Season one episode eight saw Rachel Miller join as my guest expert. Rachel is one of the UK’s (if not the world’s) leading experts in internal communications. She’s also an author and her latest book, which came out this year, is Successful Change Communication which is, quite simply, brilliant. We spent almost an hour diving into the role of people managers in change communication and the practical things they can do to communicate well during change.
I hope you find the episode helpful.
Here are five of my favourite moments from the episode:
6m00s Managers as translators. Rachel emphasised the importance of managers during change. A good team manager understand what makes their team tick in a way that senior leadership and corporate comms experts won’t.
13m00s Different types of change. Change is now rarely solely the ‘big’ stuff, such as a company-wide restructure. Change comes in all shapes and sizes and is an everyday occurrence. Rachel talked about her categorisation of change – 31 types of change across seven different categories.
15m00s Three most common questions. During change, people want to know “why this? Why now? Why me?” Your job, as their manager, is to answer those questions to the best of your ability.
23m40s Inclusive change communication. Rachel drew on her experience as a mother of neurodivergent children, and with ADHD herself. To try and reduce overwhelm for her autistic son, Rachel focuses on ‘now and next’ – “now we’ll do this, next we’ll do that”. A similar approach might be helpful for some neurodivergent team members.
41m00s Don’t ignore negativity. Rachel reminded us that negativity and resistance is data and important information. We dismiss or ignore people’s concerns at our peril. “We need to hear the negativity. We need to know what people are concerned or worried about.” Because when we know their concerns, we can then put appropriate mitigations and explanations in place.
© 2026 Sketchnote by Hayley Lewis
Have you listened to the episode? Tell me what your favourite moments were. What were the a-ha moments for you?
Post author: Dr Hayley Lewis. First published on the HALO Psychology website 27 August 2026 (updated on 19 October 2026).
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