A recent post by Ron Leeman on LinkedIn asked, “Does Change Management have an identity crisis?” What this made me think about is how we show up as change practitioners. Not just what we call the discipline, but how we are experienced by others in the middle of uncertainty, ambiguity, and disruption.

So maybe it’s not just how we define the field, but how people actually experience us when change becomes real, disruptive, political, and uncertain. In many ways, that is where the identity of change management is formed. Not in certifications, not in methods, and not in tidy definitions, but in the day-to-day reality of how practitioners enter the room, engage others, and contribute when the stakes are high.

If we show up as people carrying a toolkit in search of a problem, then change management gets experienced as a set of templates, workshops, and communication plans. If we show up as compliance enforcers, it feels procedural and performative. If we show up as translators of complexity, credible thought partners, and people who can help leaders and teams make sense of what is happening around them, then the work starts to feel far more substantive.

That, to me, is part of the identity issue.

The field is often judged less by what it claims to be than by how its practitioners behave in practice. People do not usually encounter “change management” as an abstract discipline. They encounter a person, or a team, who either adds clarity, judgment, and steadiness, or who adds another layer of process around an already difficult situation.

So perhaps the question is not only, “What is change management?” It is also, “What does change management look and feel like when it is practiced well?” I think that matters because the field has too often been reduced to visible artifacts rather than real contribution. Communication plans, stakeholder matrices, readiness assessments, and training decks all have their place. But none of those things, on their own, establish the credibility or identity of the discipline. What does that is whether the practitioner helps the organization think better, decide better, engage better, and move through complexity with greater coherence.

In that sense, how we show up is not peripheral to the identity question. It is central to it. And perhaps that is why the field can feel so uneven. There are practitioners who show up with depth, judgment, and situational awareness, and there are others who show up as though the method itself is the value. The difference is not trivial. It shapes whether change management is experienced as a strategic contribution or as an administrative add-on.

The identity question is real. But I suspect part of the answer lies less in trying to settle on the perfect definition and more in examining the posture, presence, and practical value of the people doing the work.

So, yes, maybe that is the better question for the field: not only “What is change management?” but “How are we showing up when change becomes difficult, political, and real?” I suspect the answers to that question would tell us a great deal about the identity we are actually creating.