Change is hard, especially on the brain.
In this 11-minute episode of The Leader Lab, LifeLabs Learning Facilitation Manager Brendon Nimphius joins host Micaela Mathre to introduce the CAMPS Check: a practical tool to help managers lead through change with more clarity, care, and connection.
CAMPS stands for five psychological needs that often get triggered during change:
Certainty, Autonomy, Meaning, Progress, and Social Inclusion.
Brendon explains how to use CAMPS as part of a “listening tour”—a simple set of questions that helps leaders surface unspoken concerns and reduce resistance before it spreads.
Whether you’re managing a reorg, new system, or shifting priorities, this episode gives you a ready-to-use tool for leading with empathy and intention.
Listen in to learn:
Brendon Nimphius is one of LifeLabs Learning’s Facilitation Managers. He has a Master’s in Industrial/Organizational psychology, with a focus on employee engagement, retention, and performance. For over a decade, Brendon has worked with thousands of leaders and professionals to overcome challenges, define success, identify gaps, and take meaningful action to enhance their performance.
CAMPS Resources:
Article: What’s Your CAMPS Score?
Article: CAMPS: The Best Method for Leading Change at Work
Workshop: Effective 1-1s
Video: CAMPS Video
Leading Change Resources:
Playbook Leading Change In Uncertain Times
Workshop: Leading Change
Article: How to Build Leadership Resilience During Change
Micaela:
Welcome to the Leader Lab Podcast. I’m Michaela Mathery, Chief Marketing Officer at LifeLabs Learning. If you’re a senior people leader, you’re navigating a workplace that’s changing faster than ever, and you’re not alone. 76% of HR leaders say their managers are overwhelmed, and 73% say that they’re not equipped to lead change. This season, we’re exploring what it really takes to build resilient, adaptable, and effective leaders, managers, and teams. If you’re a returning listener, welcome back. When we launched the Leader Lab over five years ago, our goal was simple, deliver 11-minute episodes packed with tipping point skills, small behavioral changes that make a big impact. We’re continuing with that format and adding something new, interviews with senior people leaders from various organizations. You’ll hear how they prioritize, make decisions, and solve the toughest people challenges. Today’s episode features one of our expert facilitators, someone who’s helped us train over 500,000 people around the world. Our goal today, you’ll leave with the tool or tactic that you can use right away. Let’s dive in. Welcome back to the Leader Lab podcast.
Micaela:
I have the amazing Brendan Nimphius with us, who is one of our facilitation managers at Life Labs. Brendan has been in the world of organizational development and coaching for over a decade and also has a background in organizational psychology. So welcome to the Leader Lab.
Brendon:
Hi, Micaela, thank you.
Micaela:
Excited to have you. One of our core kind of philosophies at Life Labs is this concept of tipping point skills, and we really apply that to our content across the board. So we want to make sure that we’re always giving small changes that can have a huge impact, and that’s one of our goals today is really just to give folks a tool that they can immediately apply after listening to this episode.
Brendon:
You know, speaking of the episode, Kristin, change and leading through change. Yes. I had an opportunity to facilitate workshops with Harry’s and when they were going through change. And one of the things we focused really heavily on with their teams was what we call the camps check, which for others would maybe compare it to what you might call a listening tour. And listening tours is just a technical term used in change management. Other people call it a stakeholder analysis or a stakeholder check where kind of guess, right? You go out and you listen to people’s sentiments, their worries, their concerns, even collecting feedback on change that you’re going to be leading through at the company. So today I just wanted to give our listeners a chance to lead better just by doing something as simple as listening, but adding that layer of a camps check. Camps stands for certainty, autonomy, meaning, progress, and social inclusion. These are at LifeLives what we call like our brain cravings. Brain cravings really just deals with psychological needs. When we think about change, it’s important, but often overlooked that we anticipate or even respond to the psychological impact of change. People are like, change is hard. It’s like, well, what is it hard on? It’s like, it’s hard on your brain in many ways. So it’s going to help us actually understand when we’re doing a listening tour, like where is this change going to have a positive impact on camps and where might it have negative impact or a perceived threat.
Micaela:
What does that application look like? Yeah.
Brendon:
A lot of times when people use the listening tour, it’s going to be a set of questions and then a set of stakeholders. And your intention is to ask the same questions to the stakeholders and you’re collecting information. And sometimes when you collect that information, you can hear, again, like you can hear the opportunities, call those green lights, and then you can hear our threats, call those red lights. A camps check works that way, where you can ask questions and listen for, where are there perceived opportunities in these areas? Your cravings might be met here. Or I now know by asking you these questions, how to meet that craving? And then also the threats, of course, like, ooh, that might be like an ouch on your brain. And I might need to, as a leader, just empathize with that. Like, oh, wow, like that’s going to hurt in that area, or it is going to be tough for you. Or again, like do things that might mitigate the impact or the threat in that area. So we can start with certainty. Sure. I mean, that’s arguably the biggest one, because your brain’s job is just to reduce uncertainty. It’s like one of its primary functions. When you think about any change, there’s just that level of uncertainty that comes into play. And so you could argue like one of the biggest threats for leaders when they’re dealing with change is not anticipating and addressing potential uncertainty. So I think like one of the first questions that you might even ask in a listening tour is just what are you worried about? And one thing that I’ve heard from leaders in the past, coaching them through change, is they tell me like, Brendan, why would we want to bring that up? We don’t want them to be thinking what they’re worried about. And I just find that fascinating because when you’re worried about something and no one acknowledges that, then they become magnified. Like they’re bigger for you. And you become even more uncertain because you’re like, not only am I concerned about this, or am I wondering, should I know this? Do I need to know this? What’s the plan going to be? But I have someone who’s possibly actively avoiding that information. So it’s like one of the first places that I really suggest leaders go is like ask people what they’re worried about, not as a way to magnify those things, as a way to listen, empathize. Because if you don’t, then they will get magnified.
Micaela:
Yes. So we talked about certainty. Tell me a little bit about autonomy.
Brendon:
Autonomy, how we define it is our craving for control. Even for things in which there might, or almost definitely is a positive at the end of the tunnel, right? Think about like you gotta go to school, right? Everyone needs to go to school because you learn and that’s how you get smarter and that’s how you get a job. All of those things seemingly are positive, but we were kind of like pushed and forced to go. So we’re like, I don’t want to. Anytime in life when we were forced to do something, there’s alarm bells go off because it’s impacting our craving for control. And so when we are leading change, we have to be clear and honest with ourselves. Like, are we imposing it? And we usually are. And we’re doing it for good reasons. I think a lot of CEOs and executives, they understand the benefit and they’re clear on that. And so it’s maybe not occurred to them of like, oh, well, you know, this is, everyone should just buy in then, no, we do need to address that. So leaders going out there and just trying to find out like, how is this received in terms of, you know, how much of a say do you actually want in this change? Like even asking that question and being honest with yourself, like, do they get a say or do they not? And being honest with employees in that area, like you do not have a say in this and we get that, you know, and I think that’s important to bring up so that people feel validated and like, oh, I crave control, but. This one’s out of my control. And this one’s out of my control. Yeah.
Micaela:
Amazing. Talk me through M meaning.
Brendon:
The meaning, human beings, we have a craving for purpose. We talk a lot about purpose-driven organizations, purpose- driven cultures, leading with why, as change leaders doing a camp check and just trying to find out what do you foresee is the goal of this change. Interesting. Actually, see how people perceive it. How might this change impact your goals individually, even if they’re individual contributors? How might it actually link with or link up to your goals, your initiatives, also then being clear with employees? How is it impacting our mission? How is it impacting, especially if your team’s goals, your individual goals? I think a lot of people join organizations for their values and their mission especially, right? And so if you can link change with, this is actually something that we value around here, like at Life Labs, like this is gonna help us. We have a value, which is cut the clutter, which is like remove extraneous steps, remove waste, make things more efficient. So if we were to implement change at Life Labs, we might say like, hey, this is gonna help us cut the clutter because that makes it more meaningful. When we don’t give people a powerful why statement, you’re just more likely to get resistance. You’re not gonna get the buy-in. So yeah, it’s like capital M for meaning in the cams.
Micaela:
All right, we talked through C.A.M. Let’s talk about P. What does that bring us to? Progress?
Brendon:
This is my sensitivity area. Uh-huh. All right. So progress, you have to think about dealing with, you know, people say change is hard. And I think one of those things that’s hard for people is learning something new. And that takes time. So you know, when we think about progress, a couple of the questions we tell managers to ask or think about is, will this speed me up or slow me down? And I think that being honest with people around like how much this might slow you down, what are you going to have to unlearn and relearn? You know, how much time are we going to spend doing this? As much as like we want to improve processes and make things more efficient, people have become efficient at the current way that they’re doing it. So if you can collect concerns about that, and then if you can, as a leader, provide any evidence of here’s how this is going to speed you up. People talk about improving efficiency all the time, but they come with no data. And I’ve talked to so many leaders about this. I go like, oh, how much time do you anticipate this is going to save your employees? And I’ve done this in leading change workshops. I’ve done this in coaching conversations. They’re like, well, and they have like nothing, like not even a benchmark. And I say, you’re going to lose people in that way. And they will resist. They’ll use systems, they’ll keep going back to the old way that they were doing it. Because again, it just feels like the pathway of least resistance. So progress, there’s the will it slow me down? Will the speed me up type of progress? And then this other aspect of progress is the wasted effort. Whenever you know, we’re asking someone to do something new, or like they’re giving up essentially what they used to do. And for some, this could be really big, you know, for me, I had to transition from one system to another. Now, this new system of doing one on ones, sharing feedback, it was a performance management system. It was going to make things easier. It was better than the Google Docs and spreadsheets I was using. I really hated it. Like I resisted it for like six months because I had spent so much time and effort organizing these documents, organizing the spreadsheet in the way that I liked it. All of my notes are there. Everything is there. I had made such an investment. So go back to sunken cost. Yes. Yeah. So I think that’s something else for leaders to really not overlook is your changes. Like, Ooh, Rah. Yes. You really have to grieve on some of the laws of what we’ve already invested. So now we’re on to the last one. And so at life lives, it’s social inclusion. And when you think about social inclusion, there’s a couple of considerations here. And one of them is like, how is this change going to impact group dynamics? How is it going to impact what we call it, our organization, our culture? So those are like the first considerations. I think that’s like a fair question to ask people, you know, with any change is like, how do you anticipate this impacting the group, anticipate this impacting relationships?
Brendon:
You know, especially if you’re bringing in, you know, we think about change, sometimes changes new people, you know, merging teams together or changing team structure. We got to address like, how do you anticipate that this might impact that group, that relationship, that level of trust, that level of culture. And I think that’s what people and leaders also need to be thinking about. Even if we change a process, just think about like, how does this change relationships? The other piece of social inclusion that I do want to talk about is fairness. Oh, all right. I love going back to childhood because like it reinforces the camps check how this really deals with cravings, whether you went to school, you’re part of a friend group, especially if you had siblings, you had siblings. Or a lot. Yeah, right. And you see even like parents with multiple children, they have this and I don’t. Why do they get to go here? And I don’t like, we are wired, we are wired for that social dynamic of what do I have that someone else doesn’t? And it is it’s built into our survival. Why do they have this? And I don’t. And when it comes to change, that’s some one other thing that leaders don’t listen for is what are people’s concerns about fairness? Because is their workload changing and mine not? Am I going through this change? And they’re not who’s being impacted more than I am. And I think that addressing that and being clear of here’s how this change is going to impact you versus someone else and not to be dishonest and say, oh, everyone’s going through this one. In fact, actually, like your workload right now is going to increase by X percent. You’re the ones who are actually at the forefront of this right now. You’re going to be taking on a lot of the brunt of this work. But then you get a chance to address that elephant in the room and then maybe link it back up to meeting again. That’s why the work you’re doing right now matters so much. Or again, here’s how we’re going to mitigate that lack of fairness about how this is impacting you versus other people.
Micaela:
Again, sort of addressing the thing that might be the big worry at the top of the conversation, but giving folks kind of like the guidance on how to do that. Thank you so much for joining us, Brendan. I learned a lot. And I think we gave our listeners some really practical tools. If folks are interested in deploying tools like the CAMP model at the organization, do you have any advice for them?
Brendon:
Of course I do, and we teach our CAMPS model in our effective one-on-ones workshop, really just dealing with, you know, empowering performance and engagement and using CAMPS actually to do that, and then our leading change workshop, of course.