Handle Change Resisters: 3 Ways to Get It Right

How to Best Handle Change Resisters
This graphic may paint a simplistic picture, but it underscores a critical truth: how you engage with change resisters can make or break your initiative. The good news is that change management consulting experts experts offer proven, practical approaches — far more constructive than drastic measures — to help even the most resistant team members embrace organizational change.

Of Course, Change is Hard
Let’s be honest: organizational change is never easy — whether you’re leading change it or experiencing it. Most of us naturally cling to the status quo because it feels safe, familiar, and predictable. Yet change management training research shows that thriving — and often just surviving — in today’s business environment demands flexibility, adaptability, and a willingness to embrace change.

The Organizational Change Basics
Of course, there are ways to effect change that sticks. You need to be able to:

• Articulate the rationale behind the change in a convincing way.
• Get buy-in, alignment, and commitment from the top on down.
• Paint a meaningful picture of how the change will be enacted.
• Be honest and transparent about how the changes will affect each employee.
• Practice patient as employees make tentative moves in the right direction.
• Monitor and coach the desired behaviors all along the way.

Three Solid Ways to Handle Change Resisters

Even when you’ve nailed the fundamentals of organizational change, there will always be employees who resist. Drawing on more than twenty years of change management simulation data, here’s proven guidance for how to effectively handle change resisters and naysayers.

1. Don’t Take It Personally
   Recognize that people who fight change are not necessarily trying to work against you personally; they just aren’t yet won over by the need for change and don’t yet see what’s in it for them compared to the status quo.  It is natural and expected for others to have a different perspective.

   Remember it is about those affected by change, not you.

2. Seek First to Understand
   Openly listen to reasons for change resistance and deal with them one-by-one in an objective and compassionate way. Avoid getting angry and frustrated. That will only give change resisters an excuse for digging in their heels deeper.

   To better handle change resisters make sure that they feel heard and taken seriously.  Learn why they feel that the desired changes may not be in the best interests of the company, the team, or them individually.  Have empathy for their situation.  Change resisters may be fearful that there will be no place for them in the “new” order or that they will lose influence.

   Be empathetic. Provide straightforward and honest answers.  And make sure that you truly understand their concerns and doubts.

3. Look Forward
   Work together to find a way your change resister can get realigned and be a part of the company’s future. This should be a cooperative effort with both offering suggestions and agreeing upon a timeline of progress toward practicing the new behaviors that are required.  This can be one of those difficult conversations that many leaders and managers avoid. But it is necessary.

   Most change resisters will adjust, albeit more slowly than the rest. But if they are not cooperative, you may need to help them move on. They cannot continue to be on the team; their negative pull will drag the whole team down.

   Are you communicating a compelling vision for change?

The Bottom Line
Your job as a change leader is to get people to follow the new method of doing things in a way that makes sense. You need each and every team member to be part of the solution — not the problem.  Work with change resisters to help them understand and appreciate why the changes are necessary and what you expect from them.

To learn more about how to handle change resisters, download How to Successfully Recognize and Reward Organizational Change

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.