Resistance first appears to the leader as an obstacle
Four or five months into a transformation, the same signs gather in front of the leader. A director who approved the new structure in the meeting keeps having the old report prepared in their own team. The most experienced sales head asks the same question at every review: why are we doing this. Deadlines slide softly; nobody says no, and nothing finishes on time. The leader gathers these signs into a single word, and the first sentence brought to us is usually the same: how do I break this resistance.
The question is reasonable. The board expects a timeline, the leader stands behind the change, and every slow month comes back as a cost with the leader's name on it. But the question hides an assumption: that what the resistance is has already been settled, and all that remains is getting past it. A leader who wants to break resistance has usually not yet read it.
Where the urge to break it comes from
The urge does not come only from the timeline. For the person who started the transformation, every objection sounds partly like an objection to them. The silence of a director they have worked beside for years turns into a question of loyalty. Tiredness adds to it. A leader explaining the same rationale for the sixth time chooses force over a seventh explanation. Resistance reaches the edge of the leader's patience, and answers given at that edge aim to end it rather than understand it.
Resistance that is broken does not disappear, it moves
The ways of breaking resistance are familiar. The transformation is announced more loudly, the objecting director is moved off the programme, bonuses are tied to the new targets, the old report is formally retired. Each step produces a result: objections in meetings fall away. The leader reads this as progress.
From visible to invisible
What we see in the field is usually something else. The director who goes quiet in the meeting starts talking in the corridor. The retired report lives on in a spreadsheet. The new process is followed, but only in the parts that get checked. The resistance has not gone, it has moved somewhere the leader can no longer see. The person who objects out loud is the person the transformation is still talking to; when they fall silent, the leader loses not an opponent but a source of information.
That information is often worth having. The sales head who asks why at every review may be the only person seeing, in the field, how the new structure will work with the largest customers. A leader who silences that voice also silences the one most likely to point at the weakest part of the plan.
Breaking it also sends a cost back to the leader. In a transformation where objection has been silenced, the leader hears more and more agreement. The agreement is comforting, but it carries no information. The leader makes the next decision from a place that learns about problems only as crises, and a few months later finds themselves saying the same sentence: why did nobody tell me this before.
Silenced resistance does not end; it moves to where the leader cannot hear it.
Resistance does not speak a single language
The word resistance gathers three quite different stances under one heading. From outside, all three look alike: slowness, questions, silence. But each says something different, and each waits for a different answer.
- An objection to the direction: the person believes the transformation itself is wrong. This objection carries information and deserves an argument. Sometimes it is right.
- An objection to the cost: the person accepts the direction but sees that they will pay for it. A remit, a team, expertise built over years or a standing is about to go, and nobody has said so by name.
- An objection of trust: the person opposes neither the direction nor the cost. They do not believe the person announcing the change will see it through this time, because they have watched earlier transformations stop halfway.
One sentence, three meanings
"This doesn't fit how we work" can be any of the three. For the first it is an argument, for the second a polite form of worry, for the third a decision to wait. The leader hears the sentence and rarely asks which language it was spoken in.
Each kind of resistance asks for a different answer, and an answer given to the wrong kind makes the resistance grow. Describing the vision to someone wary of the cost shows them the cost will once again go unsaid. Offering a better rationale to someone who does not trust the leader postpones, yet again, the only proof they are waiting for, which is consistency. We took up that language of trust separately in the piece on the leader's own role in a transformation: the team reads not the plan but the person presenting it. Someone objecting to the direction, meanwhile, expects to be heard before being persuaded, because that objection is sometimes right.
One person can object in more than one language, and the language spoken is not always the real one. An objection to the cost often arrives dressed as an objection to the direction, because saying I will lose my team sounds selfish, while saying this strategy is wrong sounds like a responsible executive. The leader then wins the argument about strategy and finds the resistance has not eased at all. The argument won was never what the objection was about.
The method is to name resistance before breaking it
One page, three columns
The method we use is small. The leader writes on one page the names of the people they are struggling with in the transformation, and next to each name notes which language the resistance is speaking: direction, cost or trust. Where unsure, they put a question mark. When the page is first written the question marks usually outnumber the rest, and that is the method's first finding. The leader does not know most of the resistance they want to break.
Then there is one conversation for each name, and each language has its own question:
- For direction: what do you see in this plan that I am not seeing.
- For cost: what does this change take from you, and who could make up for it.
- For trust: what would you need to see to believe we are serious this time.
These conversations have one rule: the leader does not answer in the same conversation. When the question is asked and the rationale follows straight after, the conversation turns back into a persuasion meeting, and the other person goes quiet again instead of saying which language they are speaking. The answer is left for a second conversation. The first one exists only to listen.
The column leaders skip
The column leaders most often leave empty is cost. Arguing with an objection to direction and treating distrust as a personal matter are both easier, because both place the problem in the other person. Accepting the cost requires the leader to tell themselves that they are taking something from people they value. The shortest way to break resistance is often to name the cost once, by its right name. A loss named aloud is still a loss, but nobody is expected any longer to act as though it did not exist.
After the reading, some resistance that has to be broken may remain. Someone may go on stopping the transformation despite every conversation, and at that point a decision is needed. But it is made after hearing what the resistance said and knowing what it costs, not as a reflex.
From the field
This subject usually enters the room as a list of names: who is resisting, who is slowing things down, who should probably go. We read the list together and ask the same question of every name: in which language is this person objecting. Most leaders cannot answer for half the names.
What happens in the room
At that point the conversation usually turns from the list to the leader. Which objection hurts, which one was taken personally, which loss has gone unspoken. From here it becomes visible that part of the obstacle in front of a leader who wants to break resistance sits in their own patience and their own silence. A leader who wants to break resistance to a transformation finds, once they hear what it is telling them, that far less needs breaking than they thought.
How we work begins with that list. The other side of a transformation, the leader's own change, is in the piece on the executive who manages change, and our other pieces sit on the Perspective page.