When I work with teams on organisational change, or I’m working with management or leadership teams, we often end up talking about ‘difficult’ stakeholders.
Sides Imagery, Pixabay
These are people who appear to be resistant to whatever it is that’s being proposed to change, who seem to be comfortable with the way that things work now and really don’t want to shift to something different. The behaviours we might see in these ‘difficult’ folk, can include:
Criticising ideas, often loudly in meetings or more quietly through their networks
Stepping back and perhaps not being as engaged as usual
Missing deadlines or not showing up for meetings
So what do we do when we’re faced by these types of behaviours? And how we can avoid getting to this situation in the first place? Here are three ideas that might help:
Try to shift your own perspective – when we’re busy and keen to push something through, we can label people who we perceive as not agreeing with us as ‘difficult’. As a result, we can sideline them and their feedback, simply to get the job done. But there will undoubtedly be nuggets of value in their feedback. So, shifting your thinking to a perspective of an ‘opportunity for learning’ instead and making time to ask questions and exploring what’s really going on could help you get access to those insights. In these situations, more listening than telling and asking, ‘what else?’ can really be helpful.
Think carefully about how you’re delivering your communications – I once worked on a project where the senior client lead was very often ‘too busy’ to come to some team meetings where updates about the change were discussed. As time went on, we (unsurprisingly) saw people in the team getting increasingly disgruntled in response to the updates being shared. Digging around this and asking questions, it turned out that they felt disrespected by the leadership team. They were being asked to get involved in making some fundamental changes to the way they work but they felt that shift wasn’t being acknowledged by the organisation’s leaders. Remember, you make an impact in all forms of communication – not just through what you say or write.
Resistance may be covering a desire to get involved – I’ve seen first-hand that if people don’t have the opportunity to support change efforts, they can be disruptive simply because they actually want to get involved. After a lot of exploring and conversation, I’ve seen the loudest, change-resistant stakeholder support what we’re trying to achieve just by getting them on the team.
Whenever we get to a situation in change where we’re facing what feel like ‘difficult’ people, it’s worth thinking about what people might actually be resistant to. Is it what we’re trying to change or is it how we’re trying to introduce the change or communicate it? Investing a little time in considering this, rather than labelling people as ‘resistant’ or ‘difficult’ can save you a lot of time and pain in the longer-term and potentially give you different insights to your change that could make a real difference.