How To Overcome Resistance In Others
Why won’t people do what you ask them to?
Why do they nod “yes”… and then do nothing?
Every leader hits this moment — where authority isn’t enough, logic doesn’t hit home, and nothing actually changes.
In this article, I’ll explain what’s really going on — and how to shift it.
To really get to the bottom of this frustrating reality, we first have to explode a pernicious myth. And that is that people make decisions based on logic. That they weigh up the pros and cons so that they can take the optimal, rational route forward.
There is a given — a sacred cow — in leadership circles, particularly those run by engineers, lawyers and accountants, that reason, logic and rationale must always take priority over feeling or emotion. That logic is disciplined, rigorous and dependable in contrast to feeling which is soft, intangible and fickle. Logic is the gold standard. This was me — as an engineer — during my early corporate career. I was only interested in the facts and not how people felt about them.
But the truth is very different and rather inconvenient. In the 1990s, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied patients who had damage to the parts of the brain responsible for emotion. What he found was striking. These individuals were still perfectly capable of logical reasoning. They could analyse information, weigh up options and articulate the pros and cons of different choices. But they struggled to make even the simplest decisions. Something as basic as choosing what to eat or deciding when to schedule an appointment became disproportionately difficult.
In other words we make decisions based on how we feel, not what we think.
Let that sink in for a moment. Think whatever you like but it’s how you feel that will determine the direction you ultimately go in.
What Damasio demonstrated is that emotion is not separate from decision-making; it is central to it. Without the ability to feel, people lose the ability to decide. In practical terms, this means that while we like to think we are making rational choices, what actually drives action is how we feel about those choices. Thinking plays a role, but its role is to shape and influence feeling rather than to replace it.
So why does anyone think otherwise? Why do we continue to live in the deluded fantasy that our decisions are logical and not emotional? Because we’ve been taught from an early age not to let our emotions control our behaviour — not to let our hearts rule our heads. Another reason is that the male aspect of humanity continues to dominate organisations and this energy has tended to diminish the female aspect which is more attuned to feeling and emotion.
Fortunately, not everyone has succumbed to the tyranny of logic and thankfully does not labour under that illusion — more so those who have not been trained in highly rational disciplines. But many do and they are the ones that can so easily struggle with overcoming the resistance in others and wondering why on earth their people won’t always do what’s asked of them.
Before we get into the solution to the problem we need to dig a little deeper into the relationship between thought and feeling. They are, in their essence, two sides of the same coin. Feeling always has an attendant thought and thoughts always have corresponding feelings. The relationship depends on the individual and is highly dynamic — symbiotic perhaps.
Now, you may be thinking (!) that I am advocating for feeling to replace thinking. Far from it. That is the last thing I want to do and would anyway likely prove to be impossible. Because what thinking does, in the decision-making process — is to change the way we feel towards the decision we’re facing. You can observe this process in action by becoming aware of how new information will change your feeling about an issue and influence what you do in response to it.
So I’m not for a second suggesting that thinking is redundant and all you have to do is feel your way forward. What I am saying is that we need to be aware of our feelings because of the critical part they play in making decisions and determining our direction of travel.
And if that is true for the team leader or CEO, so is it true for the rest of the team or organisation. In other words, if you want to change someone’s mind, get them onboard, convinced that you are right and persuaded that your way is the way for them to go, you have to change the way they feel towards the issue. It’s not enough to just bombard them with facts.
Now, sometimes, the facts are enough to change the way someone feels so that they will stand foursquare behind you and follow your lead. But oftentimes it isn’t and instead, they resist. Here are three reasons behind that resistance:
A lack of clarity over the why. In other words there is misalignment between the task and vision.
Ownership. Because you have micromanaged both what to do and how to do it, the employee feels no buy-in.
They know better. Experienced employees often believe they know a more efficient or effective way to reach the goal.
Let’s look at these in more detail and explore how to overcome the implicit resistance in each.
No 1. Why something is being done must tie in with the team or corporate vision. It may be obvious to you, but if it is not to the person you are delegating to, there will be an internal conflict which may manifest as resistance. The way forward is to find out where the lack of understanding lies by asking and then clarify. Do not worry about overexplaining this aspect of the job to be done — you can’t. Communicating the vision (or objectives, results or outcomes) can suffer from you, the leader, taking it for granted. I’ve been guilty of this many times.
If this has been the case, you will see the clarity melt away the resistance as you speak. Clarity is a feeling which facilitates action. Job done.
No 2. The more you define how someone does something, the more ownership you retain and the less responsibility you delegate. Delegation is about giving people the task, the resources and the responsibility to get the job done. Retain any of those and you’re not delegating. Responsibility is the aspect of delegation most frequently held back by managers and leaders and manifests as micromanagement. When you do this the delegate feels no sense of buy-in or ownership and will often resist satisfactory execution of the task in some way. So discuss your thinking behind the task with your employee and make it clear they have some agency in what and how it is done.
No 3. If you’re delegating a task to an experienced employee, ask them how they’ll do it. Be curious, not judgemental. Identify anything you don’t understand and get clarification — you may have identified a flaw in their thinking. Remember Steve Jobs’ quote: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” Getting them to detail the what and the how will also amplify their sense of ownership. Failure to do this may lead to the employee pivoting strategy mid-stream. While often well-intentioned, it results in the “Why didn’t you do what I asked?” conversation..
You may have noticed that my solution for all 3 instances of resistance require conversations with the delegate. These conversations are two-way — you are not just telling them what to do, you are inviting their perspectives to firstly expose any lack of clarity, secondly to encourage agency to get buy-in and thirdly to utilise their expertise to pre-empt any surprises. This is not instruction but dialogue.
The intention behind these conversations is influence. You are looking to exert influence on the way in which your employee engages with the task at hand.
Now probably the best known work on influence is the book by Dale Carnegie — How to Win Friends and Influence People. It’s sold over 30 million copies. If you’ve read it you may have noticed that it is not about bending people to your will, convincing them or manipulating them in any way. Instead it talks about appreciating, being interested in and listening to the other person. When you truly listen to someone else, you are not trying to influence them, you are opening yourself to their influence. And therein lies the great secret — to influence someone else, you must allow them to influence you first. As counter-intuitive as this seems — it works. Try it.
So putting all this together creates a very simple strategy for pre-empting and resolving any resistance from your people:
Listening to people, being interested in them and appreciating them makes them feel good. And if you make them feel good — sincerely — they will allow your thinking to influence theirs. In turn, that thinking will translate into positive feelings around what you want them to do and those feelings will ensure that they engage wholeheartedly with the task at hand.
And that is where leadership becomes far more effective, and far more rewarding, for everyone involved.
See you in the next article.
Chris Pearse works with senior leaders and entrepreneurs to help them shift from outside-in to inside-out leadership — so they can perform at a high level without burning out.
His work focuses on the inner foundations of leadership: purpose, integrity, resilience and trust.
If you want to understand where you’re currently operating from, you can take the Inner Leadership Profile Scorecard here:
→ https://inner-leadership-mastery-profile.scoreapp.com/
You can also explore more of his thinking on Leadership ]Inside Out[: