Handle resistance: treat pushback as unpaid design work

When a change stalls, the first explanation in the room is usually a person. The finance director who keeps asking for more analysis. The country manager who agreed in the meeting and did nothing afterwards. The long-serving engineer who says, politely, that this was tried before. The temptation is to treat them as the problem and the plan as sound.

A pattern I see often: a leader pushes a change through people they have privately labelled as blockers, and later discovers those people were right about the thing nobody wanted to hear. The cost is not only the delay. A better plan was available, and it was sitting in the objection.

Here is my claim. Most resistance is information about the plan, not a defect in the people. If you surface it early, co-design the fix with the people raising it and hand them real ownership, former sceptics become the most credible sponsors you will have — far more persuasive than the enthusiasts, because everyone knows they were not easy to convince. The small group who still refuse after all of that is a personnel decision, and you should treat it as one rather than as a communications problem.

This article goes deeper on one focus area from the chapter Leading change. The chapter sorts resistance into piles. Here I want to show the sequence that moves a sceptic up the ladder, and where that sequence honestly ends.

Resistance is a relationship, not a trait

The conventional story puts resistance over there, in the people being changed. Jeffrey Ford and Laurie Ford put it bluntly in 2009: when change initiatives run aground, change agents can be quick to point a finger at the people who never got on board, on the assumption that those people resisted a perfectly logical move. A year earlier, with Angelo D’Amelio, they had argued in an academic journal that change agents contribute to resistance through their own actions and inactions, and that resistance can be a resource for change.

That reframing matters, because the scale of the problem is real. McKinsey’s change team wrote that 70 percent of change programmes fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support. Read those two causes together. Resistance and absent leadership are not separate failures. People resist most when they cannot see the leaders paying the cost of the change themselves.

The reservoir of goodwill is also lower than it was. Gartner reported that the share of employees willing to support enterprise change fell to 38% in 2022, from 74% in 2016. When I meet a leadership team that thinks its people are unusually resistant, I often find they are simply tired, and the new plan has arrived on top of several unfinished ones.

Step one: surface it before it goes underground

Resistance that is voiced is cheap. Resistance that goes underground is expensive, because it turns into slow approvals, missing data and a pilot that quietly underperforms. The first job is to make it safe and easy to say the objection out loud.

Amy Edmondson has a useful example. In her 2019 conversation on psychological safety, she describes Julie Morath, who was trying to improve patient safety at a children’s hospital and met staff who felt things were already fine. Morath did not push back on that resistance. She asked a question instead: think about your patients last week — was everything as safe as you would have liked? The question invited observation rather than confession, and people started talking. Edmondson is equally clear in the same conversation that psychological safety is not about being nice. It is about candour.

That is the practical behaviour I want from leaders. Do not ask whether people support the change. Ask what they have seen that the plan has not accounted for. Ask it in the room, early, and thank the first person who answers with something uncomfortable.

Step two: co-design the fix

Once a concern is on the table, the instinct is to answer it. Resist that instinct. An answer from the top settles the argument and loses the insight. A fix designed with the person who raised the concern improves the plan and changes the relationship.

Co-design is not consensus. You are not asking permission to change. You are asking the people closest to the problem to help you make the change work. The decision on direction stays with you; the design of the route is shared.

Step three: turn sceptics into sponsors

The evidence for involving people is strong. McKinsey’s 2017 survey found that among transformations that failed to engage line managers and frontline employees, only 3 percent of respondents reported success, compared with success rates of 26 and 28 percent when each group was engaged. The same survey found that only 39 percent of respondents said their organisations had built broad ownership of the change. That gap is the opportunity.

Ownership is what turns a former sceptic into a sponsor. Not a role in the communications plan; a piece of the change they are accountable for. Give the person who said it would not work in their market the pilot in that market. Give the person who said there was no time the job of deciding what stops. When they succeed, they tell the story, and their story carries weight the launch video never will.

I also want leaders to be honest about where the ladder ends. The same McKinsey survey found that where senior leaders replaced people who were not committed to the change, 29 percent of transformations succeeded, compared with 6 percent where those people stayed in place. That is not permission to remove everyone who disagrees. It is a reminder that after you have listened, co-designed and handed over ownership, continued refusal is a performance matter, and it needs a clear, dated, private conversation of the kind I set out in having the tough conversations you keep postponing.

Arguments

The case for

The research has shifted firmly towards seeing resistance as information. Ford, Ford and D’Amelio’s work shows that resistance is partly produced by how change is led, which means leaders can reduce it by leading differently. McKinsey’s findings on frontline engagement show how badly change performs when the people who will carry it are not involved. Edmondson’s work shows that candour has to be invited before it can be used. And with fewer employees willing to support change than a few years ago, leaders cannot afford to waste the goodwill of the people who do speak up.

There is also a plain commercial argument. The sceptic often knows something you do not. Hearing it in week two is cheaper than discovering it in quarter three.

The case against

The strongest objection is that this approach rewards delay. If every concern triggers a co-design session, the people who want the change to fail have found a way to stall it politely. Some resistance is not insight; it is protection of status, budget or comfort, and treating it as wisdom flatters it.

A second objection is that co-design takes time a leader may not have. In a turnaround or a crisis, the cost of slow consensus can be higher than the cost of some resentment.

A third is that converting sceptics can become a vanity project. Leaders can spend months courting one senior holdout while the rest of the organisation waits.

When are the objectors right? When the same concern returns after it has been heard and answered, it has stopped being information. When the timescale is genuinely short, decide and explain, and do the co-design on the next stage rather than this one. And when one person’s conversion is consuming more energy than the rest of the change, stop courting and make the call.

Where I stand

I hold the thesis with a time limit. I give resistance a fair, dated hearing and a real role in the fix; I do not give it a veto. In my 7-step coaching process, surfacing resistance belongs in the Awareness step, where we map how people actually experience the change. Co-design and ownership are the Influence step: leading through others rather than over them. And if someone still refuses a standard they helped shape, that is the Challenges step — a blocker ranked by business impact and dealt with directly. Handled this way, many sceptics end up sponsoring the change. Those who do not need a clear decision, made kindly and without delay.

Try this

Run the sceptic-to-sponsor protocol on the change you are leading now.

1. List your five strongest sceptics. Not the loudest; the most respected. Next to each name, write what you believe their real concern is.
2. Ask, do not tell. Meet each one this fortnight. Ask what they have seen that the plan does not account for. Write down their answer without rebutting it.
3. Check your guess. Compare their answer with what you wrote in step one. The gap is usually the most useful thing you will learn.
4. Co-design one fix with each. Agree one specific change to the plan, or one test that would settle the disagreement, with a date.
5. Hand over ownership. Give each sceptic a piece of the change they are accountable for — a pilot, a decision, a stop.
6. Review in thirty days. Who is now explaining the change in their own words? Who is still resisting after being heard? Decide what each needs next.

Questions to sit with:

• Which objection have I dismissed that I would take seriously if it came from someone I like?
• Where is resistance going underground because it is not safe to say in the room?
• What have I asked people to start without asking what should stop?
• Who could I hand real ownership to this month?
• Which conversation am I postponing by calling it a resistance problem?

Where to go next

This part belongs to the chapter Leading change: momentum, a roadmap and handling resistance. Resistance is easier to meet when people already trust you, which is the subject of earning trust before you need it. Some sceptics are hard work for reasons that have little to do with the change; for that, read leading difficult personalities. Within this chapter, the change roadmap that lines up head, heart and habit shows where pilots and champions fit, and momentum breakers and makers shows how to protect the pace once resistance has been heard.

In cycling, a rider’s complaint about the bike is often the most useful information the team gets all week, and good coaches treat it that way; I write more about how sport translates to leadership on from elite sport to the boardroom. If the resistance is sitting inside your own senior team, that is the work of executive team coaching. Or book a 30-minute conversation and bring the name of the sceptic you have been avoiding.