unfreezeGabriel Lopez
Cover of Unfrozen: A New Manager's 90-Day Plan for Leading Change from the Middle, by Gabriel Lopez

The book · Kindle edition, December 7

The change was decided above you. Now it's yours to make work.

You're new to managing, and you've been handed a change you didn't design: a new system, a reorganization, a new way of working. Your team will look to you first. Unfrozen is a week-by-week plan for your first 90 days of carrying it, drawing on published studies, with every study rated for how strong its evidence is.

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What you'll do, and when

  • Days 1–30Listen, translate the plan into your team's words, and make bad news safe to bring you.
  • Days 31–60Agree with your boss which calls are yours, let your team design how the change lands, and sell a fix upward.
  • Days 61–90Review every two weeks, then hold the pace; decide what comes off your plate; and know what to say when the top changes on you.

Each chapter opens with a published case

  • In the 1998 ice storm, a Radio-Canada production manager spent a day phoning technicians and got nowhere. Robert, who worked under him, asked each one how they were coping before he asked for anything, called the ones he thought could come in, and by his own account had a crew within 15 minutes.
  • At Nokia, top managers pushed pressure down and favored reassuring reports, and middle managers filtered bad news on the way up.
  • Two hospitals put the same heart-failure guideline into practice. At one, attention moved on after it passed a national audit, and the service was later discontinued.
  • In one large survey of 468 Dutch organizations, changes that middle managers started and top managers carried out went with the strongest employee support, though that pattern was the rarest.

15 tools with fill-in templates, including a listening-tour script, what to say in the first 10 seconds when someone brings you bad news, a "decide how" worksheet, an upward agreement, a 30-minute review and a capacity check, plus a week-by-week 90-day calendar. For new and first-year managers, and for the HR and learning leads who support them.

For teams

Buying it for your managers?

If you're giving the book to 10 or more managers who are carrying the same change, tell me about it. I'll run a free 30-minute debrief with the leader of that change: where it stands against the Unfrozen Loop, which part looks weakest, and what to do first.

One debrief per organization. It's a conversation, not a sales call; if you later want a deeper look at one change, the Change Check-up is there.

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About the author

Gabriel Lopez is a U.S. Army veteran who completed doctoral coursework in organizational development and writes the Unfrozen newsletter. The book draws on the Atlas of the Middle, his graded library of studies on middle managers and change. More about Gabriel