Change Makes of Breaks Teams

Organizational change resistance is not about disliking change itself, but about disliking the process of change, which disrupts personal identity, creates uncertainty, and is rarely managed at a human level. Effective change leadership addresses emotion first: acknowledging what people lose, asking questions instead of presenting information, and treating skeptics as sources of insight rather than obstacles to overcome.

Key Takeaways

• Skeptics in a change process hold information that change advocates cannot see, because enthusiasm blinds advocates to gaps and risks the skeptic spots.
• Presenting problems without solutions labels a person as a problem-bringer, which causes listeners to disengage before any real dialogue can start.
• Emotional connection moves people more reliably than information alone, because people resist data that contradicts their beliefs but respond to questions that let them feel the angst and the possibilities themselves.
• Every change involves both a gain and a loss, and failing to acknowledge what people lose, even when that loss is unavoidable, prevents the emotional recognition that makes acceptance possible.
• Bottom-up change sticks better than top-down mandates, and any person in an organization, regardless of formal authority, has equal capacity to lead that kind of change.

People resist the process of change, not the change itself

The idea that people dislike change is a misperception. Everyone makes changes in their lives, and many of them are good changes that people choose freely. What people resist is the process of getting from the old to the new.

That process is messy. Even a change you pick yourself comes with headaches and challenges along the way. The chaos lives in the transition, not in the destination.

Organizations make this harder. When a change is announced to you, it was not your choice. So you carry two burdens at once: you dislike the process because it is full of friction, and you are being asked to do something you did not decide to do. Mary Lynn Manns frames the fix clearly: the problem is usually the process, and that is what organizations need to manage better.

Why change is hard for the human mind

The human mind is always looking for equilibrium. Anything that pulls you out of balance is hard, and change does exactly that.

Change can also touch your identity. You are used to doing one thing in the organization and being one thing in the organization, and suddenly the role is different. Even something as well regarded as agile software development changes what people do day to day. Why would anyone welcome that when their current way of working feels fine?

People are often tied to the old way and see real value in it. During the transition, things go wrong, and the comparison turns unfair. The old way looked perfect, while the new way is still forming and obviously imperfect, so people complain about that gap.

The conclusion holds across all of it: the work is not about new processes or new technologies. It is about the people. You manage change by understanding people and helping them care about what you are proposing.

Fear sits underneath the resistance

Much of the resistance comes down to fear, often fear of the unknown. Many of the negative reactions people have during change trace back to fear of one thing or another.

Mary Lynn calls her work “Fear Less Change.” The goal is not a life without fear. The goal is less fear. A leader of change helps people move through fear and, ideally, creates less of it in the first place.

Skeptics carry a particular kind of fear, and it runs in both directions. If you are leading the change, you are probably afraid of the people resisting you, even if you will not admit it. They can be in your face, complaining. They fear you in return, because you are bringing in something new. The two fears feed each other until everything comes to a standstill.

The cost of ignoring this is concrete. If people do not feel seen and heard, your change will be ambushed again and again.

Talk about the change at the level of the individual

The first error organizations make is describing change only in terms of what the organization will gain. That framing makes sense, but it misses how people actually think. People are working out how the change affects them personally.

You cannot sit down with every person in an organization of ten thousand. But leaders can still speak about change at a smaller, more personal level rather than staying at the organizational one. Moving the message closer to “what this means for you” changes how it lands.

How to turn skeptics into a resource

Stop trying to win skeptics over by argument. Persuading them can take enormous time and effort, and they may never be persuaded. The better move is to use what they see.

Skeptics notice things you cannot, because you are excited about the change and focused on its value. They are not. So put them on the team and ask them at intervals: what is wrong, what are we missing?

This does two jobs at once. The skeptics feel heard, so they are less likely to ambush the change later. And being treated with respect, they may complain less.

Mary Lynn describes giving someone the explicit role of champion skeptic, the official voice for what the team might be overlooking. People in that role often find they no longer enjoy complaining the same way, because the complaint has been turned into a contribution.

Information alone does not move people

Change is emotional, and people take it personally. The common failure is to treat it as a purely cognitive matter: give people information, then more information, then more.

People push back on that information when it runs against what they believe should happen. Then the leaders give up and say the others just do not get it, or are being stubborn, or are digging in their heels.

The diagnosis is different. The information was probably delivered well. What was missing was the next step: helping people care about the information. That means reaching what they feel, not only what they think.

Two ways to build an emotional connection

Creating an emotional connection in the workplace sounds uncomfortable, even woo-woo. It does not have to involve anything that makes you uneasy, and it works.

One technique is called “Imagine That.” Bring people into a room and ask two questions. The first: how are things going, what do you see out there, possibly narrowed to a specific area. People start naming the problems themselves, including their own, and give themselves a wake-up call about the current state.

Once they feel the angst, ask the second question: what would happen if we did X, where X is the change you want to introduce. Now they imagine the possibilities and start to feel that things could get better. You told them nothing. You asked questions, and the discussion did the work.

The first question got them to feel the angst. And the second question got them to feel the possibilities and maybe the idea that, oh wait, we can make things better. — Mary Lynn Manns

The second technique is the story. It does not even have to be true, as long as you are clear that it is invented. Tell a story the listener can relate to: here is John, who did this and this, do you relate to John? People feel stories, repeat them, and remember them, which a list of bullet points on a slide never achieves.

You do not need authority to lead change

A powerless leader is someone with a good idea and no formal power to make the change happen. These strategies are built for exactly that person, not only for managers or executives.

One chief information officer made the point plainly. She said she had no more power to rewire people’s minds than a nineteen-year-old intern walking into the organization for the first time and spotting a need for change.

That is the heart of it. If you have not been given the power to make a change happen, you still have as much real ability to make it happen as someone who has. People who hold the power sometimes just dictate the change, which leaves dissatisfaction floating around. Change that grows from the bottom up tends to stick better, and leaders with authority can use the same tools from the top down.

What to do when you are the skeptic

If you are the skeptic and feel unheard, check whether you are living entirely in problem space. Constantly presenting new problems and expecting others to build the solutions wears people down.

Mary Lynn’s advice to a frustrated skeptic was direct: pair the problem with something to do about it. Say, “I know I have been raising this and this. Here is a possibility for solving it. What do you think?” Even a half-formed solution changes the exchange.

The risk of staying in problem space is reputational. If you only ever bring problems, you become the problem person, and the channel for communication closes. Bringing a solution alongside the concern keeps you in the conversation.

There is a sad side to this too. The people on the receiving end often fail to realize that the skeptic holds a piece of the puzzle they are missing.

Acknowledge what people lose, not only what they gain

Every change involves a gain and a loss. No matter the change, people gain something and lose something at the same time.

Leaders talk about the gains, first for the organization, and if they are tuned in, for the individual too. They forget to acknowledge the loss. A strategy called “shoulder to cry on” fixes that.

Often nothing can be done about the loss, and acknowledging it still matters. Saying something like “Fred, I realize this means a different level of expertise for you, you will spend a lot of time learning it, you have other things going on, and we appreciate that” is rare from leaders, and it goes a long way.

That single act recognizes that people are not robots and that they carry angst through a change. You do not have to step into anything that makes you uncomfortable. You name the loss, and the connection follows.