick with it once the frustration set in (Reinforcement). We got one stage out of five and called it a communication plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that points to the third thing, the one underneath the other two: when people aren't complying, the instinct is to blame the audience. If only the owners forwarded the email to their renters. If only people read more carefully. If only they followed the rules. I get the frustration \u2014 but that instinct has it backwards. When a message isn't landing at scale, that's not a receiver problem. It's a communicator problem. The job of a leader isn't to issue the correct instructions and then be disappointed when reality doesn't comply \u2014 it's to create clarity in the middle of chaos, however many times and however many different ways that takes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We didn't get that these last two weeks, and the cost is concrete: most of the work that was done is now damaged and will likely need to be redone, later this summer or next year. Somebody pays for that \u2014 either in deferred community projects or in higher HOA dues. That's what a failure of leadership actually costs, even in something as small as street sealing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It's the same dynamic in a Fortune 500 company, a small business, or a little neighborhood in Mill Creek. While the size of the organization changes, the leadership principle doesn't. So here's the question worth sitting with: What are you doing as a leader to communicate and lead people through change \u2014 not just once, but until it actually lands?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When a paving crew jumped the schedule, half my neighborhood ended up parked on wet asphalt \u2014 and it turned into a real-time lesson in why announcements aren’t change management.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":213218,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","advanced_seo_description":"A neighborhood paving mishap became a real-world lesson in change management \u2014 and why repeating a failed message never fixes it.","jetpack_seo_html_title":"A Change Management Lesson from My Neighborhood\u2019s Paving Disaster","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Last month, a paving crew showed up to reseal my neighborhood\u2019s streets a day early \u2014 before the property management company even knew work had started. Two weeks of chaos followed: cars driving on wet asphalt, undone work, frustrated emails flying back and forth.\nHere\u2019s what stood out to me: when the first round of communication failed, the fix wasn\u2019t a different approach \u2014 it was the same email, sent again, louder.\nIt\u2019s a small example, but it\u2019s the same failure I\u2019ve seen play out in Fortune 500 companies and small nonprofits alike: when a message isn\u2019t landing, the problem usually isn\u2019t the audience. It\u2019s the communicator. Real change management \u2014 real ADKAR-style change management \u2014 takes more than an announcement.\n\n#Leadership #LeadershipDevelopment #ExecutiveLeadership #ChurchLeadership #4SIGHTGroup #JonPlotner","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31],"tags":[262,210,148,51,58],"class_list":["post-213216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-main","tag-adkar","tag-change-management","tag-communication","tag-culture","tag-leadership"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/IMG_4167-scaled.webp?fit=2560%2C1920&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pzg9k-TsY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":212598,"url":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/two-types-of-leaders-which-one-are-you-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":213216,"position":0},"title":"Two Types of Leaders: Which One Are You?","author":"Jon Plotner","date":"April 16, 2026","format":false,"excerpt":"","rel":"","context":"In "Main"","block_context":{"text":"Main","link":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/category\/main\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"green plants on soil","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/ruqhpukrn7c.webp?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/ruqhpukrn7c.webp?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/ruqhpukrn7c.webp?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/ruqhpukrn7c.webp?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/ruqhpukrn7c.webp?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1048,"url":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/we-already-do-that\/","url_meta":{"origin":213216,"position":1},"title":"We Already Do That","author":"Jon Plotner","date":"October 3, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"I've heard it what seems like a hundred times \u2014 \"we already do that.\" In an age of leadership information overload, there is no lack of information on leadership. Simply subscribe to a dozen 'leadership gurus,' and your Twitter feed will be filled with today's list of \"how to's\" and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Main"","block_context":{"text":"Main","link":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/category\/main\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":212638,"url":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/the-task-you-keep-avoiding-is-costing-you-more-than-you-think\/","url_meta":{"origin":213216,"position":2},"title":"The Task You Keep Avoiding Is Costing You More Than You Think","author":"Jon Plotner","date":"May 1, 2026","format":false,"excerpt":"There\u2019s a particular kind of weight that follows you around \u2014 and it\u2019s not the weight of what you\u2019ve done. It\u2019s the weight of what you haven\u2019t started yet. The project sitting in the corner of your mind. The plan you need to build. 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Register to join us and get the Zoom link HERE.","rel":"","context":"In "Main"","block_context":{"text":"Main","link":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/category\/main\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/IMG_0626.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/IMG_0626.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/IMG_0626.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/IMG_0626.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":213217,"href":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213216\/revisions\/213217"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonplotner.com\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}