Resistance in change
Resistance isn't the problem. It's the message.
What people are actually saying when they push back – and why we keep mishearing it.
There's a phrase that gets thrown around in change conversations more than almost any other: managing resistance.
It's a tell. Anyone who talks about resistance as something to be managed has already decided that resistance is the obstacle — the thing standing between the change programme and its successful completion. Push past it. Address it. Overcome it. The metaphors are almost always military.
But resistance isn't an obstacle. It's a signal. And when we treat it as something to be managed rather than something to be read, we lose access to the most useful information the organisation is producing.
What resistance actually is
In behavioural terms, resistance is what happens when a person's perception of risk exceeds their perception of benefit. That's it. It's not stubbornness, fear, or sabotage. It's a rational response to a felt imbalance.
The person resisting isn't being difficult. They're protecting something — and what they're protecting is almost always more specific and more legitimate than the change programme has acknowledged. Their team. Their professional identity. The way they've earned their credibility. The thing they're good at that the new system might make irrelevant. The relationship they've built with a client that a restructure will sever.
When you frame these as resistance to change, you've already misread them. They're not resistance to change in general. They're protecting something specific that the change is threatening.
The four things resistance usually saying
Most resistance, when listened to carefully, falls into one of four messages. None of them are no.
This wasn't explained to me properly. Often the loudest resistance comes from people who simply haven't received the information that would let them assess the change for themselves. They're not opposing it. They're operating in the dark and the only safe move is no movement.
I don't trust the people delivering it. The change might be sound. The track record of those leading it isn't. People aren't resisting the proposal — they're resisting the messengers. This is unfixable through communication. It requires different messengers or repaired relationships.
The cost to me is real and you haven't acknowledged it. The programme will, in fact, cost this person something — status, autonomy, a familiar way of working, a relationship they value. They're not refusing to pay the cost. They're refusing to pretend it doesn't exist.
I've seen this before, and it didn't end well. The organisation has a memory. People who've lived through previous changes that promised and didn't deliver are bringing data, not pessimism. Their resistance is informed.
Why we keep mishearing it
Change leaders mishear resistance for the same reason most of us mishear difficult feedback — because hearing it accurately would require us to do more work and possibly to revisit decisions we've already made.
If someone's resistance is really this wasn't explained to me properly, the fix is more communication, not more pressure.
If it's I don't trust the messengers, the fix involves humility from those messengers — possibly stepping aside.
If it's the cost to me is real, the fix requires acknowledging the cost out loud, which most organisations are bad at because acknowledgement feels like admission.
If it's I've seen this before, the fix is naming the previous failures honestly and explaining what's different this time.
All four require more from the change leader than dismissing the resistance as a personality issue. So we don't do them. We label the resister as difficult, work around them, and continue.
The cost of mishandling it
The organisations that get resistance wrong don't just lose the resisters. They lose the watchers — the people who hadn't decided yet, who were observing how their colleague's legitimate concerns were treated. Every time resistance is dismissed, mocked, or worked around, the watching majority learns something: raising concerns here is costly. Stay quiet.
By the time the change programme launches, dissent has gone underground. Compliance is performative. The organisation looks aligned. Six months later it becomes obvious that it never was.
What to do instead
The discipline that changes everything is to treat the first wave of resistance as the most valuable feedback the programme will ever receive. The early resisters are doing you a favour — they're surfacing what the silent majority is also feeling but won't say.
Three questions to ask when resistance appears:
What specifically is this person protecting? Not what are they refusing. What are they protecting?
Is what they're protecting legitimate? It almost always is. Even when the broader change is necessary, the specific loss for this person is real.
What would it take to acknowledge that out loud before asking them to move?
Most of the time, the simple act of accurate acknowledgment — I can see this change will cost you X, and I'm not asking you to pretend it won't — does more to unlock movement than any amount of persuasion. People don't need their concerns solved. They need them seen.
The shift this requires
Reading resistance instead of managing it requires a shift in how we hold our own role. The change leader who treats resistance as data is no longer trying to win the room — they're trying to understand it. The work becomes slower, more honest, and considerably more effective.
Katie Bloom — the protagonist of the fictional serial I write — learns this slowly across the first few episodes. She arrives believing her job is to deliver the change. By episode four, she's realising her job is to understand what each person stands to lose and what they stand to gain. The change still happens. But it happens with people, not despite them.
Resistance was never the problem. It was the conversation the organisation was finally ready to have.
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Diane Gatto
Stories, insights and practical resources exploring the human side of working life — the assumptions, unwritten rules and difficult conversations that shape what happens.
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