There’s a phrase I once heard at a corporate retreat: “We’re in transition.” It was said with the same tone you might use to excuse a messy house when guests stop by unexpectedly. “Oh, don’t mind the boxes and random piles of trash. We’re in transition!”
At the time, I thought it sounded vaguely hopeful, like we were on the cusp of something exciting. But what I’ve learned since is that transition is corporate code for liminal space: that awkward in-between when everything feels both temporary and eternal. It’s like being trapped at an airport gate where your flight has been delayed, indefinitely, “for operational reasons.”
You can’t go home. You can’t go forward. You can only sit there and pretend to be productive while your soul slowly ferments in the glow of the departure board.
In the workplace, liminal space happens when the old way of doing things is dying, but the new way isn’t quite alive yet. You’ve been told there’s a new system coming, but no one knows when. Leadership insists it’s “in progress,” but you begin to suspect “progress” is a euphemism for “stuck in procurement.”
The team starts to drift. Meetings become philosophical. Someone says, “We’re just trying to get through this phase,” and another person replies, “What is a phase, really?” Suddenly, you’re not managing a team anymore. You’re hosting a group therapy session for existential bureaucrats.
The soft slide into corporate nihilism might trick you into thinking the danger is just inertia, something you can overcome with a little elbow grease and bootstrap-pulling. But it isn’t. The danger of liminal phases is decay. When everything feels temporary, people stop investing. They stop refining processes, stop documenting, stop caring. The phrase “we’ll fix it when the new system comes” becomes the organizational lullaby that rocks projects gently into mediocrity.
I once worked on a team that lived in liminal space for almost a year. We were told our tools would be replaced, our roles redefined, our entire structure rebuilt “by Q3.” By Q3, we were told “by Q4.” By Q4, the only thing rebuilt was our collective sense of cynicism.
The old system groaned under its own weight, the new one never arrived, and somewhere in the middle we forgot what we were supposed to be doing. I remember looking around one day and thinking, we’ve become the corporate equivalent of that old amusement park on the edge of town. Half-operational, half-haunted, and fully terrifying after dark.
If you lead a team in this state of suspended animation, you start to notice subtle symptoms: Deadlines stretch like bad carnival taffy. Updates sound like prayers. Hope arrives every other Tuesday, then quietly dies by Wednesday morning. You begin to realize that leadership in liminal space is more about endurance than vision. You’re not leading people through change so much as inside it, trying to stop everyone from setting up permanent residence in the void.
So, here are four things I’ve learned about leading teams through liminal space, none of them perfect, all of them painfully earned.
1. Name the Liminal Space Out Loud
Pretending everything is fine only makes it worse. People can feel when the floorboards are loose beneath them. Name it. Say, “We’re in an in-between period. It’s uncomfortable. It’s messy. It’s temporary.” Paradoxically, naming the uncertainty makes it less scary. It gives people a place to stand, even if that place is just an honest conversation.
At a past job, we once spent six months in what our VP called “strategic transition mode,” which was corporate Esperanto for we have no idea what’s happening. Meetings became increasingly absurd. Every week, someone would ask, “So, are we still transitioning?” like a tourist asking if they’ve crossed into a new time zone.
Finally, I cracked. In the middle of a meeting, I said, “Can we all just admit we’re lost? We’re like the Oregon Trail of technology management, and half of us have dysentery.” The laughter that followed was a relief for all of us. From that day on, people started talking honestly again. We didn’t get clarity overnight, but we at least stopped pretending to have it.
2. Anchor in What Won’t Change
When everything feels fluid, remind your team of what remains solid: values, purpose, the reason the work matters. It’s not enough to say “we’ll get through this.” Tell them why it’s worth getting through. Humans need constellations to navigate by, even when the sky’s cloudy.
A friend once told a story about reorg at his company that seemed to drag on. His department was absorbed into something called “Digital Experience Transformation.” No one knew what that meant, but they all got new logos on their slide decks, so it had to be important.
People panicked. What did this mean for their work? For their jobs?
So the director did something simple but brilliant. She stood up at the next town hall and said, “Look, our mission’s still the same: we make data useful to people who need it. That hasn’t changed. The rest is just branding.” You could feel the oxygen return to the room, my friend told me.
This reminded me Jim Collins in “Good to Great,” where he talks about the hedgehog concept: knowing what you do best and sticking to it no matter how many shiny initiatives pass by. In liminal times, your hedgehog keeps you sane.
3. Create Micro-Milestones
When the big change drags on, shrink the horizon. Celebrate the small wins that prove progress still exists somewhere in the building. Maybe you can’t control the new system rollout, but you can fix a broken process, clarify a workflow, or complete a documentation sprint. Tiny victories fight entropy.
When one of our product overhauls kept getting delayed, one of my team members started making a paper countdown chain like you’d see in an elementary school before summer break. Every week we didn’t hit a promised “go-live,” she added a new ring instead of removing one. By week 17, it looked like something you’d hang on a Christmas tree if your theme were “failure and despair.”
So we pivoted. Instead of waiting for the Big Launch, we started setting tiny wins: automate a report, document a workflow, buy ourselves lattes when we cleared a Jira backlog. After a while, those little wins gave us momentum again.
It was very Kaizen of us, the Japanese management philosophy that says continuous small improvements beat dramatic overhauls. We didn’t transform the company, but we did remember how to feel proud of our work again, and that counted for something.
4. Protect the Culture Like It’s a Campfire
Liminal space eats culture first. People withdraw, gossip grows, cynicism sets in. Keep the fire alive through small rituals. Team check-ins, learning sessions, even shared frustration turned into humor. Nothing kills decay faster than laughter, especially when it’s at your own expense.
During one long “interim phase,” morale was so low that people stopped turning their cameras on during stand-up. Someone joked that we were the “Witness Protection Program for Analysts.” So we tried something new: Big Mistake Fridays.
Every Friday, we’d spend 30 minutes sharing ridiculous work stories. Our worst email typos, the strangest meeting titles we’d survived (“Synergizing Future Past Learnings” was a real one). We even had a traveling “Golden Flamingo” trophy for whoever made the funniest mistake that week.
Those 30 minutes didn’t fix the delay, but they stopped the rot. The laughter was our campfire. It kept us connected and human in the long dark between old and new.
Eventually, the new thing does arrive. The system goes live. The emails stop saying “tentatively scheduled” and start saying “effective immediately.” But when that moment comes, the teams that survive aren’t the ones who waited the best. They’re the ones who stayed connected while waiting.
In the end, liminal space is more of a human problem than a corporate one. We live half our lives between what was and what will be: jobs, relationships, seasons, even selves. And if there’s a moral in all this, it’s that you can’t control how long the waiting lasts, but you can decide what kind of person, or team, you’ll be while you wait.
Nothing rots faster than a team that stops believing. And nothing endures longer than one that keeps showing up, still doing the work, still building something while everyone else is waiting for the future to arrive.