Riviera Group Consulting

ARTICLE 04  /  RIDE THE WAVE

People Support What They Help Create

An organization announces a new strategy. The presentation is polished, the timeline is ambitious, and leadership is excited. Then implementation begins—and the people expected to carry it out seem hesitant.
It is tempting to call that resistance. Sometimes it is a sign that the plan was built without enough input from the people closest to the work.

Participation does not mean every decision is made by committee. Boards and executives still have decisions that belong to them. It means creating meaningful opportunities for people to shape the parts of a change where their knowledge can improve the result.

Ask frontline employees where a proposed process will break. Ask managers what capacity they need to deliver a new priority. Ask board members which community relationships or strategic risks are missing from the discussion. Then show people what changed because of what you heard.
That last step matters. A listening session without follow-through can create more frustration than no listening session at all. Be explicit about what is open for input, what is already decided, and when people will hear the outcome.

When people understand the purpose, see their experience reflected in the plan, and know their part in execution, the work becomes something they can own—not merely something that was handed to them.
Good change management is not a communications campaign after the decision. It is a thoughtful process of making the decision, preparing the organization, and learning as the work unfolds.

REFLECTION  Who will be responsible for implementing your next major decision, and how will their perspective shape it before launch?
Cover of book "High-Courage Conversations"
About the Book
You cannot control every wave. You can decide how you meet it. That lesson started in the ocean at a young age, when Lauren Sweeney's father taught her to stand to the side of an incoming wave and let it move through her instead of trying to fight it or turning her back on it, and it never really left her. In High-Courage Conversations, Sweeney, SHRM-CP, B.S., draws on two decades of leadership, from being a Retail Pharmacy Manager to building a sales team of hundreds to sitting in the C-suite, to make one central argument: courage is not the absence of fear; it is what happens when clarity meets capacity.

Across thirteen chapters, Sweeney tackles the conversations most leaders quietly avoid. The feedback that feels too risky to give. The values conflict that looks like a personality clash. The burnout hiding behind a full calendar and a fuller sense of obligation. The identity crisis that shows up when a title changes, or disappears, faster than your sense of self can catch up. She writes about chasing a credential to feel like enough, and about learning to stay present in hard conversations with her husband instead of freezing and disappearing behind her own eyes. This is not a book of tidy frameworks handed down from a distance. It is a field guide written from inside the moment right before you say the hard thing, by someone who has stood in that moment as a store manager, a Vice President, a co-founder, a board chair, a wife, and a mother, and who has learned, sometimes the hard way, what actually helps.

Readers will find practical tools alongside the stories: a way to name what's really draining you before you try to fix it, a script for the conversation before the conversation, three questions to ask in any transition. But mostly they will find permission to feel the racing heart and go anyway, to ask for clarity before demanding courage of themselves, and to trust that meeting the wave well matters more than controlling it ever could.
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