A change can be explained clearly from the top and still make little sense inside a team. Readiness grows in the conversations where people work out what the change will mean for the job they must do tomorrow.
The town hall has finished. The reasons for the change were clear, the slides were polished and the timetable was shared. On the way back to work, someone asks their supervisor a quieter question: “Are we still expected to hit the same targets while we learn the new process?”
The answer will do more to shape the team’s response than another slide about the vision.
In that moment, the supervisor is not simply repeating a message. They are connecting the proposed future to the work already in front of people. They may have to admit what is unresolved, explain a trade-off, or take a concern back to the people setting the timetable. Those exchanges are where a group begins to decide whether change is workable.
The team hears more than the official message
A study published in the Australian Journal of Management examined 402 employees in 48 work groups across five organisations undergoing change. The researchers distinguished formal communication from managers, such as meetings and written announcements, from the less formal conversations supervisors have with their teams.
At the group level, formal manager communication was not significantly associated with collective readiness for change. Informal supervisor communication was positively associated with it. The researchers also found a statistical link through how clear and consistent the overall communication process felt to the group.
That does not prove that informal conversations caused readiness. The study relied on survey responses, and the groups were drawn from five Vietnamese organisations. But its finding deserves attention because it tests the team as a team. It asks how people come to a shared judgement that they can carry out a change, rather than averaging individual enthusiasm.
The distinction matters. A person can believe in the change while doubting that the team has time, authority or an agreed way of working to deliver it. Others may be privately confident but reluctant to act because they do not know what their colleagues expect. Shared readiness forms through interaction.
Translation is a leadership act
A supervisor’s most useful contribution may be to make the official message specific enough to be tested. “We need to improve service” becomes “Here is what we will do when a customer needs an answer that the new process cannot yet provide.” “We will be more efficient” becomes a conversation about which existing task will stop.
That conversation can expose an uncomfortable mismatch. Senior leaders may describe a change as a manageable adjustment while a team experiences it as a new set of priorities, relationships and hand-offs. If the supervisor is expected to keep both the old and new demands intact, reassurance will eventually sound hollow.
This is why middle leaders need more than communication packs. They need room to interpret the change with their teams and a reliable way to bring contradictions upwards. Otherwise the organisation asks them to make an unworkable plan sound convincing.
The Change Readiness Gap becomes visible when a team understands the aim but cannot see how to deliver it under current conditions. Clarity matters, but so do Capacity and Trade-offs. Local discussion is useful because it reveals which of these is missing before the gap is mistaken for resistance.
Consistency has to survive contact with work
Informal communication is not automatically better. A supervisor can spread rumours, fill uncertainty with false confidence or quietly undermine the change. What matters is whether the local account is credible and consistent with the decisions the organisation actually makes.
Consider a team told that quality is the priority, then praised only for speed. In an official meeting, both messages can sound compatible. In daily work, someone must decide what happens when they conflict. If leaders will not make that trade-off visible, the team will make it for them, often differently from one shift or location to the next.
A useful sign is the kind of question people can ask after the announcement. Are they able to say which part of the plan makes the work harder? Can the supervisor answer honestly or secure an answer? Does the response lead to a changed priority, a better process or a candid explanation of a constraint? These are signs of a communication process doing real work.
The conversation after the meeting
Organisations rightly invest in a clear case for change. The research suggests paying equal attention to what happens when that case reaches a work group. The informal conversation is where people compare the promise with their experience, and where they begin to decide together whether they can act.
A change becomes real when a team can say what it means for its work, what it will stop doing, and what it can raise when the plan does not fit. The most revealing account of readiness may emerge after the town hall, when someone asks the question that was too practical for the stage.
Sources
Phong Thanh Nguyen, Alannah E. Rafferty, Karin Sanders, Gavin M. Schwarz and Amirali Minbashian, “A mediation model of change communication and collective readiness for change”, Australian Journal of Management, 1 August 2026. Read the research article
