You hear a lot about the challenges a leader encounters when their organization’s workforce resists change — but what about the leader who asks for feedback (that’s a good thing) and then yes-buts their way through response after response (not a good thing)? For example (real life by the way!):
“This new IT tool isn’t working the way it is supposed to.” Leader: “Yes, but I tried it and it worked for me.”
“My team is having trouble adapting to this new business process.” Leader: “Yes, but we provided a lot of training to make sure you all could switch over on Day One. Didn’t your people go to that training?”
“Some of us on the executive team have concerns about next steps in this change process.” Leader: “Yes, but we talked months ago about the issues you are bringing up and we agreed we needed to get past them in order to move forward. Let’s stop with the blame game.”
Feedback? Or affirmation? When a leader says, “I want your feedback,” what is the person really saying? Is the leader saying, “Bring it on, let me hear what you have to say, let me try and understand what the matter is from your perspective? What your ideas are? What worries you have that we haven’t taken into account”? Or is the leader wanting you to confirm that everything is going fine, that the decisions and investment of time and money made so far were smart and that everything is pointing in the right direction? It is amazing how quickly people can pick up on the difference. And if that leader is looking for affirmation rather than true input, however unvarnished it might be, fewer and fewer people over time will come forward with anything except affirmations, if only to seek the leader’s benediction or at least not make waves.
If you say your “door is always open…” I have observed leaders who say they welcome feedback and that their door is “always open.” That they “want to hear from you.” But when someone sits down to say what they have to say, their leader hastens the dialogue with “yes-buts,” fixes, and solutions when in fact what that team member wanted — at least for starters — was just to be heard, to explain what they see from where they sit. Perhaps an unanticipated hurdle or problem or even an opportunity exists. Instead, what they experience is a leader whose need for closure — or difficulty with ambiguity perhaps — overrides their ability to have a mind as open as they say their door is. The result can be a rather short, even dismissive conversation — and not particularly fulfilling for either. I have seen each party go away from such an encounter feeling like the other person was coming from Mars and just “wasn’t getting it.”
Leading change involves changing. One of the hardest things in the world is to manage a project (think schedule, risk, cost) and lead people (think relationships, performance, dynamics, and capabilities). Managing and leading require being able to toggle back and forth between two different brain-places at a moment’s notice. The challenge is how to sustain the pace of the change project while also remaining open to hear a contrarian view, to allow that a decision made several months ago may no longer hold.
The great British playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, “Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” The beauty of agile as a methodology, by the way, is that it creates a space where this isn’t just possible but expected as part of the process. If a leader’s approach to leading has always been rooted in certainty, leading change is different because it calls for interacting with uncertainty — with incoming data that today may say one thing and tomorrow says another, with team members whose style or approach may be different, yet who have consequential inputs that may not be welcomed or even well-timed but must be heard. This is not easy, but it is part of the change process. And so, while the change leader’s job is to keep the change train running on time and on budget, the leader must also be willing to recognize their own resistance to change — and, when needed, to change as well.
“Compliance” is a trap. When resistance meets resistance, the result is that people may comply with but not actually believe in or “own” the change. Compliance doesn’t provide a happy path to adoption. People who comply don’t necessarily stop resisting — it’s that their resistance goes underground. It takes new forms of expression, and this can cause a vicious cycle, and workarounds develop. Newly onboarded employees may hear about what isn’t working as a result of the change, rather than what is, and so from the onset their view of the new approach can become tainted, causing resistance to fester. Ways to correct whatever is flawed regarding the change may languish. All this produces a general drag on the change effort that eats away the very track that change train is supposed to be running on.
Stay in the interrogative. When you least want to hear from someone whom you’ve tagged as “not on board” — that’s when you know your resistance has met theirs: Now you have pushback times two. One thing you can do to emerge from this trap — or just set it aside for a moment — is to move from advocacy to inquiry. It is a definite shift. It says you aren’t promoting a point of view but that you are inviting points of view. Points of view = data, and data is one thing that definitely fuels the change train! Staying in the interrogative involves operationalizing a persistently friendly and — yes — utilitarian curiosity. Engaging, asking questions, trying to see another perspective helps to dissolve the resistance you might be seeing in members of your team. It can help you break down some of your own resistance. It will deliver information and insights that will be valuable as you and your team move through the change process. And — it will help build trust and credibility for you as a leader.
Resistance? Or Feedback? Here it is in a nutshell: Feedback isn’t always resistance, but resistance is always feedback.
Nina is the Change Management Practice Lead at the consulting firm LMI where she also serves as a Senior OCM Consultant supporting government clients in the planning and implementation of a wide variety of change efforts. She is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Fellows in Change Management Program and the Change Management Advanced Practitioners (CMAP) Certification Program at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, and is ProSci trained. She holds an MS in Organization Development and an MA in Communications.
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