When I first arrive in a new engagement, it’s not uncommon to be warned about specific people. “Bob will push back on everything you say” or “Janet just won’t play along”. The warnings are usually well-intentioned, with helpful colleagues trying to prepare me for what’s ahead.
What I’ve found instead, is that these people that I’ve been warned about, often become my biggest advocates.
The misunderstanding problem
In many cases, the people I’ve been warned about have become critics because nobody ever explained the changes in a way that made sense. When I ask what a concept means to them, they frequently describe something that genuinely doesn’t work. Of course they’re skeptical, they’ve been handed a broken mental model and asked to accept it.
When I explain how I think about the same topic, the response is often “well, that does make sense when you describe it that way.” They weren’t resisting the idea, they were resisting the version of the idea that had been handed to them, and that sounded completely ridiculous.
This is why I spend time early in engagements asking people what they think things mean before I explain anything.
You can’t address an objection you don’t understand, and you can’t understand it if you’ve already launched into your own explanation.
The autonomy problem
In other cases the resistance is something different: reactance. Reactance is what happens when people feel their autonomy is being removed. It’s a psychological response, not a logical one; the mind pushing back against being controlled, rather than against the specific idea being imposed.
“Reactance is an unpleasant motivational reaction to offers, persons, rules, or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioural freedoms. Reactance occurs when a person feels that someone or something is taking away their choices or limiting the range of alternatives.”
Autonomy is one of three basic psychological needs as described in Self-Determination Theory (the others being competence and relatedness). When a transformation is rolled out as something happening to people rather than something they’re part of, resistance is the predictable result.
It’s not a character flaw in the resisters. It’s a design flaw in how the change was introduced.
This is why I usually begin engagements by saying: “I’m not here to tell you what to do. I’m here to give you enough context and skills so that you can make better decisions for yourselves.” Autonomy is so important to mental health, to motivation, and to psychological safety that it’s important to be explicit about it.
The people who actually care
There’s a third thing worth noticing. The people who push back hardest are often the people who care most. They have an opinion because they’re engaged. The genuinely dangerous situation in a transformation isn’t resistance with an opinion attached — it’s compliance without understanding. The person who nods along and does nothing is a much bigger long-term problem than the person asking hard questions.
Bob might be the most valuable person in the room. He just needs to be heard first.
What this means if you’re leading change
If you have your own version of Bob and Janet, it’s worth asking: have these people had the ideas explained to them clearly, or have they just been told to accept them? Have they had any genuine say in how things will work, or has the whole thing been handed down?
The people warning you about Bob are probably right that there will be friction. What they may not have considered is that the friction is usually a symptom of how the change was introduced, not an attribute of the person it happened to.
I’ve come to really value these warnings, not because they will actually be the problem that the speaker expects, but rather because these people will probably be my biggest supporters and I want to start talking to them right away.
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