What you need to know from this episode
Reading change fatigue before it reads your organization
Maria Rosaria has spent the last eighteen years living and leading across Sweden, Finland, Germany, the US, China, and India. That itinerary is not incidental context -- it is the source of a deeply practical, cross-cultural lens on how organizations absorb and resist change. Her starting point for this conversation is blunt: most organizations discover change fatigue far too late, long after it has already shaped the decisions their leaders are making.
The first signal she watches for is speed without substance. When leaders begin making decisions too quickly -- operationalizing before thinking through strategy -- that velocity is not efficiency. It is a symptom. Fatigued leaders default to action because deliberation feels too costly. The result is a string of poorly anchored decisions that compound the very instability they were meant to resolve.
You can spot people that are fatigued into the team when they take decisions too fast and when things are not well thought through -- and then they go too much into operationalizing instead of having thought through topics strategically.
The second signal is silence. When previously engaged people stop contributing -- when energy drops to a quiet, passive acceptance of whatever is decided -- that is not harmony. It is disengagement dressed as compliance. Maria Rosaria is direct about why this matters: healthy change processes require friction. People who think differently and say so, who push back and offer alternatives, are not obstacles. They are the immune system of the change effort. When that friction disappears, the organization has lost something it cannot easily recover. Understanding employee sentiment in real time is how people leaders catch this shift before it becomes structural.
Balancing empathy and execution: the discipline leaders rarely talk about
The tension between empathy and execution is one of the most discussed challenges in leadership -- and one of the most poorly resolved. Maria Rosaria's framework is notably practical, grounded in the discipline of knowing when each mode is appropriate rather than trying to perform both simultaneously.
Her first principle is acknowledgment. Before any execution can happen with real team buy-in, the complexity of the situation must be named openly. Not managed, not minimized -- named. Teams that feel their leader has genuinely registered what they are navigating will follow direction far more readily than teams that feel the difficulty is being glossed over. This is where empathy in leadership earns its place: not as a soft value, but as a practical precondition for execution.
Emotion is important -- as far as you are aware that you have emotion in a certain situation. But when you need to take the decision, you need to try to keep emotion away in order to make a very good and sound decision.
Her second principle is structured progress visibility. Small, regular check-ins that allow leaders and their teams to track movement -- to see that the work is going somewhere -- serve a function that annual reviews cannot. They create a rhythm of shared acknowledgment that prevents the momentum loss that so often follows a difficult announcement or a major change. The feeling of being supported, Maria Rosaria argues, is not a nice-to-have. It is what allows leaders to continue executing when the environment is at its most turbulent.
The Change-Ready Leader System: Five Norms That Build Confidence in Ambiguity
Maria Rosaria's operating framework for building leader confidence during complex transformation -- covering direction, dissent, decision quality, coaching culture, and psychological safety.
Anchor Every Change to a Clear Trajectory
Leaders and teams cannot perform with confidence in ambiguity without a shared sense of where the organization is going. A visible direction -- even an imperfect one -- gives people a reference point that makes every difficult decision easier to take and defend.
Make Disagreement a Structural Asset, Not a Cultural Risk
Give teams the explicit space to express dissent and ensure those perspectives are genuinely heard and reused in shaping the change. Disagreement that is suppressed does not disappear -- it resurfaces later as resistance, attrition, or failed implementation.
Shift Leadership Effectiveness Metrics from Outcomes to Decision Quality
In a world where AI can generate outputs at speed, the measure of leadership is no longer what was decided but how robustly. Was the decision thought through? Is it unbiased and solid? Can it be communicated with clarity? Those are the questions that matter now.
Position CHROs as Architects of Learning Environments, Not Just Change Managers
The non-negotiable CHRO action for 2026 is building organizations where leaders act as mentors and coaches rather than controllers -- creating the conditions for continuous learning and guiding teams through new technology at a pace people can sustain.
Build Psychological Safety Through Transparent, Judgment-Free Feedback
The support system that protects leader well-being under rapid change is not a wellness program. It is an environment where leaders can express their views, contribute without judgment, and feel genuinely valued -- which is the precondition for everything else.
What actually builds leader confidence in ambiguous environments
Culture norms that build leader confidence are not about eliminating uncertainty -- they are about making uncertainty navigable. Maria Rosaria identifies two that are consistently underinvested in: shared direction and structured dissent. The first gives leaders a trajectory to work from even when the path is unclear. The second gives them the organizational permission to be told when the trajectory needs adjusting. Resilient organizational cultures are the ones where both are present simultaneously.
The combination matters because each one fails without the other. A clear vision without space for dissent becomes an echo chamber that misses critical corrections. Space for dissent without a clear vision becomes rudderless noise. The organizations that navigate ambiguity best are those where leaders communicate direction with enough conviction for people to commit, and with enough humility to integrate what they hear back. Change leadership at its most effective looks like exactly this balance: firm in direction, genuinely open in execution.
Measuring leadership effectiveness when AI changes what decisions mean
The conventional answer to measuring leadership effectiveness is KPIs. Maria Rosaria sets that aside immediately. KPIs measure what happened; they do not measure how the decision that produced that outcome was made. And in an environment where AI can generate plausible outputs at speed, the quality and integrity of the decision process is precisely what leaders need to be accountable for.
Her alternative metrics focus on decision robustness: Was the decision thought through strategically? Is it solid and unbiased? Was it communicated with enough clarity that it signals genuine comprehension rather than delegation to a tool? These questions become more important, not less, as AI accelerates the pace of output. Managerial effectiveness in 2026 is not about leaders who can move faster with AI -- it is about leaders who can validate, govern, and take accountability for what AI produces on their behalf.
AI is changing the quality of decisions because it can give us immediate outputs and it's faster. What leaders need to do is verify -- make sure the output of those decisions is valid, solid, and unbiased. The leaders required right now are leaders with a very good level of agility.
Agility here means something specific. It is not speed or adaptability in the generic sense. It is the cognitive capacity to assess information rapidly, understand what it contains, and make a judgment about whether it is fit for use. That requires leaders who are genuinely curious about AI's limitations, not just its capabilities -- and who understand that their role has shifted from producing decisions to governing the systems that inform them. Agile leadership in this sense is the defining competency of the current moment.
Detect change fatigue before it derails your leadership pipeline
See how CultureMonkey's pulse survey tools and real-time sentiment tracking help people leaders identify early signals of disengagement, track leader well-being, and act before fatigue becomes attrition.
The CHRO's non-negotiable: building organizations where leaders can learn
When asked for the single most important action CHROs must take in 2026, Maria Rosaria's answer is not a program or a metric. It is a structural orientation. The CHRO's role is to build an environment where leaders can engage with direction, learn continuously, and develop their teams -- not from a position of control, but from a position of coaching.
The shift from manager-as-controller to manager-as-coach is not a new idea. What makes it urgent in 2026 is the pace of technological change. Leaders cannot instruct their teams on tools they are still learning themselves. The authentic posture is one of shared discovery: leaders who model curiosity, who acknowledge what they do not know, and who create space for team members to bring what they do know forward. Trust, Maria Rosaria adds, is the third and most essential element -- the precondition without which none of the rest takes hold. Trust in leadership is what makes learning possible under pressure. Without it, even the most well-designed change program produces compliance, not commitment.
Leaders in this period need to work as mentors, as coaches of their teams -- not as controllers. And there is a third element that is trust. Leaders need to install trust so that people can follow them. If there is not trust, how can you follow them and learn alongside them?
The coaching leadership style Maria Rosaria describes creates something organizations often overlook: a feedback loop from the bottom up. When leaders are visibly learning alongside their teams, team members who already have AI fluency or adjacent expertise can surface what they know without it feeling like a threat to the hierarchy. The knowledge flows laterally and upward, not just down. That is how capability develops at scale -- and it is the only realistic model in an environment where no single leader has all the answers.
Protecting leader well-being: the support system that is hiding in plain sight
HBR has documented the mental health toll of rapid organizational change on leaders -- the anxiety, the decision fatigue, the cumulative weight of communicating uncertainty while projecting confidence. Maria Rosaria's response to this challenge is deliberately simple. The support system that protects leader well-being is not a wellness initiative or a coaching program, though those have value. It is the creation of an environment where leaders can express their point of view, offer feedback, and contribute without judgment.
That condition sounds obvious. In practice, it is rare. Most organizations nominally espouse psychological safety without building the structural conditions for it. When leaders cannot name what they are struggling with -- when the culture treats uncertainty as weakness rather than information -- the well-being consequences are predictable. Manager burnout does not arrive suddenly. It accumulates in the gap between what leaders are experiencing and what the organization allows them to say. Closing that gap is not a soft investment. It is the precondition for sustained organizational performance through change.
Maria Rosaria frames this with characteristic directness: people who feel considered, valued, and genuinely able to contribute automatically become more capable of leading their teams and setting trajectory. The connection between leader well-being and organizational performance is not indirect. It is mechanistic. And the employee feedback loop that makes this possible is the single most actionable investment any CHRO can make in their leadership pipeline right now.
AI-powered HR tools and the question of trust
The debate about whether to use AI-powered HR tools -- sentiment tracking, real-time pulse surveys, engagement analytics -- is one Maria Rosaria encounters constantly. Her position cuts through the noise: the debate is the wrong one. These tools are not inherently trustworthy or untrustworthy. Their trustworthiness is determined entirely by how they are deployed and communicated.
The framing that destroys trust is deploying these tools as surveillance: collecting sentiment data that employees do not know is being collected, or using it to make decisions without explaining the process. The framing that builds trust is positioning them as listening mechanisms -- tools that give the organization hints and signals about the human situation inside it, used to inform decisions that are then communicated transparently. Employee sentiment data that is surfaced honestly, shared appropriately, and acted on visibly becomes a source of genuine organizational intelligence. The same data used covertly becomes a source of fear and disengagement.
These tools need to be seen not like police tools, but tools that give hints and sentiment to understand the situation of the people. If we show the output and share it transparently with employees, people will trust the tools and the usage of those tools. It is a matter really of transparent communication.
Maria Rosaria closes the episode with a thought that integrates everything that preceded it. At a conference she attended recently, a group of operational excellence leaders put it simply: organizations have become so focused on processes that they have forgotten the human part of change. The same, she argues, is true of AI. There is no artificial intelligence without empathy. Emotional intelligence and artificial intelligence must be coupled -- not treated as alternatives, not prioritized one over the other, but held together as the complete set of capacities a modern leader needs. Emotional intelligence for leaders is not the antidote to the AI era. It is what makes the AI era work at a human scale.
What you'll learn from this episode
| # | Topic | What you will learn | Applicable to |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Change Fatigue Signals | How to spot change fatigue in leadership teams before it becomes structural -- including the two early behavioral patterns that appear long before burnout does | CHROs People Leaders |
| 2 | Empathy and Execution | How to hold both empathy and clear-headed decision-making simultaneously -- and why structured check-ins and open acknowledgment of complexity are tools, not soft add-ons | People Managers HRBPs |
| 3 | Culture Norms for Ambiguity | Which two organizational norms consistently reinforce leader confidence in uncertain environments -- and why each one fails without the other | CHROs Org Design Leads |
| 4 | Leadership Effectiveness Metrics | How to move beyond KPIs to measure decision robustness, communication clarity, and the agility needed to govern AI outputs responsibly | CHROs L&D Leads |
| 5 | CHRO Action for 2026 | The single non-negotiable shift CHROs must make -- from overseeing change programs to building learning environments where leaders act as coaches and trust is structurally installed | CHROs HR VPs |
| 6 | Leader Well-being Systems | Why the most effective support system for leader mental health under rapid change is not a wellness program but an environment of judgment-free contribution and genuine psychological safety | People Leaders People Ops |
| 7 | AI Tools and Trust | How to deploy AI-powered HR tools like CultureMonkey in ways that build rather than erode trust -- and why transparent communication about how tools are used is the only thing that makes the data actionable | CHROs HRBPs |
Maria Rosaria is a Senior HR Leader with extensive experience driving organizational transformation in complex, global environments. She has led large-scale change initiatives across workforce strategy, organizational design, leadership effectiveness, and post-acquisition integration, working closely with executive leadership teams to align people, culture, and business priorities.
In addition to her corporate leadership roles, Maria Rosaria brings board-level experience, contributing to discussions on governance, leadership capability, and long-term organizational sustainability. This perspective allows her to bridge executive execution with boardroom expectations, particularly in periods of strategic change and uncertainty. Her work is focused on building change-ready leadership systems, reinforcing decision quality, resilience, and accountability.
Alongside her professional roles, she contributes to executive education and business school programs, sharing a pragmatic, system-level view on modern leadership and the future of work.
Frequently asked questions
Two behavioral patterns appear well before burnout does. The first is accelerated but poorly anchored decision-making: leaders begin operationalizing before thinking through strategy, moving fast without the depth that good decisions require. The second is a drop in constructive engagement: people who previously contributed ideas, challenged assumptions, or flagged concerns go quiet and begin passively accepting whatever is decided. Both patterns look superficially like competence or calm. They are actually signals that the organization is absorbing more change than its leadership can process with clarity.
The key is sequencing, not choosing. Empathy comes first: acknowledging complexity openly, naming what the team is navigating, and making space for people to feel genuinely heard. That acknowledgment is not a delay to execution -- it is what makes execution possible without resistance. Then, when the decision point arrives, the discipline is to separate the emotion (which is real and important information) from the judgment itself. Leaders who skip the empathy step tend to make faster decisions that take far longer to implement, because the team was never genuinely on board.
Move the measurement from outcomes to decision quality. KPIs tell you what happened; they do not tell you how the decision that produced it was made. In an AI environment, where outputs can be generated faster than leaders can think, the critical question is whether those outputs were validated, verified for bias, and communicated with enough clarity to signal genuine comprehension. Leaders who can do that consistently -- who can assess the robustness of AI-generated outputs and take accountability for them -- are the leaders organizations actually need right now.
Build an environment where learning is possible and trust is structurally installed. This means positioning leaders as coaches and mentors rather than controllers -- creating the space for their teams to develop capability with new technology at a pace they can sustain. It also means being explicit about trust as a design requirement, not an outcome. Leaders who feel trusted, who operate in an environment where they can express uncertainty and be supported rather than judged, are the ones who build the resilience their teams need. Trust is not a culture outcome. It is the mechanism that makes everything else work.
The single most important factor is transparent communication about how the tools are used. Employees do not inherently resist sentiment tracking or pulse surveys -- they resist the sense that data is being collected about them for purposes they do not understand and cannot influence. When organizations explain clearly what the tools are for, share relevant outputs with employees, and act visibly on what the data surfaces, trust in those tools follows naturally. The tool becomes an instrument of listening rather than surveillance. What you do with the information -- and whether employees can see that it produces real outcomes -- is what determines whether the data is worth collecting at all.
Full Episode Transcript
S06 E08: Unlock Change-Ready Leaders: Essential Norms, Metrics, and Actions to Drive Impact in 2026 — Maria Rosaria with Darcy Mehta · 21 min
Hello everyone and welcome to season six of CultureClub X powered by CultureMonkey. I'm your host, Darcy Mehta. CultureMonkey is an AI powered employee engagement platform that helps organizations listen to their employees and build stronger workplace cultures.
CultureClub X is our global thought leadership forum where CHROs and people leaders come together to share insights, explore trends, and exchange practical strategies for building future-ready organizations.
Today, we are delighted to host Rosaria Bonifacio, VP and People Head at Nokia, a seasoned HR leader known for driving transformation across complex global organizations. Rosaria, welcome! It's such a pleasure to have you here with us today.
Well, it's great to be part of your network.
Rosaria brings extensive experience leading large-scale transformation initiatives across workforce strategy, organizational design, leadership effectiveness, and post-acquisition integration. She works closely with executive teams to align people, culture, and business priorities in times of change. She also brings valuable board-level experience contributing to governance discussions, leadership capability building and long-term organizational sustainability. Her perspective bridges execution with boardroom expectations, especially in periods of uncertainty.
Rosaria, your experience in building resilient leadership systems and navigating complex transformations makes you the ideal voice for today's conversation. And we're excited to explore our topic: Unlock Change-Ready Leaders -- essential norms, metrics, and actions to drive impact in 2026. Before we dive in, could you share a bit about your own leadership journey?
Yes, well, I think what I like to say about me is that I am a citizen of the world. I have been living the last 18 years across the globe -- first moved to Sweden, then Finland, then Germany, and working across the US, China, and India.
So my journey has been really a lot about transformation, reorganization, and driving with diverse cultures. That is something I enjoy the most -- bringing people together, being able to design an organization, and then supporting the leaders and teams in making sure to implement this new organization. So yes, change has been and is my bread and butter.
That's amazing. I love that term citizen of the world and I consider myself one too. You gain such a perspective, not just from traveling, but from living in other countries. So thank you so much for sharing that. And we will just dive right into our first question.
So how do you spot change fatigue early in your leadership team?
I would love to spot it even earlier if I could. Change is complex and you can spot people that are fatigued into the team sometimes when they take decisions too fast and when things are not well thought through -- and then they go too much into operationalizing instead of having thought through topics strategically. That could be a sign of fatigue.
A second thing could be when you start observing that people are not contributing -- a slow level of energy, silent, accepting passively whatever is decided -- and for a team, it's never healthy, it's never good. Having some kind of controversy, or people that think differently, is healthy for whatever change or transformation we need to drive.
It's dangerous when someone's just quiet and they stop engaging, right? So such a good point.
So how do you help leaders balance empathy with execution in turbulent times?
There are a few basic steps. Acknowledge what we need to do -- acknowledge the complexity of things, talking openly with the team and the people. At the same time, trying to look at things in an objective way -- and that's the most difficult thing, keeping emotion away. Emotion is important, as far as you are aware that you have emotion in a certain situation. But when you need to take the decision, you need to try to keep emotion away in order to make a very good and sound decision.
Another tip that I have seen applied and may be useful: create small steps of check-in so that the team and the leaders can look at the progress and then move on. It's important to make sure that the team can feel supported and the leaders can feel supported.
Absolutely. So true.
So what culture norms reinforce leader confidence in ambiguous environments?
I think having the vision of where we need to go -- having the big picture always reinforces the confidence of the leaders and the team when we need to change. Having in front of us the trajectory is absolutely something that can support us.
The second step, and it's important -- making sure that we can disagree, giving the teams the space to express their own opinion and that they have been heard, making sure that what is said can be reused as well in shaping the change. These are some of the few tips that can reinforce confidence in leaders and the team.
Absolutely. Having a clear trajectory is really important. And then people that disagree -- taking that into consideration and using that to make the change.
So how do you measure leadership effectiveness in uncertain environments beyond traditional metrics? And how do you see AI reshaping this approach?
First of all, not talking about KPIs -- because of course our organizations are full of KPIs. So the quality of the decision: how robust is the decision? How has it been thought through -- is it a valid and solid decision that has been taken? The communication, the way it is communicated as well, because the more it's clear, the more it's something that has been thought through. Therefore, those are important ingredients.
AI is changing the quality of decisions because it can give us immediate outputs and it's faster. What leaders need to do is verify -- make sure that the output of those decisions is valid, solid, and unbiased. The leaders required in this moment are leaders that have a very good level of agility -- agility in understanding the information, in making sure that what is reused is solid and robust.
Agility has come up in some of my other interviews too. You have to be agile because in the world of AI, it does change so quickly. And like you said, the output is very quick, but you have to be able to measure effectiveness and make sure it's unbiased.
What is one non-negotiable action CHROs must take to build change-ready leaders in 2026?
First of all, engaging those leaders -- understanding the direction that needs to be taken -- is absolutely essential to bring the leader on board. At the same time, create an organization and an environment where people can learn. In such a context, it's fundamental to have these kinds of characteristics.
The leaders in this period need to work as mentors, as coaches of their teams -- more than controllers. It's important that people can develop individually and can be guided in using this new technology. We are all learning. There are people that are faster than others, but it's important to support people in creating an environment where learning is possible.
I would like to add one thing: there is a third element that is trust. Leaders need to install trust so that people can follow them. That is the one element that is essential. If there is not trust, how can you follow them and learn alongside them?
I like that comparison of being more of a coach rather than just the boss type of thing, because it is changing so quickly. Leaders and managers are learning as well. It's creating that safe space where it's OK to ask questions, to learn, to grow. And you're doing it together, too.
HBR highlights the mental health impact of rapid change. What support systems have you built to protect leaders' well-being while sustaining performance?
That's a very tough question. We speak a lot about creating a safe environment. But if there is one thing I personally believe creates a safe environment, it is the possibility to give feedback, to express your point of view, your contribution -- without judgment and in an unbiased way. It's very simple. You don't need a scientist or a genius in order to do that.
If you create an environment where leaders can express themselves, feel considered, valued, and can contribute -- automatically, you have people who are able to drive their teams and set the trajectory in order to have a change. They need to be part of it. They need to contribute. Because if not, it's very difficult to drive whatever change. And this is common sense -- you don't need any scientific book in order to learn these very practical tips.
It's funny that it is such common sense, but how many organizations may not have that environment. It bears repeating for sure. What we all want is to be understood -- in personal relationships and of course in work and leadership. Being understood, feeling seen, feeling heard -- then you're set up to do better and you want to keep growing.
So what role should AI-powered HR tools such as CultureMonkey play in helping leaders track real-time sentiment, navigate uncertainty, and build resilience while maintaining trust and transparency?
This is a very discussed topic in many organizations. Should we use those kinds of tools or not? I think that they need to be seen not like police tools, but tools that give hints and sentiment to understand the situation of the people -- and to inform the decisions that are taken on the strategy, the people, the teams, the organization. But it's important that it's understood and communicated how those tools are used. It's a matter really of transparent communication.
Even if we show the output of those tools and share it transparently -- or at least the key information with the employees -- people will trust the tools and the usage of those tools. It's a matter of giving trust and utilizing those new ways of looking at the sentiment of employees in a healthy way. It's what you do with information.
And it goes back to trust again, too, right? So Rosaria, that's the end of my questions. But is there any topic or tips or anything else you wanted to share that we didn't discuss today?
A few weeks ago, I was at a conference and we were talking about change. I was with a group of operational excellence leaders, and they spoke about how to change with humanity. And what they said -- this is exactly what we have forgotten. We are looking so much into the processes that we have forgotten the human part of change.
And I think the same with artificial intelligence. There is no artificial intelligence without empathy. The two things -- emotional intelligence and artificial intelligence -- need to be coupled. You should not have just one or the other.
Absolutely -- that's so interesting. You need emotional intelligence coupled with artificial intelligence. This has been so enjoyable. Rosaria, thank you so much for your time and for sharing such thoughtful, experience-driven insights. Your perspective on building change-ready leaders through clarity, resilience, and strong leadership systems is both practical and highly relevant for today's organizations.
It's clear that in times of uncertainty, leadership effectiveness is no longer just about outcomes. It's about how leaders enable stability, trust, and direction for their teams. That's where CultureMonkey plays a key role -- through real-time listening and pulse surveys that help organizations understand sentiment, detect early signals, and enable leaders to respond with clarity and confidence.
And before we conclude, Rosaria, how can our listeners connect with you and continue this conversation?
You can connect with me on LinkedIn. I am absolutely available to connect with all the people that want to share, have guidance, and continue this conversation. Thank you.
And to all our listeners, thank you so much for joining us. Don't forget to follow, share, and subscribe. That's a wrap for this episode of CultureClub X powered by CultureMonkey. Until next time, I'm your host, Darcy, signing off.
